The Case of the Manufactured Child
Saturday, May 17th
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT
2 CE/CME'S
Click here to RSVP for Saturday in person at Rockland
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A members-only brunch with Dr. Santa Maria will be held on Saturday from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM at Rockland. (More details and registration coming soon!)
About the Program
Dr. Santa Maria will present The Case of the Manufactured Child in which she will consider how being the product of assisted reproductive technology -- when there is a solo parent—in this case, the father—can impact the child’s development of a sense of self. Specifically, she will bring us through her experience of working with a 12 year old boy, whose father sought to create a perfect child with selected DNA characteristics tailored to his liking. Dr. Santa Maria will share with us the nuanced intricacies of her work with this boy and will also consider her work theoretically with references to the work of several psychoanalysts including Ferenczi, Recalcati, Roussillon, and Winnicott. Her discussion will address several questions that may emerge uniquely with children conceived in a more complex manner, including, 1) the impact of the father’s personality on the relationship he establishes with his son when he is preoccupied with perfection; 2) the impact that “other mothers” -- termed “self-matryoshka” by Dr. Santa Maria –can have on the development of a child raised by a solo father -- with no identifiable mother, 3) the meaning of the father’s having sought to manufacture his child across culture and countries; and 4) how psychoanalytic psychotherapy can help a child adjust psychologically when experiencing a complex convergence of dynamic challenges from conception onward. Regarding the latter, Dr. Santa Maria will explore how the psychotherapeutic process can be an anchor at any age, in the context of a therapeutic relationship that provides a shared mental space in which the internal and the external can interplay and support the development of basic trust necessary for unconscious communication.
What Makes Us Human?
Can Artificial Intelligence Play a Role in the Conservation of the Subjective?
Sunday, May 18th
10:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT
2 CE/CME'S
Click here to RSVP for Sunday in person at Rockland
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About the Program
Dr. Santa Maria will consider how technology has contributed to the subjective experience of living with AI and how it may be changing our relationship to the experience of otherness. Toward this end, she will discuss the film, “Ex Machina” (2014) through a psychoanalytic lens (the audience will be asked to screen this film independently prior to the program). In this film, one of the protagonists, Caleb, is recruited to take the ‘Turing Test’ -- a test that aims to prove the intelligence of a computer by tricking or convincing a person that they are talking to another human being. In the film, Caleb meets Ava, an AI machine, who is portrayed as a woman in a woman’s body. The film explores the evolution of their relationship. Dr. Santa Maria will discuss how Ava “embodies” the question: what makes us human? She will explore how Ava becomes and represents humanity, because according to the ‘Turing Test,’ a machine can be seen as human in relation to its intelligence and its capacity to show deeper levels of consciousness like self-awareness, imagination, manipulation, intuition, sexuality and empathy. Dr. Santa Maria will also consider the integration and working through of various vicissitudes, i.e., encounters/discounters that occur between technology/virtuality and the human mind. This presentation will seek to generate discussion among the attendees about our emerging technological world and how AI may be impacting the conservation of our subjectivation and experience of time, both past and future.
Psychotherapy Forum:
Tragic Consciousness and Psychoanalytic Work
Presenter: Heather Ferguson, LCSW
Date: Tuesday, May 27, 2025
Time: 7:30–9:00 PM EDT
Location: Virtual via Zoom
Program Description
The program will focus on the concept of "Tragic Consciousness" and its application to psychoanalytic treatment with patient with eating disorders and histories of self-harm.
About the Presenter
Heather Ferguson, LCSW, is a faculty and supervisor at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, the Wilhelm Reich Center for the Study of Embodiment, and the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. As a certified hypnotherapist and practitioner of EMDR, she integrates embodied techniques into her psychoanalytic practice. She writes and lectures about eating disorder treatment, the role of intergenerational transmission of trauma, and the use of embodied techniques to deepen psychotherapeutic engagement. She has chapters in Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis (Eds, Harris, Kalb, and Klebanoff) and Art, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis: Perspectives from Analyst-Artists (Ed., Hagman). She is an Associate Editor for Psychoanalysis, Self, and Context and a member of the Music Industry Therapist Collective (MITC). She has a private practice in New York City.
RSVP COMING SOON!
Pearson Lecture:
The Ubiquitousness and Intensity of Countertransference in Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis
Presenter: Alan Sugarman, PhD
Date: Wednesday, June 4, 2025
Time: 7:00 - 9:00 PM EDT
Location: Virtual via Zoom
Program Description
Dr. Alan Sugarman will be discussing some of his ideas regarding the prominent place that countertransference has in child and adolescent work. He notes the existence of a “Broader Field” or “Total Situation” when analyzing children and adolescents because of the various roles required of the child analyst i.e. analyst, developmental object, and real object; because of the child’s developmentally appropriate orientation to action; and the need to involve parents and others (siblings, nannies, teachers). The child or adolescent young age and action orientation often stimulates more intense and /or primitive feelings in the child analyst. In turn this may activate the child analyst’s internal conflicts much the way it does the child’s parents’ conflicts.
RSVP COMING SOON!
Save-the-date!
Annual Year-End Dinner
Date: Thursday, June 26, 2025
Time: 6:00 - 9:00 PM EDT
Location: Platform Thirty at Beat Street Station
DETAILS COMING SOON!
Check this page regularly for updates!
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact PCOP Membership & Events Coordinator, Julia Seixas, at [email protected] for questions or assistance with registration!
