TICP Scientific Meetings
Upcoming Events
Sep. 23, 2026 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm Witnessed, Not Saved: Visual Psychoanalysis at the Edge of Queer Aging and EndingsRegister NowChristian Schulz-Quach, MD
Psychoanalysis has long theorised mortality, yet its developmental grammar remains largely cis-heteronormative: linear stages, biological generativity, and a mourning process that culminates in closure. What happens to that grammar when the person approaching death has spent a lifetime outside it?
This presentation centres on On Queer Aging and Endings (2025, 19 min.), an award-winning short documentary and the first film from existentials:lab. Shot in Norway in the home of the trans physician, sexologist and queer rights advocate Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad and their partner, the sexologist Elsa Almås, the film accompanies them as they live with Esben Esther's stage IV cancer. It is an experiment in what I call visual psychoanalysis: a method that brings analytic listening, existential-phenomenological inquiry, and cinematic observation into a single dialogical field, deliberately leaving room for silence, the unguarded, and the unsayable.
Following a screening of the film, I will open three lines of inquiry with the TICP community. First, queer loneliness: the compound of existential confrontation with finitude and the intersubjective residue of exclusion, ageism, and the erosion of late-life networks. Second, annihilation anxiety as a shared, contextual dread of erasure rather than a purely intrapsychic one, and the unconscious defence against ageing and endings enacted within youth-oriented queer spaces themselves.
Third, and centrally, positive belonging. This is Esben Esther's own concept, developed with Elsa Almås, in which belonging is achieved when others perceive us as we perceive ourselves and attach positive value to what they see, and in which good gender belonging is not the absence of dysphoria but gender enthusiasm, gender euphoria. In the film, this thoroughly intersubjective achievement is still being made at the very end of a life, in a body that is failing. I will place it alongside the emerging literature on queer joy and the shift from minority stress toward minority strength: joy that is bold, radical and defiant, and joy found in quiet moments of connection with chosen family. What does it ask of our clinical listening if belonging and joy are not consolation prizes awarded once suffering has been catalogued, but the organising achievement of a queer life, including its ending?
Drawing on Lifton's modes of symbolic immortality, I will argue that Esben Esther is neither fighting nor collapsing into death, but composing a self that endures. The clinical provocation for us is simple and difficult: queer and trans people facing mortality do not need to be saved or inspired. They need to be witnessed, and we need imaginative languages, including visual ones, adequate to that witnessing.
Oct. 21, 2026 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm Temporal Disjunctions between Self-States: The Broken Dialogue between Child and Adult Selves in Male AnalysandsRegister NowKeith Haartman Ph.D.
This presentation explores core temporal discrepancies and conflicts between developmentally younger and older self-state structures in male analysands.
Psychoanalytic models that diverge theoretically share at least one element in common. Differing schools account for the complexity of mind by positing dynamic structures that crystalize usually
via complex processes of identification. These developmental structures appear as “islands” of personality endowed with degrees of partial function (perception, cognition and affect, intentionality etc.), and capacities to engage with neighbouring structures (merging, co-
operating, attacking, censuring and censoring, etc.). I refer to Freud’s structural model, Fairbairn’s endopsychic situation, the Kleinian/Bionian ego-destructive superego, the concept of self-envy explored by Scott, Lopez Corvo, and Searles. In the Relational schools, Davies and Frawlies describe the antipathy between a child and an adult self in survivors of sexual abuse, and Bromberg describes self-states alienated by differing degrees of linguistic formulation.
Hans Loewald suggests that in conceptualizing psychic structures we replace concrete spatial conceptions with temporal ones. Psychic structures or complex self-states are radically temporal.
Psychic structures tend to form as defensive responses to trauma. Trauma involves states of encapsulation where time freezes and recurs cyclically. When developmentally earlier traumatized states vie with healthier adult states in linear/episodic time, the traumatized state,
trapped in an alternate repetitive temporality, fails to empathically comprehend the lived reality or umwelt of the adult. While themes of guilt and accusatory antagonism may occur at this interface, conveying a punitive ego-superego atmosphere, I suggest that a neglected yet crucial discrepancy is the problem of antithetical temporalities. This irreconcilable difference underlies the breakdown in the dialogue – the temporal confusion of tongues between developmentally younger and older structures.
My awareness of this issue first arose working with two male patients who each experienced an unbridgeable gulf between an economically and emotionally bereft childhood, and, in adulthood, undreamed of success, wealth and fame. In their dreamlife, as well as in sessions, a fractured dialogue between younger and older selves manifests in the form of guilt, impostiture, and derealization.
This presentation examines facets of the broken dialogue in male analysands between traumatized younger selves and socially adapted, yet compromised, adult selves. The clinical work attempts to create a “contact barrier” between the younger and older selves such that
mutual intrusiveness gives way to integrative dialogue.
Upcoming Events
Upcoming Events
TICP Workshops
Upcoming Events
Nov. 14, 2026 10:00 am – 4:00 pm Trauma, Self-Shaming, and MourningRegister NowHow 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.