Course Description:

This paper discusses the different maternal imagoes that emerge in the transference and countertransference over the course of an analysis. A powerful, cherished, and idealised mother of infancy gives way to the cruel and competitive mother of adolescence. The way this mother emerges in the transference is through the sudden use of a foreign language. The author links this emergence to Freud's search for the meaning of the uncanny in different languages: She suggests that the uncanny is that which provokes curiosity and is simultaneously rejected, as it refers to incestuous desires that are frightening, forbidden, and disgusting. The following question is raised: Is incest at the core of the riddle of anxiety? The author traces the interplay between the sexual and the melancholic in this analysis. It is the force of the repetition compulsion that enables repressed infantile sexuality to find its way into the transference, so that it can, for the first time, be named, in terms of its contradictory and opposing forces: red and black. The author establishes a link between Freud and Laplanche in the understanding that sexuality is only incompletely transformed into psychic reality.

Course Link:
http://www.mcpp.online

CE Value (credits): 2
CE Type: Standard
 

Michigan Counciel for
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

Contact Information:
Karen Weber, MSW
734-769-2183
kkweber01@gmail.com