Scientific Meeting
Saturday, May 17, 2025
4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
255 Bradley Street New Haven, CT 06510
Event will also be available
via Zoom (link will be sent via email the day before the event)
"Barbie' and Beyond: Visions of Sex and Gender
Speaker: Rosemary Balsam, MD
Speaker: Phillip Blumberg, MD
Non-WNEPS members
$35.00
WNEPS members, candidates and all students/trainees
$0.00
Registration Coming Soon
Drs. Rosemary Balsam and Phillip Blumberg will give a joint presentation on different aspects of the 2023 “Barbie” blockbuster movie. We learned afresh from our patients the impact of this stylized culture on their inner worlds, re-visited traumata, and their conflicts about growth in sex and gender. The making of Barbie, the doll, and the script reflect such psychic dilemmas.
Dr. Balsam will speak on some of the meanings of dolls and their developmental functions using classic and contemporary psychoanalytic literature and raise the paradoxes shown in this portrait of female “liberation” in terms of body image, femininity, and Barbie’s interactive world with males, peers and adults, brought to life. Dr Blumberg will talk of the impact of the screen event, cinematographic aspects, feminist and political, and power-seeking contexts of this projection of inner sex and gender wars. Slides will illustrate the talks, and the speakers will interact also with the audience.
Learning Objectives
- Summarize the psychohistory of the iconic doll from 1959 and discuss the meanings of dolls and doll play in the psychoanalytic literature.
- Identify the complexity of children’s and adults’ reactions to “Barbie”, and recognize in clinical work, the application to a range of sex and gender dilemmas.
- Critique the movie’s cultural and cinematographic effects and appeal in terms of feminist and political moviemaking, and raise questions about its role, constructive or destructive, for past and present ego ideals of “femininity” and “masculinity.”
Speaker: Rosemary Balsam, MD
Rosemary H. Balsam F.R.C.Psych (Lond), M.R. C. P. (Edin), originally from Belfast, UK), is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in the Yale Medical School; staff psychiatrist in the Yale Department of Student Mental Health and Counseling, and a Training and Supervising Analyst at WNEIP. Her special interests are gender developments, young adulthood, the place of the body in psychic life, the work of Hans Loewald. Editorial boards of Imago; PQ. Hon. Board of Loewald Center; Author:Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis: Co- Editor: .Legacy and Promise of Hans Loewald: The Emerging Tradition of Hans Loewald. Winner of The Sigourney Award for Outstanding Achievement in Psychoanalysis 2018.
Speaker: Phillip Blumberg, MD
Phillip Blumberg, Ph.D: did his Doctoral work in dramatic literature and criticism at the Yale School of Drama: Doctoral work in clinical psychology, University of Michigan. Earlier he was a Vice President of Production at Paramount Pictures and ABC films; and currently, graduate and faculty of the William Alanson White Institute; The New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Columbia University. He is an Associate Editor, JAPA; and on the Program Committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is Co-editor, Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Intense Involvement in Sports.
