TICP Scientific Meetings

Florence Loh How do an analyst’s personal history and cultural inheritance shape the capacity to love? This presentation brings relational psychoanalysis into dialogue with Confucian philosophy to explore analytic love as a cultivated ethical practice. It considers how the analyst’s work of self-cultivation can support a caring presence through conflict and uncertainty. Florence Loh draws on a long-term treatment conducted in Chinese, the mother tongue she shares with her patient. Familiar expressions and humour help the patient recognize affection and experience a sense of belonging. The treatment illustrates 传承 (chuán chéng), the receiving and carrying forward of cultural wisdom within the analytic relationship. The Confucian idea of 推恩 (tuī ēn), extending benevolence to others, helps explain how care experienced in analysis may shape how the patient cares for others. The clinical discussion also examines how the analyst’s cultural values shape countertransference and the work of sustaining care. The paper proposes that this reflective work helps create a symbolic home where traumatic dislocation becomes more bearable and new forms of relationship become possible. Alongside the working through of trauma, analysis can become a setting in which cultural wisdom is sustained across generations.

TICP Workshops

In Person - Waitlist - email info@ticp.ca How does trauma shape the way we see ourselves—and what happens when the shame that follows becomes turned inward? In this full-day program, Peter Shabad, PhD, will explore the powerful role of self-shaming in the aftermath of trauma and its impact on emotional life, relationships, and the therapeutic process. Drawing connections between shame, self-doubt, resentment, envy, and the search for certainty, Dr. Shabad will also examine the important distinction between guilt and shame and consider how shame may contribute to the appeal of authoritarianism. Turning to clinical practice, Dr. Shabad will consider psychological symptoms as a non-verbal means of communicating and memorializing traumatic experience. He will explore the ethics of countertransference and the importance of preserving the patient's agency, freedom of self-determination, and capacity for self-healing. The program will conclude by considering mourning as a vital process of self-acceptance—one that allows previously dissociated wishes and hopes to be acknowledged and integrated. Through this process, the possibility emerges not simply to recover from trauma, but to reclaim the freedom to become.

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Clinical Signatures: The Analyst behind the Theory

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Clinical Signatures: The Analyst behind the Theory

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