The 2022 James Grotstein Memorial Lectures

April 21 - May 21, 2022

PLEASE NOTE: Lectures will be held online via Zoom Conferencing.

The International Psychoanalytic Association’s Affiliated Institutes in Los Angeles—New Center for Psychoanalysis, the Psychoanalytic Center of California and Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies—in conjunction with the Regional Bion Symposium, proudly present:   

The 7th Annual James Grotstein Lectures

Clinical Reflections on the Infantile in the Work of Klein, Winnicott and Bion: 
A Three-Part Series on Contributions from the IPA Vancouver Congress

As part of the annual James Grotstein Memorial Lectures, this series honors the work of generations of analysts and contemporaries who have taken up Bion’s leads in clinical psychoanalysis. Reprising some of the key contributions from last summer’s IPA Congress in Vancouver, this series focuses on the work of Klein, Winnicott and Bion from distinguished analysts/authors who continue to add to our knowledge of our analytic predecessors.

Please note the dates and times, as they vary. Attendance at all three sessions is strongly recommended.


Part 1: Thursday, April 21, 2022, 8:00 to 10:00 pm  

Winnicott, Bion and the Infantile

Stephen Seligman, DMH, San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis

We begin the series with a paper by noted Winnicottian analyst/scholar Stephen Seligman, who takes up the interconnections and points of disjunction between Winnicott, Klein and Bion. 

In this overview presentation, Stephen Seligman gives a detailed and nuanced view of the “infantile” in the work of Winnicott, Bion and Klein, differentiating how Winnicott elaborated Freud’s notion of primary narcissism and the body-ego, only setting it against the infant’s ever-evolving developmental relationship with its primary caretaker.  He carefully details the infant’s progression through a complicating set of transitional experiences that ultimately underscore the infant’s sense of a subjective self that is signified by its adoption of a transitional object. From a Winnicottian vertex, he then examines creative conceptual differences with how both Klein and Bion formulated their contrasting view of the infantile as it traverses the paranoid/schizoid and depressive positions—with the help of maternal reverie—in birthing a sense of an integrated self.  
 
Learning Objectives
 
As a result of attending this session, participants should be able to:
  • Analyze and develope the difference between Winnicott’s notion of the infantile and Klein and Bion's notion of the infantile
  • Describe the infant's state of primary narcissism and body-ego from Winnicott's perspective
  • Analyze how Winnicott, Bion and Klein understand how the infant births a subjective sense of self

Part 2:  Saturday, May 7, 2022, 10:00 AM to Noon Pacific 

Bion’s Technique as a Method of Clinical Inquiry
 
Joseph Aguayo, PhD, New Center for Psychoanalysis; Psychoanalytic Center of California; Guest Member, British Psychoanalytical Society
 
This presentation by Joseph Aguayo takes up a central question that invariably comes up in conferences on Bion’s work: did he have an actual clinical/analytic technique?  What does his clinical and supervisorial work tell us about some of the characteristic ways in which he approached doing analytic work? Drawing upon research in collaboration with Bob Hinshelwood, Sira Dermen and Nicola Abel-Hirsch, Aguayo surveys Bion’s clinical and supervisorial work, concluding that while Bion birthed numerous and unique theories of the human subject, at a clinical level he remained quite Kleinian in his practices. Starting with the group period, then his work with patients experiencing psychosis—and extending it to work with people living with borderline personality disorder in the 1960s—Aguayo abstracts what his research group has termed Bion’s “method of clinical inquiry,” a set of propositions and questions he put to himself as he investigated the nature of the patient’s difficulties in living. 

Aguayo also illustrates what Bion’s concepts look like at the clinical level when he presents a candidate’s analytic case he has supervised, one that illustrates how Bion’s model of “container/contained” can be used to make sense of extremely disturbed and traumatic pathology.
 
Learning Objectives
 
As a result of attending this session, participants should be able to:
  • Describe three aspects of Bion’s method of clinical inquiry: avoiding premature foreclosure; addressing what isn’t understood in the clinical encounter; and the analyst’s processing of his own subjective states that can be implicated in countertransference problems
  • Analyse why Bion was disinclined to propagate a clinical technique of his own
  • Deferentiate how the analyst uses the concept of role-responsiveness in the way she/he understands transference/countertransference problems

Part 3:  Saturday, May 21, 2022, 9:00 AM to Noon Pacific  

Holding and Containing:  Reflections on the Infantile in the Work of Klein, Winnicott and Bion

Jan Abram and Nicola Abel-Hirsch, British Psychoanalytical Society—London

In this final part of our series, two distinguished British analysts/scholars examine, dialogue and debate the key differences in the theme of the infantile in Winnicott’s model of holding and Bion’s model of container/contained. Both Winnicott and Bion were strongly influenced by Klein albeit in different ways. They were both concerned with early psychic development and recognized how the infantile layers of development manifested in clinical practice. But their basic clinical paradigms are distinct. Winnicott’s paradigm evolved out of his different perspectives on the infantile from Klein while Bion’s advances are founded on Kleinian principles. The concept of holding is often underrated while Bion’s concept of container-contained can often be too loosely applied.

In this meeting, each author will present the different perspectives on the infantile in the work, especially of Winnicott and Bion, to highlight the similarities and differences in their elaborations. Abram argues that Winnicott’s contribution on the role of the mother enhances and expands the meaning of relating, while Abel-Hirsch takes up Hinshelwood's argument that Bion’s container-contained does two things: firstly, it indicates the porous nature of the ego boundary; and secondly, it emphasizes the infantile in each person now, in the present. Implications for analytic treatment will also be taken up.    

After Abel-Hirsch and Abram's presentations, there will be a brief comment made by Joseph Aguayo, Training and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of California.

Learning Objectives

As a result of attending this session, participants should be able to:  

  • Identify what differentiates Winnicott’s holding from Bion’s container/contained
  • Explain how Winnicott and Bion differ on the importance of the actual mother in the patient’s subsequent pathology
  • Differentiate Winnicott’s emphasis on the infant’s development vis-à-vis the processing of infantile aspects of the patient in the “here and now”

After each presentation, the authors will engage in a short dialogue before inviting the audience to participate.


Stephen Seligman, DMH, is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco and at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis; Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California; and Editor Emeritus of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. He is the author of Relationships in Development: Infancy, Intersubjectivity, Attachment (Routledge, 2018), which has been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Ukrainian, and co-edited the American Psychiatric Press’ Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health: Core Concepts and Clinical Practice. He has worked for over four decades in the development and dissemination of the original “Fraiberg model” of infant-psychotherapy. 

Joseph Aguayo, PhD, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of California, a Member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis, and in private practice in West Los Angeles. He is also a Guest Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in London. Forthcoming publications:  Introducing the Clinical Work of W.R. Bion. This book is based on a series of 16 video lectures given to Chinese students of psychoanalysis in Shanghai—and the main focus of the book is a close examination of how Bion went about his work both in the consulting room—and how he theorized his findings in a revision of the Kleinian and Freudian traditions. Recent presentations include participation on two Bion panels at the July 2021 International Psychoanalytic Congress in Vancouver. He also presented a paper on February 2, 2022, at an Archival Meeting of the British Society: ‘Reappraising John O. Wisdom’s Critique of W.R. Bion’s Learning from Experience at a Meeting of the British Psychoanalytical Society—17 October 1964.’ A longer version of this paper appears in this year’s International Journal of Psychoanalysis.  
 
Nicola Abel-Hirsch is the author of Bion 365 Quotes (Routledge, 2019) and a training and supervising analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society with a full-time psychoanalytical practice in London. She has given clinical and theoretical papers and seminars on Bion in the UK; Taiwan (annually 2005-2012); the USA and in Europe. From 2013–2015 she was the visiting professor at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex. Her publications include "The Life Instinct" Int. J. Psycho-Anal. (2010); "A Note and a Short Story" in The Bion Tradition (2015); "Bion, Alpha-Function and the Unconscious Mind" Brit. J. Psychother. (2016), and "The Devil is in the Detail" in The Melanie Klein Tradition (2017). She is the editor of Hanna Segal’s last book Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (2007). Under the auspices of Understanding Primitive Mental States (NYC) she has recently given a series of online seminars on ‘Bion’s Questions’.
 
Professor Jan Abram, PhD, is a training and supervising analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and is in private practice in London. She is Visiting Professor of the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London, and currently Vice President of the European Psychoanalytic Federation. She is a Visiting Lecturer and supervisor at the Tavistock Clinic, London. In 2016 she was a Visiting Professor for the University of Kyoto, Japan, where she resided for a writing sabbatical. Since 2008 she has been a member of the Paris Group, a research group of the European Psychoanalytic Federation, and was its chair between 2016 and 2019. Dr. Abram has published several books and articles, notably: The Language of Winnicott, first published in 1996 and judged Outstanding Academic Book of the Year in 1997 (2nd edition 2007 and translated into several languages; Classic Book PEP); Donald Winnicott Today (2013) for the New Library of Psychoanalysis (shortlisted for a Gradiva Award); and, co-authored with R.D. Hinshelwood, The Clinical Paradigms of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott: Comparisons and Dialogues (Routledge 2018). In September 2021, she published: The Surviving Object: psychoanalytic clinical essays on psychic survival-of-the-object, New Library, Routledge. She is presently working on a 2nd book with R.D. Hinshelwood – The Clinical Paradigms of Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion: comparisons and dialogues, to be published by Routledge later this year.
 
Van Dyke DeGolia, MD, is a child, adolescent, and adult psychoanalyst and psychiatrist in private practice in West Los Angeles, California. He is a former Medical Director of the Reiss-Davis Child Study Center, a former Associate Director of the Graduate Center for Psychotherapy and Child Development, a graduate of the adult psychoanalytic training program at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and Society, and a graduate of the child and adolescent psychoanalytic program, a senior faculty member, Chair of the Curriculum Committee, a Training and Supervising Analyst, and a Child and Adolescent Supervising Analyst at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. He is also an Assistant Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine, where he supervises Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellows. In addition, he is a former Co-Dean of Training and a former Director of the Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Training Program at the New Center for Psychoanalysis, where teaches courses on Winnicott’s Developmental Theory and Advanced Relational Psychoanalysis.
 
John Lundgren, MD, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of California and an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine. He formerly served as Co-Director of the Group Relations Training course at UCLA Department of Psychiatry. He is a member of the A.K. Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems and its West Coast affiliate, GREX. He serves as a consultant to Tavistock group relations conferences and is presently exploring the integration of this training model and psychoanalytic training. He is in private practice in Los Angeles.   Recent publications include “Intervention in an institute at a crossroads: A methodology and rationale,” Int. J. Psychoanalysis (2019), 100(4): 674-692, and “A place where Psychoanalysts Live: Introducing Group Relations to Psychoanalytic Institutes” In Belgirate V - The Place where We Live: the space for Group Relations (In Press).
  
Agnes Regeczkey, LMFT, PhD, is a child, adolescent, and adult psychoanalyst in private practice in Palos Verdes, California. She is the co-founder and director of BriteMinds Learning Center, Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry & the Behavioral Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, serves as a research coordinator at Reiss-Davis Graduate Center, Los Angeles, and enjoys teaching with colleagues at the New Center for Psychoanalysis. Current academic research: childhood sleep disturbances impacting development, hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, continuity and change in child development. Panel presentation at APsaA February 2020 Meetings in New York. Publications: with Joseph Aguayo: “Small Group Collaborators and Adversaries in the London Kleinian Development,” Psa. Quarterly, July 2016. She is a co-editor with Joseph Aguayo and Lia Pistiner de Cortinas of Bion in Buenos Aires: Seminars, Case Presentation and Supervision, (Karnac, 2017). Presented at both the IPA 50th Congress in Buenos Aires, July 2015 and the IPA 51st Congress in London (July 2019).
 
Program Coordinators: Joseph Aguayo, PhD and Agnes Regeczkey, PhD.
 

IMPORTANT:

  • This is a virtual conference. All will be held over Zoom Conferencing.
  • Pre-registration is required. Registration is on a first come, first served basis because of limited capacity. 
  • 7 CE credits offered (2 CE credits each for the first and second lectures; 3 for the third)
  • Attendees must "sign" in and out at the beginning and end of the lecture to receive credit. (Instruction will be provided with the Zoom conference link & info after you register.) You will receive this information by email. Contact Tina at tinaw@n-c-p.org or Ebony at ebonyt@n-c-p.org if you have questions. 
  • This conference will be recorded. All registered attendees will receive a link to the recording so they may review. Only live attendance receives credit. 

FEES:

  • There is a flat fee for this package of three presentations. Attendance at all three sessions is strongly recommended. 
    • General Registration - All Three Lectures:  $225  General Registration for all three lectures is now closed. Please register under "Single Registration." You will be able to register for the remaining lecture.
    • Student Registration - All Three Lectures:  $150
    • Lectures 1 and 2 - $105/per lecture
    • Lecture 3 - $135
    • RBS - for those whose membership package includes these lectures, please use the registration designated as "Presenters & RBS Group - All Three Lectures." A passcode is required. All others should use General Registration.  
    • Please contact Tinaw@n-c-p.org if you have trouble registering.

DATES & TIMES (all times Pacific Time):

  • Part 1: Thursday, April 21, 2022, 8 to 10 PM
  • Part 2: Saturday, May 7, 2022, 10 AM to noon 
  • Part 3: Saturday, May 21, 2022, 9 AM to noon 

 

How to obtain lecture papers: 

Once registrants are officially enrolled, they can email Joseph Aguayo, PhD, at joseph.aguayo@gmail.com and request a copy of the first and second presentations. The third presentation will be done live at the day of the event. The papers will be available after April 7. 

 

This event will be recorded and shared with participants who have registered for the event. The video may also be used for educational purposes. If you do not wish to be recorded, please turn your camera off. By registering for this event, you grant permission to THE NEW CENTER FOR PSYCHOANALYSIS to the rights of your images, in video or still, and of the likeness and sound of your voice as recorded on audio or video.

 


CONTINUING EDUCATION CREDIT 

IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE INFORMATION FOR ALL LEARNERS: None of the planners and presenters for this educational activity have relevant financial relationship(s)* to disclose with ineligible companies* whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling, or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients.

*Financial relationships are relevant if the educational content an individual can control is related to the business lines or products of the ineligible company.

-Updated July 2021-

PHYSICIANS: 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 The New Center for Psychoanalysis. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians. 

The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this Live Activity for a maximum of 7 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

PSYCHOLOGISTS: The New Center for Psychoanalysis is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists.  The New Center for Psychoanalysis maintains responsibility for this program and its content. Psychologist must report CE credits directly to MCEP using this document to verify attendance. Please note that a Psychologist must attend the CE program in its entirety in order to receive credit.   

SOCIAL WORKERS, MARRIAGE and FAMILY THERAPISTS (LCSW, LMFT, ASW, IMF, LEP, LPCC, PCCI): The New Center for Psychoanalysis is a continuing education provider that has been approved by the American Psychological Association, a California Board of Behavioral Sciences recognized approval agency.

Schedule

Schedule
Event Date
The 2022 James Grotstein Memorial Lectures April 21, 2022, 8:00 - 10:00 PM
The 2022 James Grotstein Memorial Lectures 10:00 AM, May 7, 2022
The 2022 James Grotstein Memorial Lectures 9:00 AM, May 21, 2022