Scientific Meeting
Saturday, March 22, 2025
4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Online
via Zoom (link will be sent via email the day before the event)
On the Essential Spirituality of the Psychoanalytic Process
Speaker: Donald Carveth, PhD
Discussant: Jenifer Nields, MD
Non-WNEPS members
$35.00
WNEPS members, candidates and all students/trainees
$0.00
Although we have tried to disguise the fact, psychoanalysis is a moral enterprise, a value-infused rather than value-neutral science. We affirm life over death, love over hate and truth over lies. In its concern with psyche, soul or spirit—with human beings as symbols, meaning-making subjects—and in its promotion of personal transformation through the development of an “observing ego“ and a conscience (as distinct from a superego), psychoanalysis is a spiritual journey of both self-discovery and self-correction (soul-making). Although analysts must not be “superego-ish” with patients, they must carry the conscience in the treatment until such time as patients are able to carry it themselves. For, ultimately, emancipation from the tyrannical superego requires reconciliation with conscience.
Learning Objectives
As a result of attending this program:
- Participants should be able to distinguish persecutory guilt from reparative guilt.
- Participants should be able to distinguish the superego from the conscience.
- Participants should be able to explain what is meant by “soul -making” and how the psychoanalytic process may be conceived as a “spiritual process of soul-making.”
- Participants should be able to explain why Carveth believes that psychoanalysis needs to recover its conscience.
- Participants should be able to explain in what ways analysis has, for many decades, like the society around it, engaged in a process of guilt invasion.
Speaker: Donald Carveth, PhD
Donald Carveth is emeritus professor of sociology and social and political thought at York University in Toronto. He is a training and supervising analyst in the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis; a past Director of the Toronto Institute, and past editor in chief of the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is the author of The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience (Karnac, 2013); Psychoanalytic Thinking: a Dialectical Critique of Contemporary Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2018); and Guilt: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2023). Many of his publications are available on his York website (yorku.ca/dcarveth) and his current website (doncarveth.com); his video lectures are available on his YouTube channel (YouTube.com/doncarveth). He is in private psychoanalytic practice in Toronto.
Suggested Readings
CME/CE Accreditation
ACCME Accreditation Statement
This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of American Psychoanalytic Association and Western New England Psychoanalytic Society. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
AMA Credit Designation Statement
The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this live activity for a maximum of 2 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
Disclosure Statement
The APsA CE Committee has reviewed the materials for accredited continuing education and has determined that this activity is not related to the product line of ineligible companies and therefore, the activity meets the exception outlined in Standard 3: ACCME's identification, mitigation and disclosure of relevant financial relationship. This activity does not have any known commercial support.
This program is being reviewed for Continuing Education Credit hours by the NASW, CT to meet the continuing education criteria for CT Social Work Licensure renewal.
A Certificate of Attendance for WNE Programs can be used to fulfill CE requirements for CT Psychologists.
