Conference Agenda

Session
Session 38: Developmental Methodologies
Time:
Tuesday, 18/June/2024:
10:00am - 11:30am

Session Chair: Nigel Williams
Location: F5
External Resource for This Session


Presentations
ID: 119
Individual Paper

Through the Kleinian Lens: Psychic Encounters of a (Becoming) Psychotherapist and a Person in India

Manali Arora

Ambedkar University Delhi; All India Institute of Medical Sciences, India

My journey into psychoanalysis did not commence with the didactic absorption of theories but unfolded through a deeply personal evolution, an experiential assimilation that transformed my way of being and perceiving. As I traversed the chasms of self-discovery and professional development, I chanced upon a psychoanalytic institute in India, a country where the psychoanalytic community is still emerging amidst a rich tapestry of cultural and social dynamics, which facilitated my becoming – not merely as a therapist but, more fundamentally, a person who thinks psychoanalytically.

This paper aims to weave together the tapestry of my experiential journey with the conceptual threads of Kleinian theory. I will explore how the oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions has been emblematic of my own internal struggles and triumphs as a candidate in a psychoanalytic institute. This duality mirrors the inevitable anxieties and the reparative aspirations I faced while constructing a home within the institution and the broader psychoanalytic community.

Moreover, I plan to highlight how this internal Kleinian process paralleled the clinical encounters with patients, where the tumult and the tranquility of their psychic lives demanded an empathic attunement that only a lived-through psychoanalytic perspective within a certain cultural and social context could afford. The feeling of belonging within the institute was not a peripheral experience but a central one that informs my clinical work.

The presentation will also have a clinical vignette that exemplifies the application of this internalized psychoanalytic lens and will delve into the role of institution as a scaffold that has supported the integration into the psychoanalytic milieu against the backdrop of India’s evolving psychoanalytic landscape. It is through this lens that I could build my relational home within the institute and the broader field, a home that is both a sanctuary and a site of ceaseless becoming.



ID: 209
Individual Paper

This Is (not) Me: Autotheory and Writing the Psychosocial Self

Elena Gkivisi

Birkbeck College, University of London, United Kingdom

The suggested contribution is an autotheoretical piece on autotheory and how it can be employed as a psychosocial concept and method for the exploration of self-formation in-between the psychic and sociopolitical spheres. I reflect on my personal experience related to the reception of my published fiction as a disguised autobiography that offers itself (myself) to wild analysis interpretations; to do so, I draw upon psychoanalytic theory and feminist metaphysics. I investigate whether it is important to make a differentiation between truth and fiction, memory and fantasy, and whether the disruption of such separation could offer a new formative psychosocial paradigm of female subjectivity.

Autotheory is a genre of writing that has recently been brought into prominence in feminist life-writing but also psychoanalytic theory. It entwines autobiographical narration with philosophy and critical theory; it engages self-narrativisation with the conceptual questioning of the formation of ‘the self’. My hypothesis is that autotheory is not merely a genre; transposing the lived experience of everyday life into the psycho-philosophical examination of subjectivity, it offers a psychosocial medium and tool to study the wider psychic and sociopolitical consequences in and for self-formation.