Saturday, November 16, 2024, NAPsaC will mount its next Tri-Regional Panel: “Chaos Unleashed: Global Turmoil in the Consulting Room.” The increasing influence of the external world—global terrorism, climate change, politics and racism—are now seeping into the consulting room, evoking some of the deepest anxieties within the internal worlds of our patients and ourselves, and inevitably impacting modern analytic work. The sense of safety that the analytic room and sessions have often offered, even in fantasy, is increasingly challenged.

After the panelists have shared their material, the panelists will then discuss their ideas amongst themselves followed by audience participation.

Claudio Laks Eizirik will focus his presentation on the chaos provoked by the extensive floods that happened in his State in Brazil, and “how this dramatic situation affected our analytic work, and the minds of patients, analysts and the analytic fields we establish with each of them.”

Jeanne Wolf Bernstein will share her group work with traumatized soldiers from the Ukrainian War, and briefly revisit Freud’s perhaps premature abandonment of his theory of traumatic neurosis.

Drew Tillotson will reflect on the violence of a suicide that occurred below his office, on the main floor to his office building, and the impact on him as analyst as well as on the incoming patient. The growing escalation of the generalized fear of a shooter will be included.

Maureen Murphy will serve as interlocuter before each panelist speaks to such intrusions into their work.

Claudio Laks Eizirik is a Training and Supervising Analyst, Porto Alegre Psychoanalytic Society Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul Former IPA President Recipient of the Sigourney Award, 2011.

Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst living and working in Vienna, Austria. She is a member and training analyst at The Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse, WAP where she is also a member and vice-president of the Board. She is the head of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Vienna Sigmund Freud Museum, where she had also been the Fulbright Freud Visiting Scholar in Psychoanalysis in 2008. Prior to moving to Vienna, Jeanne Wolff Bernstein was the past president and supervising and personal analyst at PINC (Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California). She is still on the faculty at PINC and at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in New York and teaches at The Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse (WAP). She has published numerous articles on the interfaces between psychoanalysis, the visual arts and film. Her most recent publications include the chapter on Jacques Lacan in The Textbook of Psychoanalysis (2012/2024), Living between two languages: A Bi-focal Perspective, in Immigration in Psychoanalysis, (2016) Routledge, Dora, the unending and unraveling story, in Dora, Hysteria & Gender: Reconsidering Freud’s Case Study, Leuven University Press, October 2018 and Unexpected antecedents  to the concept of the death drive: a return to the beginnings, in Contemporary Perspectives on the Freudian Death Drive, in Theory, Clinical Practice and Culture. Edited Routledge, 2019, 55-68. Her book, The Lure of the Gaze and the Past, Alexander Verlag is forthcoming. She is also the co-editor with Daniela Finzi of Thoughts for the Time on Groups and Masses, A Sigmund Freud Museum Symposium (2024), Leuven University Press and she is the co-editor with Helga Klug and Daniella Kammerer of Neu Denken und Handeln, Der Einfluss gesellschaftlicher Umbrüche auf die Psychoanalyse (2024) Psychosozial Verlag.

Drew Tillotson PsyD, FIPA, BCPsa is a board-certified psychoanalyst in private practice in San Francisco, California. He is a graduate, Personal and Supervising Analyst, Faculty member and Past President of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), and Past Vice-President of the North American Psychoanalytic Confederation (NAPsaC). Recent publications include: co-editor and chapter author for Routledge’s 2022 Gradiva Award winning “Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond” (2021); chapter author for “Braving the Erotic Field in the Treatment of Adolescents and Children,” Routledge (2022) edited by Mary T. Brady, PhD. and contributions to Jonathan Sklar’s new book “The Soft Power of Culture: Art, Transitional Space, Death and Play,” Karnac Publishing, April 2024.

Maureen Murphy, MSN; PhD. is a graduate, Personal and Supervising Analyst, Faculty member and founding President of PINC. She is the Co-Coordinator of PINC’s Distance Learning Program. She teaches courses on contemporary psychosomatic concepts particularly the impact of burgeoning biotechnology on core psychoanalytic concepts and on adult development and aging. With Terrence Mc Bride, she is co-editor of Trauma and the Destructive-Transformative Struggle: Clinical Perspectives. She maintains a private practice in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in San Francisco.