During the first half of the program, Dr. Frank will present a clinical paper including a detailed analysis of some drawings of one of Klein’s little patients, Erna. From the beginning, Melanie Klein was interested in the unconscious phantasies underlying the child’s different activities. As her career developed, she began to grasp more basic structural unconscious phantasies governing the psychic functioning of her small patients. In her paper, Dr. Frank shows us how Klein’s struggle to understand Erna’s movements in the analytic situation led her to formulate “the fragmentation of the personality into two parts” and to describe the dynamics of splitting for the first time (in a manuscript not published by Klein). In today’s analytic work we can build on that understanding of splitting as an early defensive maneuver. We experience it in the transference-countertransference situation. In interpreting and working it through with the patient, we can enable a process of getting to know one’s organizing/structuring unconscious phantasy, thus having the chance to transform (parts of) it. Dr. Frank will present a few vignettes from the analysis of an adult patient with an obsessive-compulsive disorder. During the second half of the program, PCC member Deborah Bilder will interview Dr. Frank about her commitments on the international level regarding psychoanalytic training including supervision of candidates, infant observation, and the Eitingon model. Learn more.
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