Reading Wilfred Bion: Second Thoughts

Second Thoughts: A Second Trimester of Reading Wilfred Bion

– Certificate Course with 12,5 hrs of post-graduate/ CE credits in psychoanalytic education (no pre-requisites)

with Stefanie Teitelbaum, LCSW, NPsyA

When: Five Saturdays 10/11; 10/18; 11/1; 11/15; and 12/6, 2014, – 9:45 am – 12:20 pm

Where: 99 University Place, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10003

OR VIRTUALLY (with minimal technical requirements for in real time participation and/ or via use of video-taped sessions)

Tuition: $450/ 10-week course/ 5 double-sessions. Ask for our need-based scholarships and payment arrangements (call the administrator at 646-522-1056).

This course provides a space for second thoughts about the ORI introductory course on Reading Wilfred Bion.

Second Thoughts is a collection of papers on Schizophrenia, Linking and Thinking, and his commentary upon them in the light of later work. Originally composed between 1950 and 1962, it derives its title from the lengthy critical commentary which Bion attached to these case histories in the year of publication, 1967, and represents the evolutionary change of position marked in his three previous books and brought to further refinement in the present work. (Karnac Books website)

The three books referred to above are Learning from Experience (1962), Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963), and Transformations (1965). It is also significant to note that Bion’s “Notes on Memory and Desire” was also published in 1967. A quote from “On Hallucination” serves as a springboard for a thread woven throughout the papers and commentary, and the implicit influence of the three books:

…particular bizarre objects are to be found in what are ordinarily described as the patient’s “delusions”. In his paper on Constructions in Analysis (1937), Freud suggests that delusions may be the “equivalents of the constructions which we build up in the course of an analytic treatment-attempts at explanation and cure.”, but later states that under the conditions of a psychosis they are bound to be ineffectual. (Bion, On Hallucination, pp 81-82)

Thus we are offered a glimpse into the mind of Bion and his evolutionary thinking leading his revolutionary concept of the psychotic component in the analyst’s desire to cure the patient.

In the 5 double class sessions, Students will read the ten papers and commentary in Second Thoughts. We will review the Grid and Notes on Memory and Desire read in the first trimester, and will continue to amplify Bion’s dialectic with and departure from Freud and Klein on the challenge of psychoanalytic work with psychotic personality. The material will be experienced in seminar-style associations to the readings, clinical practice and our own dreamwork-alpha.

The Papers in Second Thoughts

· The Imaginary Twin

· Notes on a Theory of Schizophrenia

· Development of Schizophrenic Thought

· Differentiating the Psychotic from the Non-Psychotic Personality

· On Hallucination

· On Arrogance

· Attacks on Linking

· A Theory of Thinking

Bio of the Course Instructor:

Stefanie Teitelbaum, LCSW, NPsyA, B. Music – is the Supervisor, Training Analyst, Faculty of NPAP and IEA; Dean of Students, IEA; Instructor/Faculty, Training Analyst, Training Supervisor, ORI. She is the former staff psychotherapist at the Lower East Side Service Center’s Drug-Free Outpatient Program. Stefanie Teitelbaum is in private psychoanalytic practice in New York City. Contact info: 212 255-3284; 917 279-3414; .

Visit Bion’s web page on our web site HERE.

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