IPA Webinar : Do Dreams Still Matter for Psychoanalysis?

Date: 30 August 2024 (4:00PM, London time)
 



This webinar will assess the contemporary relevance of dream interpretation in psychoanalytic practice. It will examine how current theories of dreams are integrated into the psychoanalytic framework, highlighting their role in understanding the patient's unconscious and psychic dynamics. This webinar will discuss how dreams can be a valuable tool for unraveling inner conflicts, repressed desires, and traumas.


Presenters:

Marilyn Charles (USA)
She is PhD, ABPP, a psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. A training analyst at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, she is the Chair of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society and a British Psychoanalytic Council Scholar. Her books include Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan and the forthcoming Echoes of Trauma: Meaning and Identity in Psychoanalysis.

Title: Dreams and Dreaming: Primary Process and Psychoanalysis
Bion suggests that the purpose of psychoanalysis is to enhance the capacities for feeling, thinking, and dreaming.   Dreams provide metaphors embedded in the person's own experiences and history, marking the emotionally-charged, aesthetically-driven patterns of lived experience, and the patterns through which human dilemmas can be revealed, as analyst and analysand translate condensed, highly personalized meanings into symbols and characters that can be recognized, worked with, and integrated.  


Felipe Matamala (Chile)
He is a full member of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NPSI) in Seattle, WA, and Vice President of the Chilean Society of Psychoanalysis (ICHPA) in Santiago, Chile. Throughout his career as a psychologist in Chile, he has worked on the issues of generational trauma and political violence. Currently, he is a counselor in a community health center for the Latino population in Washington State, United States of America.

Title: Political nightmare in Latin America: are we dreaming the same trauma?
The experiences associated with transgenerational trauma are shared between generations through psychological mechanisms associated with silence and shame. In this sense, this presentation will address the notions associated with the transmission of experiences of political trauma between generations and how nightmares hold the possibility of transforming traumatic elements between one generation and another. Some conclusions from what happened in Chile will be projected to what happened in several Latin American countries. 


Moderator: 
Laura Katz (Argentina)
She is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is a Titular Member of the Didactic Function of the Argentine Psychoanalytical Association (APA), a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), and a member of the Latin American Psychoanalytic Federation (FEPAL). She has held various institutional positions in the APA and FEPAL. Since December 2023, she has been the Chief Editor of the Journal of Psychoanalysis of the APA.