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Click & Watch the 5-minute Professional Video of the ORI's 2010 Annual Conference on Psychoanalysis & Spirituality!

Click & Watch the 5-minute Professional Video of the ORI's 2009 Annual Conference on Eroticized Demonic Object!

EIGHTEENTH ANNUAL OBJECT RELATIONS INSTITUTE CONFERENCE (March 14th, 2009)

THE EROTICIZED DEMONIC OBJECT, THE DEMON LOVER:

Masud Khan, Date Rape, and Argentine Tango...

(Article by Susan Kavaler-Adler, Ph.D., ABPP, NCPsyA, D.Litt., Summer 2009 NAAP News)

This year’s Object Relations Institute conference was a very special and unique event, setting a precedent for analogies of art, biography, and profound psychoanalytic clinical work.

The entertainment during lunch was a professional Argentine Tango performance by Anton Gazenbeek and Nadege of the School of Traditional Argentine Tango. Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler, the Object Relations Institute Executive Director, who also performed an Argentine Tango with Anton, told the well-attended audience that it was only appropriate that Argentine Tango should be experienced during a psychoanalytic conference because the spontaneous tango moment is just like the spontaneous clinical moment. In Argentine Tango all known steps are allowed to be in the background of the preconscious mind by the follower, who must be open, without “anticipation,” to whatever the music inspires the leader to lead--just as the psychoanalytic clinician needs to “forget” all theories and concepts, keeping them stored in the preconscious, while the clinician is open to the fresh clinical moment and the fresh emergence of internal world experience coming from the patient, through “free-floating attention,” (Freud) “without memory and desire” (Bion), and allowing for the creation in the moment of the “true self” (D. W. Winnicott).

The Argentine Tango performances were enthusiastically received by an audience that had just eaten lunch at the Lafayette Grill restaurant where the entire conference was held, and where they had just shared in an extensive discussion of a poignant clinical case presented by Dr. Kavaler-Adler called “Tales of the Demon Lover: Seduction, Date Rape, and Aborted Surrender.” Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s clinical case illustrated in narrative and novelistic form the pivotal clinical moment of surrender to the inner traumatized child self after years of resistance to yielding the walls of resistance and self enclosing self attack. The paper further illustrated how this surrender to self integration through the expression of core yearnings for maternal connection, and the mourning of lack and loss of maternal nurturance, could be harshly challenged by the renewal of trauma in a dramatic date rape attack in adulthood. Through the patient’s own words and writing Dr. Kavaler-Adler brought the conference audience into her patient’s violated yearning to surrender at the level of heterosexual erotic desire .at the oedipal level, when surrender was perverted into a bloodied and bludgeoned submission by an exotic and royally robed demon lover rapist.

Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s paper detailed the subjective experience of her female patient as she overcame her primal trauma with her female analyst’s help so that a more adequate self and mother connection could be internalized and built upon within the patient’s internal world psyche. Dr. Kavaler-Adler described her patient’s reparative moments with her external mother as the patient became able to reach out to the core pain of her mother just as she had felt her analyst had reached out to her own starving and tortured infant and toddler self. Mourning, reparation, and internalization could then lead the way to readiness for an organic feminine surrender to sexual desire. However, the patient’s internal father was a narcissistic, sadistic, and psychopathic figure who drew the patient into an erotic arousal for a malignant man who brutally raped her, when her deepest desire was to willingly yield and surrender to her own ravishment. Fortunately, the organic clinical work that had preceded this compounding adult trauma allowed the patient to mourn the devastating loss of her feminine and vulnerable self to the dark vadir she met one night in a New York night club.

She was able to use the containment and holding of the therapeutic object relations environment to heal her rape trauma and to begin to put it into words for herself and her therapist, and then for the psychotherapeutic writing group she had entered in Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s practice, through her written words. Having her trauma then retriggered by some provocative words of a man in this group led to the patient’s courageous confrontation of this man who allowed for a reparative experience with a man following her earlier reparation with female figures. The success of the patient’s individual (only one time a week in this case) and group therapy experience allowed her to go on to a successful creative writing career and to love in intimate relations with men, demonstrating the evolution of a “love-creativity dialectic” of psychic health (Kavaler-Adler, The Creative Mystique, Routledge, 1996, Mourning, Spirituality and Psychic Change, Routledge, 2003).

The stage was set for the guest speaker of the day, Dr. Linda Hopkins, who initiated the biographical and historical dimensions of the conference through her power point exposition of the life and infamous evolutions of Masud Khan, Khan was the British theorist and psychoanalyst , who actually wrote as well as edited D. W. Winnicott’s papers, along with his own writings (The Privacy of the Self, Hidden Selves, “cumulative trauma,” “symbiotic omnipotence”), but who declined into alcoholic extremes of narcissism and psychopathy, becoming a morbid and self sabotaging figure in the annals of psychoanalytic history--ultimately being formally expelled from the British Psychoanalytic Society and its institute. Was Masud Khan a demon lover when he had full blown love affairs with his female analysands, thinking himself above all analytic rules and conventions due to his presumed genius as an “innovator”? What did his actual female patients-lovers have to say about this in personal interviews conducted by Dr. Hopkins? Or was Khan’s worst betrayal of his second wife, the famous Royal Ballet starlet, Svetlana Beriosova, when he totally abandoned her as soon as she fell from stardom? These are some of the questions that Dr. Hopkins attempts to pose and in part answer, leaving a lot to the audience and their opinions and thoughtfully shared comments. Wise and learned, with thirteen years of research and interviews behind her, all of which culminated in her Other Press biography on Masud Khan, entitled The False Self (2006, winner of both Gradiva and Goethe awards), Dr. Hopkins empathizes with the demon, noting his childhood torn between the grandiose dimensions of a filthy rich Pakistani father (in his 70s when Masud is born) and the shame ridden dimensions of having a seventeen year old courtesan mother who was an opium addict, leaving Khan to be “raised by the servants” and to be taunted by his siblings and peers for a deformed ear--then developing anorexia and mutism for long periods of time in his childhood and youth. Betrayed too by D. W. Winnicott, who implicitly promised Khan the role of literary executor for Winnicott’s written works, only to bequeath it all to his wife, Claire Winnicott, instead, if not actively, by neglectful default, Dr. Hopkins wonders how much the loss of the idealized Winnicott mentor, who became an abortively abandoning analyst for Khan, effected Khan’s clinging to his female patients by seductively and coercively turning them into lovers. She also wonders out loud to the audience about why Winnicott had so many suicides in his practice while Khan, by contrast, had none. She hypothesizes that Khan could invite aggression rather than pretend to be saintly, although he also believed in active retaliation, “giving it back” to his perhaps at first unsuspecting patients. What was the demonic in Winnicott and the reparative in Khan, and why did so many of Khan’s patients, even those he transformed into lovers, defend him?

Why did his longest patient love affair with “Eva” leave “Eva” to later report to Dr. Hopkins that she would have done it all over again just to benefit from Khan as a brilliant and inspiring analyst who birthed her creativity in the world? Dr. Hopkins notes, however, that the woman she gave the pseudonym “Eva” to could never have made it through the chaotic emotional terrain that erupted into emotionally violent tantrums by Khan, when she threatened to end her affair with him, without the steady assistance of Marion Milner, Eva’s new therapist. This was the same Marion Milner historically treated by the man who quaked like a duck as he rode down his homestead banister each morning, the supposedly lovable Winnicott. What a lot of history and clinical ambiguity is to be found here, and how much we can all learn by reading the full biography so carefully sewn together by Dr. Linda Hopkins!

The conference moderator, our Ferenczi scholar, Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, has introduced each speaker with an intense sense of erudite connection to the presenter and the presentation being introduced. After Dr. Linda Hopkin’s presentation, Dr. Lewis introduces Dr. Jeffrey Seinfeld, the Object Relations professor and author of a multitude of books, including The Bad Object, The Empty Core, and Interpreting and Holding. As the discussant, Dr. Jeffrey Seinfeld sharpens the analogies, contrasts and debates around the theme of the demon lover as “eroticized demonic object” as he picks up on themes and points made by both Dr. Hopkins and Dr. Kavaler-Adler in their presentations. Such consistent follow through on the themes of the conference led some of the attendees at the conference to comment that this conference was unusually well integrated around its appointed topic, unlike many other conferences. Besides integration, Dr. Seinfeld had such pithy remarks as that pertaining to the well-known travesty brought about by Masud Khan’s anti-Semitic attacks against a patient in his last book that brought his dismissal from the British Psychoanalytic. Leaning over the microphone and podium with his earnest and reflective aura, Jeff Seinfeld tells all at the conference: “Of course Khan would make anti-Semitic remarks since he was engaged in an overall attack upon psychoanalysis at the end of his life (while sitting alone in a room drinking in the dark) and the founder of psychoanalysis was obviously a Jew, Freud.”

As the conference ends, I offer thanks to all those who volunteered to help with its development and manifestation. Thanks to our administrator, Robyn, and to the conference committee: Audrey Ashendorf, Judy Segal, Dr. Inna Rozentsvit, and Heike Bloom.

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Click & Watch the 5-minute Professional Video of the ORI's 2010 Annual Conference on Psychoanalysis & Spirituality!

Click & Watch the 5-minute Professional Video of the ORI's 2009 Annual Conference on Eroticized Demonic Object!

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