October Scientific Meeting

Western New England Psychoanalytic Society

Scientific Meeting

Saturday, October 24th         4pm–6pm

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This meeting is virtual. ZOOM link will be emailed to all registrants the day before the meeting.

See below for important CME/CE certificate details.

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What’s Loss Got to do With It?  A Meditation on Freud and Mourning

Presenter: Madelon Sprengnether, PhD

Discussant: Sybil Houlding, LCSW

The modernist Freud of the early twentieth century has ceded to the postmodern Freud of the twenty-first. My book Mourning Freud (Bloomsbury Academic 2018) examines this phenomenon from several perspectives (including feminism, cultural studies, and postmodernism), with a special emphasis on the subject of mourning. For this presentation, I will focus on Freud’s occasions for mourning, his theories thereof, and post-Freudian conceptions of mourning, trauma, and haunting. I will discuss in particular the losses of Freud’s early life in relation to those of his later years and the impact of the preoedipal turn in psychoanalytic theory on mourning in individual and cultural contexts. I hope to demonstrate, in this way, both the continuities and discontinuities between Freud’s thinking and ours.

Learning Objectives:

• Participants will develop a critical understanding of the relationship between Freud’s experiences of loss and his theories of mourning.
• Participants will be able to trace the evolution of mourning theory from Freud’s groundbreaking “Mourning and Melancholia” through the work of Karl Abraham, Melanie Klein, and other contemporary theorists, including Hans Loewald.
• Participants will be able to assess the importance of the preoedipal turn in post-Freudian mourning theory in their own theoretical orientations and clinical practices.