Presented by Dr. Lauren Levine, Ph.D.

In this presentation, I will consider the transformative power of stories and storytelling in psychoanalysis to create shared symbolic meaning and coherence out of ungrieved loss and trauma. I explore creativity as an essential aspect of aliveness and authenticity, and as transformative, emergent in the clinical process, and I draw on film, dance, poetry, literature and dreams as frames for experience that often exceeds what words can capture. In analysis, we dwell in stories, in associations, echoes and reverberations. Apres coup. In the enigmatic and ineffable. As psychoanalysts, we listen for the cracks and voids, interstitial spaces, the presence of an absence. Stories get told; untold and retold, as memory expands and collides, as dreams and remembrances float to the surface, or dissociated shards of trauma pierce through our consciousness, crashing unbidden into awareness, jarring and dysregulating. As a psychoanalyst and writer, I’m interested in the stories we tell, individually and collectively, as well as what gets left out of the narrative, the gaps and holes; what gets disavowed, dissociated, and disrupted by experiences of relational, intergenerational, and sociopolitical trauma. I’m concerned as well with whose stories get told and whose get erased, silenced and marginalized. This crucial question, what gets left out of the narrative, and the potential for an intimate psychoanalytic process to help patients reclaim their memory and creative agency and become the storyteller of their own lives, is at the heart of my new book, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis.

Course Objectives: 

• Participants will be able to describe the transformative power of stories in psychoanalysis to create shared symbolic meaning and coherence out of ungrieved loss and trauma.
• Participants will be able to assess ways in whichcreativity is an essential aspect of aliveness and authenticity, and canserve as a vital source of therapeutic action.
• Participants will be able to describe the importance of paying attention to what gets disavowed, dissociated, and disrupted by experiences of relational, intergenerational, and sociopolitical trauma.
• Participants will be able to evaluate the potential for an intimate psychoanalytic process to help patients reclaim their memory and creative agency.

About Dr. Lauren Levine: 

Dr. Lauren Levine is Joint Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Her new book, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis was published in Routledge’s Relational Perspectives Book Series in April 2023. The book has just been translated into Spanish by her colleague, Dr. Marie Saba from Lima, Peru. Dr. Levine teaches and presents both nationally and internationally, and has published articles about creativity, mourning, relational, intergenerational, and sociocultural trauma, and resilience. She is on the Faculty of New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis, and The Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center. Dr. Levine is Visiting Faculty at the Institute for Relational and Group Psychotherapy in Athens, Greece, and the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society. She is a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC.