Academy Introduction 

by Linda J. Young, Ph.D.

I’d like to welcome each of you to our Academy conference. My name is Dr. Linda Young and I am the Vice President of the Academy. We will be listening today to an extraordinary paper and an important contribution to the study of the psychoanalytic arts. In it, among other things, Dr. Kavanaugh will be referencing voices of ancient cultures, calling upon these voices to elucidate the complexity of what transpires in the psychoanalytic process. These dead poets signify knowing, remembering, seeing, narrating, and meaning making, and they personify the multi-faceted aspects of experiencing and communicating within the consultation room. Frequently, these multi-dimensional aspects of experiencing work together in concert, while at the same time they feel split off from one another. Who among us, for example, has not had the experience of Seeing something familiar while not quite Remembering from where it is derived—or of Being in something without having the words to Narrate it or of not being able to clearly Perceive  the contours of that which  another part of ourselves Feels so precisely. 

The poetry that emerges in psychoanalysis is a consequence of two individuals creating together this chorus of witness, seer, rememberer, listener, and thinker, all of these disparate and yet unified parts of ourselves whispering/shouting, /evoking, and provoking a new rendition of life. It is a poetry that is not metered in a standard way and its rhymes are not always recognizable. The rhymes are not necessarily sounds repeating themselves in familiar patterns, but comprise instead, repeated symbols, images, and meanings, making their appearance here and then here again. Moreover, sometimes the patterns are not recognized until one is fully in them... Living them. Breathing them, speaking them, and being spoken oneself by them.

In the paper today you will be hearing the  fascinating ways in which an individual came to be  known to another human being, and to himself—an individual who by many people’s standards would have been labeled as crazy and incomprehensible and UN-knowable. One question to consider as you listen might be: Is it possible to really come to know someone in a psychoanalytic setting without also NO-ing in a different way. That is, N-O ing or saying NO to several things. Consider the idea that the work you will hear described IS about all kinds of things and importantly, it is also NOT about all kinds of things. This is NOT, for instance, the work of a medical mental health care. While the chorus is multifaceted, and there is an appreciation of how a single voice of the participant comprises many voices—seer, rememberer, knower, maker, narrator only being a fraction of the ensemble, there are some voices and some props that are conspicuously absent. Here are, I imagine, some of the characters of an ensemble that do not exist. These perhaps, are part of what is said “no” to.

We have a rare opportunity today to hear how one clinician, Dr. Kavanaugh, heard an individual’s perspective and entered into it, allowed by the participant and allowed by himself, to look and feel around in this world and to create a reality with this person in which it was safe enough to speak that which had been previously unutterable.

The Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts is committed to trying to keep alive opportunities for the kind of work you will be hearing about today. As an organization, it speaks out against the ever-expanding labyrinth of rules and regulations which strive to standardize and bureaucratize nearly every aspect of the clinical hour. With standards of care, evidence based treatment, and outcome based manuals prescribing how one should work with particular diagnostic groups, these proliferating guidelines attempt to make standard and uniform the very process, which paradoxically, is supposed to celebrate the uniqueness, singularity, and creativity of the individual. The Academy strives to create and to maintain a professional reality where poetry is allowed to exist—where dialogue between two people can exist in part, because the voices that would otherwise drown them out are conspicuously absent. The Academy strives to keep a space open and alive that has enough essential quiet in it to allow the murmurings of the soul to emerge and for mystery and magic to reveal themselves in the process.

We are grateful to Dr. Kavanaugh for his willingness to share himself and his work with us today and to offer this work as a contribution to the Academy’s endeavors.

Dr. Kavanaugh is a former president of the International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education, former director of clinical Training in psychology at the University of Detroit , and an adjunct faculty member at the Center for humanistic studies. He is a former president of the MSPP and the current past president of the Academy. He has presented and published on psychoanalytic epistemology, theory, practice, ethics and education. During the past 35 years, he has worked with people in a variety of settings, including residential TX facilities, day hospital programs, and clinics. He is currently in the private practice of psychoanalysis in Farmington Hills where he is also available for consultation, supervision, and study groups. The paper we will be hearing today will be published later this year as a featured article in a special edition of The Psychoanalytic Review entitled “The Poetics of the Psychoanalytic space.” 

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Kavanaugh.