South Bay Reading Group – January 2020

South Bay Reading Group: An evening of comparative psychoanalytic inquiry

Friday Jan 31, 6:45 PM–9:00 PM

logoKnafo, D. (2020). The Sexual Illusionist. Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 17:13-30.
Elise, D. (2020),  ”Selling Fire to the Devil”: Commentary on Danielle Knafo’s “The Sexual Illusionist”. Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 17: 31-40.
Grossmark, R. (2020). It’s all too much: Excess, enactment and ending in Danielle Knafo’s “The Sexual Illusionist”: Commentary. Psychoanalytic Perspectives,17, 41-52. 
Knafo, D. (2020). The imperfect art of Psychoanalysis: Response to Dianne Elise and Robert Grossmark. Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 17:53-56.

After reviewing Danielle Knafo’s original paper on her 5 year multi-layered analysis of a patient with a highly perverse/sado-masochistic psychic organization which is (re)enacted in the analysis, the focus of our reading/discussion will be the two theoretically divergent commentaries by Dianne Elise and Robert Grossmark. In her discussion, Elise articulates her analytic field theory perspective (Elise, 2019) which leads her to focus on the dynamics internal to the analytic couple. At the same time, Elise characterizes the patient’s “psychotic transference” in which reality is evaded such that it doesn’t impact the patient’s enacted fantasies about the analyst. The patient’s aggressive insistence on forming both a pre-oedipal and oedipal union with the mother/analyst is compulsively and perversely re-enacted. Along with contemporary Kleinians, Elise underscores the necessity of acquiring the capacity to experience the limits/reality of oedipal exclusion without relinquishing desire. From a Relational perspective, Grossmark offers a read of Knafo’s case by proposing that the analyst serve as an “unobtrusive companion” (Grossmark, 2018) working in the register of dynamic enactments (unrepresented states) as “this is where healing takes place — in the enacted realm.” According to Grossmark, the perverse patient needs to be viewed as attempting to “create a transformational object such that he can manage his immersion in excess and come into being as a subject.” Grossmark notes that the patient’s sado-masochistic relatedness “built entirely around control and the perverse simulacra of relatedness where only part objects exist” serves as an attempt “to force his analyst to contain and transform what he does not have the capacity to bear himself, and in doing so to create the transformational object he so desperately seeks.”


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When
January 31st, 2020 6:45 PM
Location
Private residence
Palo Alto, CA
United States
Event Fee(s)
Admission $ 15.00