A Scientific Meeting Presented by Mitchell Wilson

Event Price: This event is free. CE fee is $10. 

Continuing Education (CEU/CME): 1.5 credits

(CE information will be sent to all attendees the week after the event.)

Attendance: This is a hybrid event: in-person and online attendance is available. Online attendees will have a webinar experience, which will not include the ability to ask questions of the speaker. No attendance limit.

NOTE: Pre-registration is encouraged. Walk-in registration is available. No CEs available for walk-ins.

Reception 6 - 6:30 p.m. at the Center before the presentation.

Event Price: Fees include CEs. This is a free event for HP/CPC students and candidates, $60 for CPC/HP members and nonmember students, and $90 for nonmembers who are not students.

Continued Education (CEU/CME): 3.0 Ethics Credits

Attendance: Hybrid Event - In Person & Virtual event via Zoom Meeting

Program Description: Psychoanalysis has been linked to tragedy ever since Freud established the Oedipus Trilogy as the literary model for the vagaries of family life and human being. More recently, the tragic has been transformed into something more specific: the trauma narrative. The trauma narrative has come to so dominate the psychoanalytic body politic that we hardly notice it. This talk is about that dominance, and challenges it in a number of ways; in so doing, it rehabilitates the comic form through an exploration of Miranda July’s 2024 novel, All Fours, and a look at Donald Trump’s particular brand of comedy.

Learning Objectives:

1) Participants will be able to describe three features of the comic narrative form.

2) Participants will be able to explain how trauma, and the trauma narrative, has become the controlling perspective in contemporary psychoanalysis.

Mitchell Wilson is the former Editor-in-Chief of JAPA, and the author of The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice (Bloomsbury 2020). He has developed a theory of clinical process that centers the analyst’s wishes, intentions, values, and commitments at the heart of their ethical stance. He has recently published papers and essays on tele-therapy, the importance of the voice in clinical work, and the tension between the tragic and comic visions in the psychoanalytic perspective. He is a Training and Consulting Analyst at the SF Center for Psychoanalysis, and at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California.