Marilyn Charles, PhD
The Forgotten Feminine
February 13-14, 2027
1132 S. Wabash Ave., Suite 502, Chicago
& ZOOM
Marilyn Charles is a psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Austen Riggs Center, Co-Chair of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS), and Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council. Affiliations include the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, Universidad de Monterrey, Harvard Medical School, and the Association for Psychosocial Studies. Marilyn is also a poet, whose work has been collected under the title Orphans of the Real: Reflections on Love and Loss (Mission Point Press), and an artist, with work featured at the George Mason University Gallery and in DellaPiettra’s Perspectives in Creativity, V. II. Marilyn is committed to mentoring future generations of psychoanalytic scholars, clinicians, and researchers. Her research interests include creativity, metacognition, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and the impact of devaluation on women and other marginalized groups. She has published more than 150 articles and book chapters and six books, including Patterns: Building Blocks of Experience; Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan; Psychoanalysis and Literature: The Stories We Live; and, most recently, Echoes of Trauma: Meaning and Identity in Psychoanalysis. She has also published five edited volumes, including: Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis; Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering (with Michael O’Loughlin); and Women and Psychosis and Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness (with Marie Brown). (214).
Seminar Title: The Forgotten Feminine.
Seminar description: In this era in which we are invited to become even further lost from our embodied experience, we will investigate some forgotten or undervalued threads in psychoanalysis as they exist in women’s writings. As AI comes forward to meet us in our madness, as though mind could replace body, psychoanalysis teaches us that growth occurs when mind meets body, when embodied experience can be translated into words that can be shared with others, received, exchanged, and developed.
Participants are expected to attend all seminars in full, and to participate actively. In line with the topic, this is meant to be an interactive process through which we can all learn together. Each participant brings their own lens to the conversation, which adds to and enriches the learning of all. Towards that end, please come to each session with at least one question or talking point from each of the assigned readings, so that we can fine-tune our understanding together.
Reading:
Seminar 1 (Saturday morning):
What Does a Woman Want?
We will begin our journey with Karen Horney, who was there at the very beginning of psychoanalysis, when Freud was asking the question: “What does a woman want?” Remarkably, there was a woman sitting at the table who could have answered that question, or at least helped to develop ideas around it. But Karen Horney needed to come to the United States to more fully develop her response to that question, resulting in her seminal paper:
Horney, K. (1926). The flight from womanhood: The masculinity-complex in women, as viewed by men and women. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 7:324-339.
We will then read a more recent paper I published on the subject:
Charles, M. (2011). What does a woman want? Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 16(4):337-353.
Narcissism
We will then turn to another early analyst, Joan Riviere, who looks at the relationship between the negative therapeutic reaction and narcissism.
Riviere, J. (1936). A contribution to the negative therapeutic reaction. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 17:304-320.
Seminar 2 (Saturday afternoon): Symbolization and the Underpinnings of Embodied Meanings
For another look at this level of under-development, we have a paper from Joyce McDougall:
McDougall, J. (1978). Primitive communication and the use of countertransference: Reflections on early psychic trauma and its transference. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 14:173-209.
We will then look at the symbolization process itself, through parts of a paper from Marian Milner
Milner, M. (1952). Aspects of symbolism in comprehension of the not-self. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 33:181-184; 193-194.
And a more recent paper on the subject:
Charles, M. (2024). Somatization and symbolization. American Journal of Psychoanalysis. 84:57-78. doi: 10.1057/s11231-024-09441-1.
We will then dive deeper into aspects of embodied experience that underlie meaning-making, looking at Julia Kristeva’s idea of the chora, the rhythmic structures underlying meaning.
Kristeva, J. (1986). Revolution in poetic language. In: T. Moi (Ed.). The Kristeva Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 89-117.
Seminar 3 (Sunday morning):
Continuation of Underpinnings of Embodied Meanings
We will shift from Kristeva’s idea regarding the rhythmic underpinnings of embodied meanings to look at Piera Aulagnier’s depiction of the primal layer of experience, which she links to the affective charge of the infant’s first encounters with other beings.
Aulagnier, P. (2001). Birth of a body, origin of a history. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 96:1371-1401.
A Clinical Voice
Finally, we will turn to Nina Coltart, who is a fine exemplar of a humanistic perspective:
Coltart, N. (1992). Slouching toward Bethlehem . . . Or thinking the unthinkable in psychoanalysis. In: Slouching Towards Bethlehem . . . New York & London: The Guilford Press (pp. 1-14).
Coltart, N. (1991). The silent patient. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1(4):439-453.
Coltart, N. (1996). The baby and the bathwater. In: The Baby and the Bathwater. Madison, CT: International Universities Press (pp. 155-166).
For those interested in supplemental readings, I recommend Aulagnier’s descriptions of the primal process in her book The Violence of Interpretation.