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Chair: Stefano Bolognini
Panellists: Nancy Goodman, Douglas Chavis, Paula Ellman
Discussant: Abel Fainstein
Reporter: Carolyn Curcio
Nancy Goodman began her presentation, “Civilization and Its Discontents: The Anti-Trauma Function of Free Association When We Symbolize the Death Instinct Outside and Inside,” by alluding to the image of fires in the overall theme of the Congress. She associated them with the “wildly burning Death Instinct” of the past three-and-a-half years as expressed through the pandemic, racism, misogyny, and the invasion of Ukraine. Goodman suggested that this seemingly uncontainable barrage of events awakened terrifying unconscious fantasies and that these traumas illuminated former traumas though a Nachtraglichkeit process.
Using a series of case examples, Goodman stressed that both she and her patients have felt frightened and disoriented. She described ways in which the new analytic frame brought changes to her work with patients while stressing that fantasies continued to flourish during their sessions nevertheless. In illuminating her work with Dr D, she mentioned the fantasy of the deadly virus being situated on the computer screen. An alternative fantasy was the virus as a common enemy.
In an attempt to make sense of the upheaval, Goodman re-read Freud’s essay, “Civilization and Its Discontents.” She reiterated his theories about civilizations arising as a result of anxieties about the Death Instinct and evolving as a result of struggles between Eros and Death. In response to Freud’s hypothesis that the Death Instinct may be tamed by the formation of the superego and the subsequent presence of guilt, Goodman asked us, “What if there is no guilt?” She alluded to “psychotic rhetoric denying reality” that, at times, replaced thinking as well a fear that life forces could become overwhelmed.
Goodman described the associative process in psychoanalysis as “giving and receiving darkness and light,” and, as such, giving sessions “a flow of life.” She no