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Chair: Cláudio Eizirik
Panellists: Michael J. Diamond, Stefano Bolognini, Fred Busch
Reporter: Sylvia Zwettler-Otte
In his introduction Dr Cláudio Eizirik, Training Analyst of the Porto Alegre Psychoanalytic Society and IPA President 2005–2009, pointed at Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel's paper from 1988: she described the femininity of the analyst's work and the balanced mixture of feminine and masculine traits, resulting from our own maternal and paternal identifications. She considered the analytic setting as a representation of the mother's lap, but also as the law that represents the father.
The first presenter, Dr Michael J. Diamond, Full Member of the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, started his paper “The Elusiveness of the Feminine” with a joke: according to a “less androcentric version,” God created Eve first but had to suggest to her that she let Adam believe that he was first, because he needed it. This “cognizance of the ‘other’ might more naturally reflect” our thoughts about the “feminine.” Diamond considered the psychoanalytic and cultural changes during the last decades and mentioned Freud's limited view due to his perspective of masculine subjectivity, but he also stressed the fact that Freud nevertheless helped us see that psychosexuality rests upon unconscious fantasies.
Diamond was also aware of the unavoidable limitations and influences here and now in this panel, the risks of conflating the female and the maternal, the problem of disentangling femininity and masculinity from biological sex, etc.: “we are speculating on the topic – a panel of four heterosexual, aging, white male analysts from different regions of the Westernized world, each shaped by our idiosyncratic psychodynamics and psychocultural environments.”
Diamond referred to the facets of contemporary analytic thinking (Balsam 2001, 2019; Fiorini 2007, 2017; Irigaray 1993; Schiller 2018), which tends not to focus in the constructed feminine on the experience of lack