Free and open-to-all, this event will explore pain in the community from a psychoanalytic and psychosomatic point of view. Pain lies at the core of human experience even if one never encounters trauma. The life of everyone is punctuated by painful transitions and losses over time. Pain is enigmatic and often speaks without words; it inhabits at the intersection of body and mind, and self and other.
Can psychoanalysis create therapeutic spaces in community settings to address pain and its disruptions? How do frozen emotions and, especially, suppressed rage and hate link to pain? As Aeschylus states, pathei mathos, we learn through suffering. What can we learn from pain?
These and many other questions will be addressed by our guest from the Paris Psychoanalytic society and the Psychosomatic school of Paris, Panos Aloupis, as well as by Patricia Gherovici and Vaia Tsolas as they share their experiences addressing pain while working psychoanalytically in community settings.
Panos Aloupis, MD, PhD, is a psychiatrist, psychologist and psychoanalyst based in Paris, France. He is a full member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (SPP), correspondent member of the Hellenic Psychoanalytic Society (HPS), training and supervising member of the Paris Psychosomatic Institute (IPSO Pierre Marty), member of the editorial committee of the Revue française de Psychosomatique, and faculty member of Pulsion Institute. His last paper is titled “Enemies of unpleasure in A psychoanalytic exploration of the contemporary search for pleasure” (Routledge, 2023).
Patricia Gherovici, PhD, is a recipient of the 2020 Sigourney Award for her clinical and scholarly work with Latinx and gender variant communities. She is a trustee at Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics, New York. Her single-authored books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Gradiva Award and Boyer Prize), Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference . She co-authored with Chris Christian Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious (Gradiva Award and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize) She edited with Manya Steinkoler Lacan On Madness: Madness Yes You Can't ; Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (and most recently, Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans* (Gradiva Award).
Vaia Tsolas, PhD is co-founder, president and director of the Pulsion Institute, the International Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics, and a training and supervising psychoanalyst at Columbia University, Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She is in training at the Paris School of Psychosomatics (IPSO). She is co-founder of Rose Hill Psychological, a mental health center in New York City and the Bronx since 2006 and the project director of RHPS pain center. Dr. Tsolas is the author of many articles on the feminine, the body and otherness. She edited with Christine Anzieu-Premmereur “The Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today’s World” (Routledge, 2017) and “a Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Contemporary Search for Pleasure” (Routledge, 2023).