STEPMOTHERS AND NANNIES: THE IGNORED PLAYERS IN
PSYCHOANALYSISFundamental features of a psychoanalytic perspective
have included the importance of understanding the specificity of the
relationships between the child and his or her earliest caregivers as
well as understanding the experience of the actual caregivers within
the family’s dynamics. Stepmothers and nannies, however, despite
their frequent and impactful presence in the composition of
contemporary families, have remained almost invisible within our
professional literature.
Dr. Susan Scheftel will open this seminar by considering the question:
“Why aren’t we curious about nannies?” Although nannies
(caregivers who care individually for children at home) have had a
ubiquitous presence among professional working parents for decades and
are frequently involved in the lives of our patients or their
children, the potential psychological significance of this
relationship has rarely been considered among analysts and clinicians.
Dr. Scheftel will focus on the ways the nanny’s role necessarily
risks ambivalence in child and parent alike due to its literal
positioning between them. The nanny is there when the parent is not.
The fact that the nanny is an actual reality based placeholder for
parents in their absence may explain our patients’ tendency to need
to keep both historic and present nanny relationships out of
awareness. Just by showing up for the job, a nanny walks into a web of
longing, anger, guilt, separation anxiety and loss on both sides of
the parent/child relationship, not to mention what this complex role
evokes for her.
Dr. Sally Donaldson, a stepmother and a psychoanalyst, will then take
up the complicated yet largely unformulated experience of stepmothers.
Stepmothers live in a liminal space between the real and the imagined.
On one hand they are like regular mothers who shop for groceries and
pick up children after school. On the other hand they are the dreaded
other woman, the home wrecker, the gold digger, the cruel, murderously
jealous witch. Unlike the powerful evil stepmother in fairytales,
however, modern stepmothers often feel like outsiders in their own
homes: depressed, overburdened, and misunderstood by their families
and friends. This seminar will explore the complex sources of their
unhappiness and what we, as analysts, need to understand to support
the psychic survival of a stepmother so she can reap the benefits of
this problematic, yet common and potentially rich, family structure.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. To understand the nanny’s uniquely difficult role, which
necessarily risks ambivalence due to its positioning between parent
and child.
2. To pose the question as to whether there may such a thing as a
“nanny transference” which may constitute unconscious
representations of individuals whose actual and internal presence has
been as crucial as it was invisible.
3. To examine how fairytales and the trop of the evil stepmother
promotes the problematic split between the good biological mother and
the bad, cruel stepmother (with an eye to understanding our own blind
spots).
4. To develop a fuller understanding of the unique points of tension
and conflicting loyalties endemic to step family life.
SUSAN SCHEFTEL PH.D. is a graduate and on the faculty of the Columbia
Psychoanalytic Center. She teaches in the Psychoanalytic Training
Program, the Child and Adult Psychotherapy Training Program and the
Columbia Parent Infant Program and supervises in the Clinical
Psychology Program at City College and in the Columbia Adult
Psychotherapy Program. She has published and presented on topics
pertaining to childhood
SALLY DONALDSON, PH.D. is a graduate of NYU’s Postdoctoral Program
in Psychoanalysis and a psychoanalyst in private practice in Greenwich
Village. She has taught The Psychology of Marriage to NYU
undergraduates and recently completed a MFA in Creative Nonfiction.
She is currently writing a memoir about how two people, each with
children and complex pasts, come to love each other after fifty.
CONTINUING EDUCATION
This event is approved for 4.0 CE contact hours for PSYCHOLOGISTS,
SOCIAL WORKERS, and LICENSED PSYCHOANALYSTS:
The National Institute for the Psychotherapies is approved by the
American Psychological Association to offer continuing education
credits for psychologists. The National Institute for the
Psychotherapies maintains responsibility for this program and its
content.
The National Institute for the Psychotherapies is recognized by the
New York State Education Department's State Board for Social Work as
an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social
workers #SW-0018.
The National Institute for the Psychotherapies is recognized by the
New York State Education Department's State Board for Mental Health
Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for
licensed psychoanalysts #Psyan-0004.
Personalized CE certificates will be distributed at the end of this
event. _Due to New York State requirements, persons arriving more
than 15 minutes late or leaving more than 15 minutes early will not
receive a CE certificate._
FEES
EARLY REGISTRATION
$100 general public
$85 NIPPA members
$65 candidates & students
GENERAL REGISTRATION
$125 general public
$110 NIPPA members
$90 candidates & students
REFUNDS, & CANCELLATION POLICY
Cancellation requests made more than a week prior to the event will be
given a full refund of registration fees. Refunds will not be granted
for cancellation requests made within a week of the event or for
no-shows on the day of the event.
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02/02/2020 Last update