A Shimmering Landscape: The Actual and the Imaginative in Psychic Life

Speaker: Dodi Goldman, PhD

2 CE Hours available for: NY Practitioners – LCSWs, LMSWs, LPs, LMFTs, LMHCs, LCATs, PHDs, PSYDs, Connecticut Practitioners – LCSW

WCSPP invites you to an evening with Dodi Goldman, PhD, of the William Alanson White Institute. Through an interactive consideration of a series of projected images, we will explore how the idiosyncratic interplay between the actual and the imaginative shapes one’s sense of reality and is inherent to the making of personal meaning.

In this talk, we will consider a series of projected images to consider how the idiosyncratic interplay between the actual and imaginative is forged from within our earliest relationships.

The poet Elizabeth Bishop’s grandmother had a glass eye. The glass eye often looked heaven-ward, or off at an angle, while the real eye looked directly at you. Bishop’s grandmother’s bifurcated gaze is a useful metaphor for the inherent strain involved in coming to terms with reality, distinct from what psychoanalysis commonly describes as conflict between reality and pleasure. We neither simply “see” an objective reality nor invent a subjective one.

Dodi Goldman, PhD, is a training and supervising analyst and on faculty at The William Alanson White Institute. He authored “In Search of the Real: the origins and originality of D.W. Winnicott” and is the former book review editor of the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis. His latest book, “A Beholder’s Share: Essays on Winnicott and the Psychoanalytic Imagination” won the 2017 Gravida Award for Best Psychoanalytic Book.

Janet Rivkin Zuckerman, PhD, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, is faculty and past director of WCSPP and clinical consultant at NYU Postdoc. Dr. Zuckerman leads study and supervision groups on contemporary interpersonal/relational theory and publishes in the area of female agency and self-assertion.