Save The Date: Annual Conference 2025

Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies 
Annual Conference
This will be a hybrid conference 
(limited in-person seating and online via Zoom)

Transference Revisited: How Neurotic and Psychotic Patients Use Us Differently

Keynote Speaker
Bruce Fink, PhD

Discussant
Siamak Movahedi, PhD

Whereas Freud’s conception of transference as a repetition of a past situation fits work with neurotics, repetition is not so clearly involved in work with psychotics.  In some cases, there may appear to be no transference at all, but this does not mean that the psychotic has no transference; it is merely something quite different from that of the neurotic.  Most broadly, we could define transference as how the patient uses the analyst: the psychotic is trying to accomplish something with the analyst quite different from what the neurotic does.  In neurosis, the patient uses the analyst as a blank slate on which to project aspects of the past as well as present thoughts and feelings.  In psychosis, the patient uses the analyst in a variety of other ways, such as to achieve stabilization, which may take many forms and involve many different processes, such as idealization, sublimation, making a name for oneself, and so on. 

Bruce Fink, PhD, is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and supervisor who trained in Paris with the psychoanalytic institute Jacques Lacan created shortly before his death, the École de la Cause freudienne.  He has translated many of Lacan’s works into English—including Écrits and Seminars VI, VIII, XVI, XVIII, and XX—and is the author of numerous books on Lacan, including The Lacanian Subject, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Lacan to the Letter, Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique, Against Understanding (two volumes), Lacan on Love, Lacan on Desire, and Miss-ing.  He also published A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques for Everyday Practice.  A board member of the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center, he has also penned several mysteries involving a character loosely based on Jacques Lacan, including (among others) The Psychoanalytic Adventures of Inspector Canal, Death by Analysis, and most recently The Da Vinci Staircase: Love and Turbulence in the Loire Valley.  His books have been translated into 17 languages.  

Siamak Movahedi, PhD, NCPsyA, LP, FIPA, is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Boston; Professor of Psychoanalysis, Training and Supervising Analyst, and Director of the Institute and Doctoral Program for the Study of Psychoanalysis, Society, and Culture of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis; and the Founding Director and Faculty, Persepolis Psychoanalytic (PersPsy)

Conference Location:
Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies
16 West 10th Street
New York City

Registration to be available soon.