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Please join us for the fourth and final Pre-EBOR Scientific Meeting leading up to the Fourteenth International Evolving British Object Relations Conference: Live from Seattle – The Music of Psychoanalysis, taking place October 17–19, 2025 in Seattle, Washington (USA).
Where do we locate the source of true-self feeling? Just as the concept of the unconscious has been taken to signify a kind of buried property of the individual psyche, so has the conception of “true-self” commonly been viewed as something domiciled in a private psychical interiority. But an alternative reading of Winnicott’s work suggests that authenticity and realness of self-experience depends not on the cultivation of an interior core, but on being able to live transitionally, in the movement between subjective and objective registers of perception. Extending this idea, we might describe true-self experience as essentially transitive – i.e., as a way of being in the world that rests on the ability to enter transiently into shared or collective states of being, thereby rejuvenating and expanding the sense of self. Music gives us a model for transitive modes of experience, and reveals, importantly, the psycho-sensory basis of shared experience.
Considered in light of the function of transitivity, certain contemporary maladies (e.g., dissociative, attentional, and sensory disorders) can be understood in terms of the inability to shift states adaptively, hence the inability to access domains of “shared music”, leaving the individual isolated and dislocated. This picture has important clinical implications: it shifts our conception of the clinical process to one where state-transitions take on greater significance, and the analyst’s ability to enter more fully into shared psycho-sensory states becomes a central element in the clinical situation.
Learning Objectives
- Participants will be introduced to the concept of “transitivity” to describe how we shift states and access shared domains of experience.
- Participants will reconsider Winnicott’s conception of “true self” experience as a shared and transitional rather than an individual phenomenon.
- Participants will consider the important role that transitive and dissociative processes play in the clinical encounter.
Participation in this scientific meeting provides 1.75 continuing education credit hours.
About the Presenter
Peter Goldberg, PhD, FIPA is a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, is co-chair of Faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and on the faculty of the Wright Institute in Berkeley. He is a co-author of Here I'm Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2023) and has written and presented widely on a range of clinical and theoretical topics including the evolution of clinical theory in psychoanalysis; psychosomatic dissociation, sensory experience in analysis and cultural life; transitional mechanisms and the function of the analytic frame; non-representational states; and the impact of social trauma on individual psychology.
About the Moderator
Rikki Ricard, MFA, MA, FIPA is an IPA certified training and supervising psychoanalyst working with adults, couples, and adolescents. She is a Washington State certified supervisor offering supervision toward licensure as well as consultation for clinicians interested in a British object relations perspective. Rikki regularly teaches for NPSI, SPSI, and COR. She is a Past President of COR and is presently serving as NPSI's President of the Board of Directors until September 2025. She is Co-Chair with Danny Gellersen of EBOR 2025: "Live from Seattle: The Music of Psychoanalysis."
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