31ST ANNUAL EVENT AND LECTURE
A STATE OF MIND:
A DAY WITH ORNA GURALNIK, PSY.D.
Socio-political realities, such as the divisions by race, nationalism, or gender, are maintained by engaging us all in states of enchantment/trance. What does psychoanalysis have to say about the way ideology inscribes us? Following her long empirical and clinical work with people suffering with dissociation and depersonalization, Dr. Guralnik will propose that the intimate link between culture and the subject is not necessarily mediated by the Oedipal crisis or the internalization of the Law of the Father, but through spell states and dissociative mechanisms. This claim has broad clinical implications.
Engaging in an honest investigation of how the political inheres in the personal has become urgent for psychoanalysis in the wake of the current administration, the tensions surrounding identity politics, and powerful movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. Guralnik will draw on daily experiences, film and pop culture, as well as clinical material to introduce the concept of interpellation and to discuss the mind’s desire to enter dissociative spell states. The audience will be invited to participate throughout the day, including through small group discussions.
Karim Dajani, Psy.D. will join the discussion with a response, and both will apply their thinking to a dramatic case presentation by Daniel Yu, LCSW.
At the end of this course participants will be able to:
- Identify aspects of dissociative syndromes that go beyond individual trauma theory to include socio-political factors in the etiology and maintenance of dissociation and integrate this information into their clinical interventions.
- Explain how ideological issues shape intra- and intersubjective experience and apply this knowledge directly in the therapeutic relationship.
- Identify and apply empirical and theoretical links between hypnotic spell-states and the socio-political workings of ideology not only regarding discrete dissociative syndromes, but also in everyday life.
- Fonagy, P. (2015). The effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapies: an update. World Psychiatry, 14, 137–150.
- Bayne, T. (2007). Hypnosis and the unity of consciousness. Hypnosis and Conscious States, ed. Graham Jamieson. Oxford: Oxford University Press (93-109)
- Putnam, F. W., Guroff, J. J., Silberman, E. K., Barban, L., & Post, R. M. (1986). The clinical phenomenology of multiple personality disorder. A review of 100 recent cases. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 47, 285-293.
- Steele, K. S., Dorahy, M. J., der Hart, Van, O., & Nijenhuis, E. R. S. (2009). Dissociation versus alterations in consciousness: Real but different concepts. In P. F. Dell & J. A. O'Neil (Eds.), Dissociation and the dissociative disorders: DSM-V and beyond (pp. 155-169). New York, NY: Routledge.
- der Hart, Van, O., Nijenhuis, E., Steele, K., & Brown, D. (2004). Trauma-related dissociation: Conceptual clarity lost and found. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 38, 906-914.
- Davies, J. M. (1998). Multiple perspectives on multiplicity. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 8(2), 195-206.
Orna Guralnik, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. She is faculty at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital, and the Stephen Mitchell Center; visiting scholar at PINC; co-editor of the Psychoanalytic Dialogues Blog; and associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender & Sexuality. Dr. Guralnik co-founded the Center for the Study of Dissociation and Depersonalization at the Mount Sinai Medical School and publishes on the topics of dissociation, depersonalization, and culture.
Daniel Yu, LCSW, is on the faculty for the Coalition for Clinical Social Work at SFCP. A former board and faculty member for the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance, he has been adjunct faculty in the MSW Program at SFSU and currently supervises for Access Institute in San Francisco. He is in private practice in San Francisco.
Karim G. Dajani, Psy.D., MFT is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice with a specialization in treating bicultural individuals. His research and writing include publications on psychological resilience and on culture, where, his work examines the role culture plays in determining an individual's role within a collective, and on the experience of cultural dislocation.
Francisco J. González, MD, is a psychoanalyst and writer whose work focuses on the necessity of community psychoanalysis as a necessary movement and on the complex articulation of the sociopolitical as an intrinsic element of individual and collective psychic life. He is the Co-Director of the Community Psychoanalysis Track at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. He served on the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis, and practices privately in San Francisco and Oakland and in the public domain at Instituto Familiar de la Raza in San Francisco.