A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns – nicht wahr?...  No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.
                                                                   – Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)  

How we understand and engage with the negative may determine whether it sabotages the process of psychoanalytic psychotherapy or serves as an engine of therapeutic action. Transference, for example, which Freud initially regarded as a powerfully disruptive mode of resistance (like yelling fire in a crowded theater), later became for him both a potentially motivating factor for the analysis to continue and a window into the dynamic determinants of the patient’s history. Countertransference reactions, first dismissed as distortions on the part of the analyst, were later theorized as providing insights into the patient’s unconscious life and character structure. Projective identification – defined by Klein as the patient’s evacuative phantasy and clinically experienced as an attack on the therapist or therapy itself – has been reconceived as an infantile form of communication, soliciting the therapist’s receptivity and capacity for containment.

Immersion in the negative expands the therapist’s awareness of the patient’s internal world. Negotiating obscurities supports her complex role as an observer-participant, strengthening her capacity to hold the frame in the context of transference and helping her to determine the appropriate scope, timing, and tone of interventions. Just as negative space in a painting actively defines boundaries and guides the movement of a successful composition, so tolerance of uncertainty, Bion’s “negative capability,” affords the therapist internal space to deliberate alternative perspectives in the complex field of here-and-now work with patients. Even sessions dominated by repeated unreflective exchanges may ultimately be therapeutically beneficial, as surrender to the sleep of enactments precedes the awakening of understanding.

Under the guidance of insightful, experienced instructors, this year’s intensive study groups will investigate theoretical approaches to the negative and practical engagements with it in the clinical setting, considering such topics as trauma, the fusion of Eros and the death drive, negative therapeutic reaction, psychic retreats, perverse modes of relating, destructive narcissism, and excessive splitting. In some sections, reading assignments will be supplemented by films or include plays that vividly illustrate course themes. We invite you to explore with us how apparent challenges to psychotherapy may vitally contribute to the process of human transformation.

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