2024-25 Seminar Series

Title: Dissociation Then and Now: Freud’s Folly
Elizabeth Howell, PhD & Sheldon Itzkowitz, PhD
Date: Friday 9.27.24
Times: 4:00-6:00 PM Eastern Time
CE: 2
Location: Zoom

Cost: $75 and candidates $50 (Proof of Institute affiliation required.)

ABSTRACT

We have been fortunate to have had and continue to have the opportunity to work in an area that we find very important and meaningful: working with trauma-related dissociation and the dissociative disorders. During our tenure as psychoanalysts, trauma therapists, teachers, consultants, and writers we have encountered enthusiastic, thoughtful candidates and colleagues who not uncommonly find themselves perplexed about clinical, theoretical, and diagnostic issues pertaining to those suffering from unconscionable early childhood trauma.
One reason for this dilemma has been the paucity if not complete lack of graduate and post-graduate education about this area of human experience, which is striking because abuse and trauma have such a devastating impact on the mind of the developing child. Also striking has been society’s inability and/or unwillingness to acknowledge that humankind has the capacity to inflict such cruelty on the most helpless amongst us.
We will address some of the questions that have come up over the years with some frequency (see below). We also plan to leave sufficient time to address questions we may have overlooked.

1. Why was Freud’s abandonment of his Seduction Theory so important? How did this result in confusion about dissociation?
2. How do we define trauma and what is the link between trauma and dissociation?
3. How do we understand developmental trauma?
4. What is the difference between repression and dissociation?
5. Dissociation and splitting; same or different?
6. Similarities and differences between DID v. BPD??
7. What are self-states; are they the same as alter personalities?
8. Is Depersonalization/Derealization a symptom or a Disorder
9. Dissociation v. unformulated experience; twins or cousins?