MARCH 2010

 

JOINT PRESENTATION

with

U of M INTERDISCIPLINARY PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDIES PROJECT (UMIPS)

Narcissism, ego ideal and the superego in the current financial crisis
             Paper presentation by Michael Shulman, Ph.D.

 

ABSTRACT: The current financial crisis emerges historically as a paroxysm of modern economic deregulation. It is a phenomenon linked psychologically to idealizations, both of the notion of deregulation and of powerful financial figures. Freud’s work suggested a series of basic understandings of idealization’s functioning in large group psychology. His conceptualizations of narcissism, ego ideal and the superego's origins are organized around a central relational paradigm of onlooker(s) and idealized object. Applying this paradigm of idealization, and appreciating its origins in the parent-child relationship, I consider accounts of financial child geniuses in an effort to illuminate one psychological piece of the origins of this particular crisis of public trust.

 

BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENTS:  Michael Shulman, Ph.D. is a Clinical Instructor of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan, as well as a psychoanalyst and psychologist in private practice in Ann Arbor.  A graduate of Wesleyan University, the University of Michigan, and the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute (MPI), he is currently on the faculties of MPI and Madonna University, as well as U-M.  He is also current Co-Chair of the Committee on Psychoanalysis and Undergraduate Education of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

 

 

FEBRUARY 2010

 

Wang Fo and an Ethic of Free Association:
Poetic Imagination, Mythical Stories, and Moral Philosophy

Paper presentation by Patrick B. Kavanaugh, Ph.D. 

 

ABSTRACT: As medicine articulates a code of ethics for the analytic practitioner as a healthcare professional, literature suggests an ethic for those practitioners who understand and interpret themselves outside of a healthcare matrix, e.g., as an artist, poet, or philosopher. This essay examines the Taoist fable from ancient China, How Wang Fo Was Saved, in terms of the ethic and values embedded in its organizing themes. This fable suggests an emotional, ethical, and intellectual attitude that complements and enfolds within the associative-interpretive process, the heart of psychoanalysis. In the context of process material, consideration is given to an ethic of caring and theory of moral obligation that derive from these values as illustrated in the narrative of Small Change Makes Cents, the story of a young man seen shortly after his third psychiatric hospitalization. The complex interweave of literature and narrative story -coupled with the practitioner's ways of being, knowing, and presencing - yields an Ethic of Free

Association.

 

BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT:  Dr. Kavanaugh is a former president of the Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts and the MSPP. He is the philosopher-in-residence (in psychoanalysis) at the Center for Psychoanalytic study (Chicago) and is in private practice in Farmington Hills, Michigan.