Patrick B. Kavanaugh, Ph. D. presented his paper, “Frankenstein’s Genie-ology: The Magical Visionary Experience and the Associative Method” at the fourteenth annual interdisciplinary conference of the International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education (IFPE) this past November in Pasadena. Frankenstein’s Genie-ology... is the autobiographical story of how he came to be as told over a five-year period of time by an African-American man on the inpatient unit of an inner-city state hospital. It reflects the palpable experiences and inexplicable processes of psychic transformation in the very telling of his story to another via the the associative-interpretive process. From this process, a central organizing experience of this man’s life came to be known: his living his everyday life as the monstrous creature created by Victor Frankenstein. The story of Frankenstein’s Genie-ology was presented as a contribution to the subversion of the analytically acquired truth that the associative-interpretive process is contraindicated for the so-called severe pathologies.

Dr. Kavanaugh was also invited to speak on Culture, Psychoanalysis, and Art at the graduate school of the Cranbrook Academy of Art. The focus of the day-long seminar was on the question of how the subject comes into being as considered from the Freudian and Lacanian perspectives; the art academy’s model, philosophy, and methods of education in the process of the artist coming into being; and, the interpretive context and encounter with the world from out of which the artist speaks.