Presenter: Alessandra Lemma 

Discussant: Carol Moore

Date and time: Saturday, May 12, 2012, 9 a.m. to noon

Place: 40 St. Clair Ave East, Toronto

Individuals who present as excessively preoccupied with the appearance of their body, perceiving some aspects of it as being ugly, focus the clinician's attention on the body in the therapeutic situation and provide a rich insight into how unconscious conflicts are enacted on and through the body. In this talk, Dr. Lemma will suggest that the relative pervasiveness of an identification with a superego accounts for the degree of severity of the body dysmorphic disturbance, increasing the compulsion to alter and/or conceal the hated body parts. Understanding the vicissitudes of the development of the body self in the context of the earliest relationship with the “object of desire” is central to helping these patients, because of the quality of the identifications that ensue, which are then enacted in the transference.

Alessandra Lemma is a psychologist and psychoanalyst, director of the Psychological Therapies Development Unit at the Tavistock, and a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She has published several books and papers on psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, the body, and trauma.

Carol J. Moore is a psychoanalyst and the director of the ATPPP. She has taught courses in psychoanalysis and feminism, and women and embodiment at the University of Western Ontario.