Advanced CE - Stepmothers and Nannies: The Ignored Players in Psychoanalysis

Stepmothers and Nannies: The Ignored Players in Psychoanalysis

Fundamental features of a psychoanalytic perspective have included the importance of understanding the specificity of the relationships between the child and his or her earliest caregivers as well as understanding the experience of the actual caregivers within the family’s dynamics. Stepmothers and nannies, however, despite their frequent and impactful presence in the composition of contemporary families, have remained almost invisible within our professional literature.

Dr. Susan Scheftel will open this seminar by considering the question: “Why aren’t we curious about nannies?” Although nannies (caregivers who care individually for children at home) have had a ubiquitous presence among professional working parents for decades and are frequently involved in the lives of our patients or their children, the potential psychological significance of this relationship has rarely been considered among analysts and clinicians. Dr. Scheftel will focus on the ways the nanny’s role necessarily risks ambivalence in child and parent alike due to its literal positioning between them. The nanny is there when the parent is not. The fact that the nanny is an actual reality based placeholder for parents in their absence may explain our patients’ tendency to need to keep both historic and present nanny relationships out of awareness. Just by showing up for the job, a nanny walks into a web of longing, anger, guilt, separation anxiety and loss on both sides of the parent/child relationship, not to mention what this complex role evokes for her.

Dr. Sally Donaldson, a stepmother and a psychoanalyst, will then take up the complicated yet largely unformulated experience of stepmothers. Stepmothers live in a liminal space between the real and the imagined. On one hand they are like regular mothers who shop for groceries and pick up children after school. On the other hand they are the dreaded other woman, the home wrecker, the gold digger, the cruel, murderously jealous witch. Unlike the powerful evil stepmother in fairytales, however, modern stepmothers often feel like outsiders in their own homes: depressed, overburdened, and misunderstood by their families and friends. This seminar will explore the complex sources of their unhappiness and what we, as analysts, need to understand to support the psychic survival of a stepmother so she can reap the benefits of this problematic, yet common and potentially rich, family structure.

Learning Objectives

1. To understand the nanny’s uniquely difficult role, which necessarily risks ambivalence due to its positioning between parent and child.
2. To pose the question as to whether there may such a thing as a “nanny transference” which may constitute unconscious representations of individuals whose actual and internal presence has been as crucial as it was invisible.
3. To examine how fairytales and the trop of the evil stepmother promotes the problematic split between the good biological mother and the bad, cruel stepmother (with an eye to understanding our own blind spots).
4. To develop a fuller understanding of the unique points of tension and conflicting loyalties endemic to step family life.

Susan Scheftel Ph.D. is a graduate and on the faculty of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center. She teaches in the Psychoanalytic Training Program, the Child and Adult Psychotherapy Training Program and the Columbia Parent Infant Program and supervises in the Clinical Psychology Program at City College and in the Columbia Adult Psychotherapy Program. She has published and presented on topics pertaining to childhood

Sally Donaldson, Ph.D. is a graduate of NYU’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and a psychoanalyst in private practice in Greenwich Village. She has taught The Psychology of Marriage to NYU undergraduates and recently completed a MFA in Creative Nonfiction. She is currently writing a memoir about how two people, each with children and complex pasts, come to love each other after fifty.

Continuing Education

This event is approved for 4.0 CE contact hours for psychologists, social workers, and licensed psychoanalysts:

The National Institute for the Psychotherapies is approved by the American Psychological Association to offer continuing education credits for psychologists. The National Institute for the Psychotherapies maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

The National Institute for the Psychotherapies is recognized by the New York State Education Department's State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0018.

The National Institute for the Psychotherapies is recognized by the New York State Education Department's State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychoanalysts #Psyan-0004.

Personalized CE certificates will be distributed at the end of this event. Due to New York State requirements, persons arriving more than 15 minutes late or leaving more than 15 minutes early will not receive a CE certificate.

Fees

Early Registration
$100 general public
$85 NIPPA members
$65 candidates & students

General Registration
$125 general public
$110 NIPPA members
$90 candidates & students

Refunds, & Cancellation Policy
Cancellation requests made more than a week prior to the event will be given a full refund of registration fees. Refunds will not be granted for cancellation requests made within a week of the event or for no-shows on the day of the event.