MPS Scientific Meeting – October 5, 2024 – Jorgelina Corbatta, Ph.D.

Some Ideas About How Language Works in an Analytic Session (Christopher Bollas) and in a Literary Text (Jorge Luis Borges)

Presenter: Jorgelina Corbatta, PhD

Emerita Professor/ ex-Director of Women Studies, Wayne State University

Academic Analyst and Associate Faculty, Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute

Discussant: Kristen Miller Beesley, PhD

Associate Faculty, Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute

(The paper will be available to read along during the event, both virtually and in person)

October 5, 2024

2:00 – 4:00 PM (Eastern time)

Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, 32841 Middlebelt Road, Farmington Hills

2 CME and CE Credit Hours ($30 per credit hour for non-MPS members)

HYBRID:    Join Meeting https://zoom.us/my/michiganpsychoanalysis

About the presenter and discussant:

Jorgelina Corbatta, PhD was born in Argentina and left the country after the arrival of the military rule in 1977. She is an Emerita Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture and ex-Director of Women Studies at Wayne State University, and Academic Associate Faculty at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. She has taught courses on Contemporary Narrative and Film, Latin America Literature, Women’s and Cultural Studies, Literature and Psychoanalysis at universities in Argentina, Colombia (where she lived for eight years), Chile, US, Sweden, France, Belgium, Austria, and Spain. She has published seven books in Spanish on literary/film criticism, sociology of literature, the narratives of the Dirty War, Feminism and Women Writers in Latin America, Juan José Saer, Jorge Luis Borges, and Manuel Puig. Her latest book -and first in English, is Psychoanalysis and Narrative. Literature, Film and Autobiography, Routledge, 2024. She has also published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and is currently looking for a publisher for her Spanish manuscript on “Auto-fiction/ Psychoanalysis and Intertextuality”.

In 2004 she received a Research/Teaching Fulbright Award, and in 2017 the IPA/IPSO International Psychoanalytic Award for her paper “The Quest for, and the Denial of, Intimacy in Luisa Valenzuela’s Dark Desires and the Others. Diaries of New York (IPA/Buenos Aires). In addition, she has received several awards for teaching, directing graduate students and conducting research at Wayne State University. She is currently writing her autobiography and continues writing essays on literature and film through a psychoanalytic lens.

Kristen Miller Beesley, PhD is an adult psychoanalyst and associate faculty at MPI. She is the Clinic Director of the Mel Bornstein Clinic, residency site director for the Beaumont/Corewell psychiatric residency at MBC, and adjunct faculty and clinical supervisor at the University of Detroit-Mercy. She is the chair of Continuing Education for APA’s Division 39 (Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology) and she has a chapter in the forthcoming edited volume, Parenting Psychoanalysed: Letters to a Parent, planned for release by Routledge in Spring 2025. Dr. Beesley is in private practice in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

Practice Gap/Need and Course Description:

The purpose of this paper is to explore some ideas about how language works in a literary text and is analyzed in literary criticism, in relationship with how language functions in an analytic session during the interaction between analyst and analysand. I will start by refreshing some basic notions about the relationship between those areas, with a couple of examples from Freud, to focus next on some very provoking thoughts from Christopher Bollas. In the last part of this paper, I will explore the interdisciplinary field created by those different approaches by exercising applied psychoanalysis to some texts of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

After attending this presentation, participants will be able to:

1.   Examine the analysand ‘s discourse-during an analytic session with an analyst in comparison to a literary text analyzed by a literary critic as a tool to decodify the presence of the unconscious in the analysand’s talking.

2.   Present an example of applied psychoanalysis: the critical analysis of a writer’s work -Jorge Luis Borges, as a form of extending and improving the analyst’s linguistic awareness.

*** No Partial Credit Given. You must arrive within 10 minutes of the start time and stay until 10 minutes of the end time to receive credit.

Continuing Medical Education

ACCME Accreditation Statement

This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of American Psychoanalytic Association and Michigan Psychoanalytic Society. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

AMA Credit Designation Statement

The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this live activity for a maximum of 2 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Disclosure Statement

The APsA CE Committee has reviewed the materials for accredited continuing education and has determined that this activity is not related to the product line of ineligible companies and therefore, the activity meets the exception outlined in Standard 3: ACCME’s identification, mitigation and disclosure of relevant financial relationship. This activity does not have any known commercial support.

Continuing Education for Social Work

The Michigan Psychoanalytic Society is an approved provider with the Michigan Social Work Continuing Education Collaborative. 

 Continuing Education for Psychologists

The Michigan Psychoanalytic Society is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. The Michigan Psychoanalytic Society maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

The views of the speakers do not necessarily represent the views of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Society.

Please call or email Monica Evans at 248-851-3380, mevans@mpi-mps.org for additional information