A Scientific Meeting Presented by Henry Markman, MD

Event Price: This event is free. CE fee is $10 for members and $20 for non-members. 

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.

Program Description: Similarities between creative processes in painting and psychoanalysis come from the same source within us. I will describe my experience in both activities, recognizing a shared state of mind that is open, calm, and able to inhabit and intensify strong emotion in the act of painting and within the analytic interaction. I will describe creative expression as arising from internal, often unconscious work within oneself that is known only in the act of doing, in its expression. I will draw on the writings and work of Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell. Motherwell’s idea of the ‘aesthetic function’—an incubating process that condenses scattered feelings, making feelings live and be known—accounts for the analyst’s same function of incubation-condensation within an intersubjective matrix. ‘Emotional truth ’-Motherwell’s term-is then available for expression in a variety of modes by analyst and patient. I will describe in painting and analytic work a growing trust in disciplined spontaneity, in which a ripening sense of an emotional form is allowed expression before being entirely known. A clinical example illustrates these ideas.

Learning Objectives:

1) Participants will hone a sensitivity to internal processes that allow for greater freedom in their clinical work

2) Participants will learn how to be more spontaneous in their clinical work

Henry Markman, MD, is a Supervising and Training Analyst and Faculty Member at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and a faculty member at The Wilhelm Reich Center for the Study of Embodiment. His recent book (2022), Creative Engagement in Psychoanalytic Practice, was published by Routledge. His published work includes play in adolescent analysis, embodied attunement, aesthetic experience, musical accompaniment in psychoanalysis, Bion’s late work, the analyst’s ethical commitments, and the relevance of Ferenczi’s mutual analysis. His most recent papers appear in JAPA, entitled The Analytic True Self for Another, in a special issue of Contemporary Psychoanalysis on Embodiment, entitled The Analyst’s Embodied Presence: Working Within an Aesthetic Matrix. He is in private practice in Berkeley, California, where he also consults and leads study groups.