A Scientific Meeting presented by Dr. Joseph Fernando, MDCM
Event Price: Event is free. CE fee is $10 for CPC/HP members and non HP/CPC students, $25 for nonmembers who are not students. HP and CPC students and candidates receive CEs for free.
Continued Education (CEU/CME): 1.5 credits
Attendance: This is a hybrid event - in person and online attendance is available
Reception 6 - 6:30 p.m. at the Center before the presentation.
Course Description:
This presentation explores the links between trauma, guilt, and the superego, and through this exploration attempts to make some additions to our understanding of individual dynamics, group regression, and group delusions. Dr. Fernando first describes his concept of the zero process as the form of mental functioning that is a product of the breakdown of the construction of the present moment during trauma. These unconstructed, bits and pieces memories exist as present experiences or future expectations.
From time to time, in relation to traumas that are either individual or developmental, inner objects which have the quality of immediate presences form — we usually call them introjects. The presenter suggests that these are best conceptualized as zero process structures in having many characteristics of the zero process, and that the obligatory connection between trauma and guilt, and the manner of transmission of culture and the superego, and of conspiracy theories and other group delusions, can be better and more deeply understood once the part that zero process structures play in all these phenomena is brought into focus.
Learning Objectives:
Will be able to describe the basic characteristics of the zero process, and identify them in their clinical work.
Will be able to describe how zero process characteristics manifest in such internal structures as introjects and the superego.
Will be able to describe how the zero process aspects of the superego explain its intergenerational transmission and its connection to shared group delusions.
Dr. Joseph Fernando, MDCM is a training and supervising analyst at the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis, and Director of the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis. He has been in private practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for over 30 years in Toronto. Dr. Fernando has published papers on guilt, narcissism, the character of the exception. His book, The Processes of Defense, won the 2010 Gradiva prize for a book on psychoanalytic theory. His second book, “A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Trauma: Post-Traumatic Mental Functioning, the Zero Process, and the Construction of Reality” was recently published by Routledge in the IPA ideas and applications series. He is presently at work on a book on the deeper links between trauma, guilt, and the the superego, which attempts to throw some light on issues of cultural transmission and group delusions. He has presented widely on his ideas in North America and abroad.