The June 2023 clinical days will pick up the threads of thinking introduced in Pulsion’s inaugural symposium in Fall 2022 on The Erasure of the Feminine. In June, we will introduce three projects of investigation and research from an ethno-analytic perspective at Rose Hill Psychological Services, the affiliate clinic of Pulsion, in New York City. These projects – a seminar on the erasure of the feminine in contemporary times, a working group on the pandemic, and a clinical group study of disaffection all develop techniques for working on psychoanalytic thought.

While Freud originally identified the repudiation of the feminine and the interminability of psychoanalytic treatment nearly a century ago, our work investigates these issues as they present today. During the clinical days, we will examine the problematic of how to use terminology and concepts across traditions in psychoanalysis and amongst clinicians at different levels of their practice. More specifically, questions such as the following will be considered: is anything new emerging today in our patients’ speech and symptoms living in a world that is hostile to thinking, denies lack and pushes relentlessly for an ideal of complete happiness? Do we observe a different kind of transference as the links between the social and intrapsychic have been altered in the larger landscape of a post pandemic era of decreased Eros?

And if so, is there a need for a ‘transitional psychoanalysis’ in the clinic that would aim to re-libidinalize the patient, augmenting the analytic work with a transitional space of creativity, preconscious activity, the fabric of our dreams?

Drawing from inter-generational work on these issues, we will distinguish the aims of psychoanalytic technique responding to a number of contemporary problematics, including but not limited to virtuality, identity politics, and cultural globalization.