International Psychotherapy Institute

This event addresses: the role of the non-human shapers and regulators of personality, both as it develops and functions over the human lifespan.

Keynote Speaker: Salman Akhtar, MD

Psychoanalysis, including psychoanalytic psychotherapy, is a discipline devoted to studying psychic development, well-adapted and maladapted mental functioning, the unfolding of the inner world of real and imaginary formative figures during a therapeutic dialogue, and the subterranean existence of the personal in the cultural and vice versa. The building blocks of the inner world and outer edifice are held, in psychoanalysis, to be the dialectics of interactions between a growing child’s given potentials and the actual and felt attitudes of his or her caretakers. Mother, father, and to a lesser extent, grandparents and siblings are viewed as the major players in this drama. Also, recently the study of culture and diversity have been given some attention.

Strikingly, psychoanalytic theory has largely ignored the role of the non-human shapers and regulators of personality, both as it develops and functions over the human lifespan. Exceptions do exist (e.g., Freud’s fetish, Winnicott’s transitional object, Searles’s study of anthropomorphization and animism, Volkan’s linking objects). However, by and large the impact of the non-human environment has been ignored. This set of presentations and group discussions seek to rectify this error by addressing the role of time, space, animals, things, and God in normal and abnormal psychic functioning and in the latter’s amelioration, and will delineate their developmental, psychopathological, and therapeutic implications. Material from literature, poetry, movies, and day-to-day clinical practice will be included to highlight the proposals made.