A Workshop presented by Peter Rudnytsky, Ph.D.
Continued Education (CEU/CME): 2.0 credits
Event Price: $40 members and non-CPC students, $75 non-members, Free for CPC students which includes CEs
In-personal and virtual options available. Masks are optional for in-person attendees.
Shakespeare’s tragedies fall into two clusters: one in which the hero dies in isolation, the other in which he dies clinging to a beloved woman. Rudnytsky deploys Balint’s concept of the basic fault to argue that these seemingly antithetical tendencies are complementary responses to a traumatic rupture in the primitive mother-child bond. Detailed analyses of Othello and Macbeth are presented to substantiate this hypothesis, along with two vignettes to illustrate the reciprocal enrichment of literary and clinical work in psychoanalysis.
Learning Objectives
1. To explain Balint’s concept of the basic fault and how it leads to “ocnophilic” (clinging) and “philobatic” (isolating) character structures
2. To use a contemporary understanding of Balint’s concept as a framework for analyzing two tragedies by Shakespeare
3. To model the way that literature and psychoanalysis are complementary forms of understanding “what makes people tick”
Peter L. Rudnytsky is Professor of English at the University of Florida and Head of the Department of Academic and Professional Affairs as well as Chair of the Committee on Confidentiality for APsaA. From 2001 to 2011, he was Editor of American Imago. In addition to serving on the editorial boards of numerous journals, including JAPA and The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, he is currently Editor of the History of Psychoanalysis series for Routledge and Co-Editor of the Psychoanalytic Horizons series for Bloomsbury. His most recent books are Formulated Experiences: Hidden Realities and Emergent Meanings from Shakespeare to Fromm (2019) and Mutual Analysis: Ferenczi, Severn, and the Origins of Trauma Theory (2022), which builds on his 2017 edition of Elizabeth Severn’s The Discovery of the Self, originally published in 1933.