Interactive Lecture on The Subjective Experience of Time: Time as Persecutory, Frozen, or Holding: An Object Relations Perspective for Clinicians

When: Sunday, 4/23/17 (1:00 – 4:00 pm). 
Where: In-Person location: 115 East 9th street, 12P, NYC, 10003   Virtual participation will be available via gotomeeting platform (with minimal technical requirements)

Everyone is welcome! No fee, but RSVP is required! 
For more information about this open house and the virtual participation – please contact ORI’s administrator at 646-522-1056 or by email to admin@orinyc.org .

What to expect during this Open House?

Interactive Lecture on The Subjective Experience of Time: Time as Persecutory, Frozen, or Holding:  An Object Relations Perspective for Clinicians by Susan Kavaler-Adler, PhD, ABPP, D.Litt., NCPsyA, ORI’s Executive Director

We can experience all our primal affect states in relation to TIME. Clocks may register an objective aspect of time, but internally, we are all living with the subjectivity of time. During the analytic session, time manifests for our patients as a transference object, along with other objects, such as their parents, siblings, etc. Some patients want to suspend the intrusion of objective time, and luxuriate in its holding qualities on the couch, allowing the unconscious to emerge. They may like the lights dim and the blinds drawn. Some are terrified of time as the intrusive persecutor, with its impossible demands, and its unrelenting mortality. Those are the ones with the big watches and the ocular search for the clocks in your consulting room. And then there are those who block their thoughts and feelings, and feel like time is a frozen ice breast that refuses to melt. Internal objects, which are persecutory, holding, or frozen, are projected into our fantasy images of the persona of time. What happens when time as an internal object becomes time as a transitional object?  Can we play with time?  Can time, when holding, suspend our subordination to our mortality? 

Befriending time, rather than to be persecuted by it, can evolve into the “eternal now” moment that challenges the linear time construction of our mortality.  It can become a clinical moment or an Argentine tango moment.  This is Winnicott’s “creativity of everyday life,” and we can only get there through Klein’s depressive position journey, through the healthy mourning of life’s “necessary losses.” 

Come join us to play with all these questions, cultivating the Winnicottian capacity to play and the Bionian moment “without memory or desire.” Dip into the internal world with us, and then travel to the transitional world through the open house experience of an in the moment clinical role-play, in which one of you will get inside the skin of one of your patients, will experience the patient’s being from the inside/out, and will dialogue with Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler, who will play the part of the analyst in the role-play.        

Reference to read before or after the Open House: 

Kavaler-Adler, S. (2014). Dialectics of mortality and immortality: Time as an internal and transitional object experience and time as a persecutory vs. a holding object. Issues in Psychoanalytic Psychology, 35(1), 37-61. (can be found at

http://www.mindconsiliums.org/publications/2013/12/2013-12-Kavaler-Adler-dialectics-of-mortality-and-immortality-time.pdf