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About the Presenter
Dr. Bruce Reis, Ph.D., FIPA, BCPsa
Dr. Bruce Reis, Ph.D., FIPA, BCPsa, is a Training and Supervising Analyst and Faculty Member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, New York; an Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor in the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; and a member of the Boston Change Process Study Group. He is Regional North American Editor for ‘The International Journal of Psychoanalysis’ and has previously served on the editorial boards of ‘The Psychoanalytic Quarterly’, and ‘Psychoanalytic Dialogues’. He is the author of ‘Creative Repetition and Intersubjectivity’ (2020) Routledge Press.
In this presentation, Dr. Reis explicates how, for Freud, being human involves consigning animality to “not-me” states in favor of adult non-neurotic functioning. Disidentification with the animal produces
wide-ranging effects beyond the discontent of having to give up instinctual aims in favor of living in a civilized society. What hangs in the balance
for Freud is what he will claim to be unique to man — what separates him from the animal world — which Reis will illustrate he precariously rests on an identificatory process. Thus, man is the animal that must not identify as such. Supported by higher level defenses meant to distance the individual in part or in whole from his own animality, Freud relies on a bricolage of a narrative he creates out of strands of evolutionary theory and anthropology to craft what, in effect, becomes a mytho-scientific theory of man’s difference to the animals.
On the basis of this narrative, Freud gives an account of how humans came to differ from other animals to establish culture, by which he means “everything in which human life has risen above its animalistic conditions and in which it is distinguished from the life of animals". However, this elaborate and fanciful narrative functions as a McGuffin, as it is not evolution—cultural or biological—that for Freud differentiates man from animal, but the psychological operation of identification supported by a host of defenses, the aim of which is Oedipal resolution.
Learning Objectives
- Participants will be able to demonstrate Freud’s ambivalence around the concept of animality in humans.
- Participants will be able to describe the role Freud proposed for Oedipality as concerns animality.
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Participants will be able to describe how Freud’s conception of the id represented his solution for the problem of human animality.
About the Moderator
Drew Tillotson, PsyD, FIPA, BCPsa
is a board-certified psychoanalyst in private practice in San Francisco, California. He is a Training 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). He has published on aging, masculinity, book reviews for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and Fort Da, and is co-editor and chapter author for Routledge’s “Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond” (2021), which was awarded a 2022 Gradiva Award for Best Edited Book. Most recently he was a chapter author for Routledge’s “Braving the Erotic Field in the Treatment of Adolescents and Children,” (2022) edited by Mary T. Brady, PhD.
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