Rosine Perelberg - Love and melancholia in the analysis of women

Event description

Birkbeck Institute for Social Research/Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

Speaker: Rosine Perelberg (BPS Professorial Fellow)

I will suggests that in the analysis of women by women a melancholic core may be encountered at the centre of the transference/countertransference situation that is an expression of the loss of the primary maternal object that has never been mourned. The attachment to the primary, lost object may be preserved in a melancholic, invisible way, and the longing that it is connected to might only reach representation in the après coup of the analytic process. The links between this primary love, melancholia and the unrepresentable in the analysis of women will be explored.

Reference: Rafael-Leff, J and  Perelberg, RJ (2008) Female Experience: Four Generations of Women Analysts on work with Women London : The Anna Freud Centre. First edition, 1998