Autotheory is always Arriving

Stephen Hartman, Discussants Daniel Butler, Julie Leavitt and Leigh Lyndon

Sunday Apr 28, 9:30 AM – 11:30 AM
In-person event at PINC

Taking Muriel Dimen’s use of autotheory as its muse, my recent book (Hartman, 2023), Reading with Muriel Dimen/Writing with Muriel Dimen: Experiments in Theorizing a Field joined forty diverse authors from six continents in teams to rethink the framing and presentation of psychoanalytic reading and writing. My recent essay, The Stork, follows suit. Taking my trip to a maternity ward to visit my newborn niece as a “clinical case”, I visit the phenomenon of digitally surveilling neonates with the self-same devices that were designed to enforce the house-arrest of would-be felons whose noisy place in the cultural imaginary has rendered the neonate’s ankle a transgenerational “risk object” (Hartman, 2019) in the unconscious collective. I will speak briefly about autotheory, the next frontier in how we deploy disclosure in relational psychoanalysis, and then present The Stork followed by a conversation about new directions in psychoanalytic writing with the audience and two colleagues who took part in the “Dimen book”, Julie Leavitt and Daniel Butler, and Leigh Lyndon whose autotheoretical paper, The Ice is Melting, will be published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues this Spring.

CE Credits offered: 2

Course Objectives

After completing this course participants will be able to:

1. Attendees will be able to explain how autotheory establishes a collaborative frame in psychoanalytic writing and clinical practice.
2. Attendees will be able to distinguish between conservative and radical ways of constructing the frame vis a vis “the social” and “the psychic”.

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The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. PINC maintains responsibility for this program and its content. Visit db.pincsf.org/policies for policies and disclaimers.