Robert Grossmark, PhD

November 7-8, 2020

Robert Grossmark, PhD, ABPP teaches and supervises at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy; The National Institute for the Psychotherapies Program in Adult Psychoanalysis; The National Training Program in Psychoanalysis, The Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society and other psychoanalytic institutes and clinical psychology doctoral programs.

He is author of numerous psychoanalytic articles about clinical process and is author  of the: The Unobtrusiv

Relational Analyst: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Companioning and co-editor of The One & The Many: Relational Approaches to Group Psychotherapy and Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory all published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis

Seminar Title: The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst, Enactment and Narrative: The Shift from Epistemology to Ontology in Psychoanalysis 

Seminar Description: This course addresses the challenges met when working as a relational analyst with patients who cannot “work together” with an analyst, who are not sufficiently able to symbolize and mentalize. The course addresses both patients who suffer disturbances in the area of self-other definition, continuity and regulation of self, as well as patients who can appear to be more related and reflective, but harbor sequestered self states that are dominated by areas of unrepresented and unsymbolized trauma and neglect.

This seminar will present the position of the unobtrusive relational analyst who companions the patient in the emergence of illusion, fragmentation and non-relatedness and privileges the inner world of the patient that becomes the signature and defining sculptor of the clinical interaction and process.

Unrepresented and unformulated trauma and neglect announce themselves in the flow of mutual enactive engagement and rather than seek to move the patient into greater relatedness and insight, the analyst companions the patient in the emergence of yet to be known and thought narratives of trauma and fragmentation. The tilt is toward an ontological position that privileges being-with the patient rather than epistemological where meaning can be symbolized and interpreted.

There will be the didactic presentation of ideas and theory as well as case discussions.

Selected Readings:

Aron, L. & Atlas, G. (2018) Generative Enactments. In L. Aron & G. Atlas Dramatic Dialogues: Contemporary Clinical Practice, pp. 1-20

Aron, L. & Atlas, G. (2018) The prospective function. In L. Aron & G. Atlas Dramatic Dialogues: Contemporary Clinical Practice, pp. 21-41

Aron, L. and Bushra, A. (1998). Mutual Regression: Altered States in the Psychoanalytic Situation. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 46:389-412

Eshel O. (2013). Patient-analyst “withness”: On analytic “presencing”, passion, and compassion in states of breakdown, despair, and deadness.Psychoanal. Quarterly, 82:925-963.

Grossmark, R. (2012) The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst, Psychoanalytic Dialogues

Grossmark, R. (2012) The Flow of Enactive Engagement. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 48,3, 287-300

Grossmark, R. (2016) Psychoanalytic Companioning, Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 26: 698-712

Grossmark, R. (2018) Enactment: the Total Situation, In R. Grossmark, The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Companioning, Hove UK, New York: Routledge

Grossmark, R. (2018) The Work of the Narrative and Enactive Co-Narration. Chapter 7 in R. Grossmark, The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Companioning. Hove UK, New York: Routledge

Grossmark, R (2018) Everything happens at once: The emergence of symmetric enactment, In R. Grossmark, The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Companioning, Hove UK, New York: Routledge

Grossmark, R. (2017) Narrating the Unsayable: Enactment, Repair and Creative Multiplicity in Group Psychotherapy, International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, Vol. 67, Issue 1.

Grossmark, R. (2018) The Unobtrusive Relational Group Analyst and the Work of the Narrative, Psychoanalytic Inquiry

Reis, B. (2010).  Performative and enactive features of psychoanalytic witnessing: The transference as the scene of address. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90:. 1359-1372.