The Robert Waelder Memorial Lecture

"Can Psychoanalysts Listen to Each Other?" 

Presenter: Stanley J. Coen, MD

Date: Wednesday, September 18, 2024

Time: 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm EDT

Location: In person at Rockland & Virtual via Zoom

Program Abstract 

The 2 recent explosions within the Program Committee and then within the American Psychoanalytic Association are examined, from an insider's perspective, as analysts' difficulties with listening to each other. Analysts' anxiety with erotic excitement, especially with racial erotics, even when used for self-affirmation, is discussed. So too is the need for  'Othering' and the need for those who have been 'Othered' to validate themselves, using anger for self-affirmation. Not primarily psychoanalytic ethics, ethics for psychoanalysts, but human ethics, valuing of the other, of our relationship with the other, becomes the pathway for psychoanalysts to listen to the other. Emmanuel Levinas and his psychoanalytic elaborator, Viviane Chetrit-Vatine, are seen as triumphing over their own personal Holocaust trauma via their model of ethical behavior with others.  Other prominent contemporary thinkers will be cited, including Frantz Fanon. The author emphasizes our failures, including his own.

About  Stanley J. Coen, MD.

Stanley J. Coen, MD, is a Training and Supervising Analyst and has been Senior Associate Director for Academic Affairs, Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research; Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons, and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Journal of Clinical Psychoanalysis, and the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. He is the author of The Misuse of Persons: Analyzing Pathological Dependency, 1992, The Analytic Press; Between Author and Reader: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Writing and Reading, 1994, Columbia University Press; and Affect Intolerance in Patient and Analyst, 2002, Jason Aronson. He has published extensively on problems in clinical psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic literary criticism. He chairs (now co-chairs) the subcommittee on University Forum of the APsA Program Committee, which has recently produced the outstanding series, Racism in America. He has chaired the Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism of APsA since 1981. He was the 2018 Plenary Lecturer, American Psychoanalytic Association. 

More information coming soon.