By: Event Chair, Ed Corrigan with testimonials from attendees
March 16-18, 2024

The weekend with Adam Phillips and friends was a kind of a happening, which one doesn’t always say about a psychoanalytic conference. There was movement and a variety to each day’s presentations which were filled with surprises, depth, and humor.

Saturday morning started with Ron Taffel’s Memoria for Pearl Ellen Gordon.  Ron’s essay was a marvel that touched not only all of us who knew Pearl-Ellen but those who got to know her through his searching, poignant, wonderful remembrance.

Adam delivered a paper entitled “On Not Being Taught” on Saturday which is a companion to the essay discussed Sunday afternoon Psychoanalysis for Beginners.  These two essays, which are more directly psychoanalytic are part of a series of essays... his next one is entitled “On Getting the Life You Want:  Psychoanalysis with Pragmatism.”

The conversation with the novelist Nicole Krauss and Adam Phillips was a joy. Two gifted writers having an in-depth conversation about each other’s work.

Sunday morning Ron Taffel, Holly Levenkron, Kathleen Miller and myself organized a panel, in honor of Pearl Ellen Gordon, entitled “Adolescence through Young Adulthood; A Belief in an Unknowable Future.’ These experienced psychoanalysts, made up of four ICP graduates, Kathleen Miller, Caroline Volel, Susan O’Kuhn and Seshi Hargett. They were joined by two Californians, Steve Seligman and Sacha Bollas.  This group, eventually joined by Adam Phillips and Cecil Webster created a pastiche...that is kind of landscape of a diverse group of analysts working with a diverse group of patients.  This was a lively, amazing panel ...telling stories that were moving, tender and illuminating.

I've asked a few people about their experiences, and I wanted to present some of the things they wrote which capture the feeling of the weekend.  One of the things I heard again and again from members of the ICP community was how positive they were about simply being there and feeling the strength and the diversity of the ICP community.

Catherine Steindler:

I'm in my fourth year of analytic training at ICP. Having come into this community in 2020, I have experienced ICP largely online. This conference was a wonderful first live and in-person experience of the larger ICP community. The weekend was vibrant, bustling, full of warmth and generous engagement. What an all-around pleasure. It left me wishing there had been more of this in the past years and looking forward to much more in the coming years.

Patricia Expo:

I attended all three seminars and I think I will always remember his readings of those three papers. Adam’s live close readings were masterful and sparked lines of thought for me that I will continue to investigate in my clinical work and writing, particularly his reading of the Bollas' "The Transformational Object" which added substantially to the original text. Outside of the close readings, it was a novel experience for me to experience ICP as a community the way I felt during the conference. Seeing past instructors, advisors, and candidates all in one place interacting with one another was excellent and made me feel like a part of something larger.

Laura Mackall:

As I’ve shared before, (which I also think is colored by your (Ed’s) way of teaching Phillips), my experience of his work has a profound heart connection in a way that I don’t strongly associate with other theorists we’ve studied - or overtly with psychoanalysis in general, despite some kind of open-heart surgery we seem to be going for. Talking is our best shot at getting past our own minds?

It very much seems he had this connection with Khan, the part about Khan telling Phillips if he needed anything that Khan was his guy. It had me wondering if this sense of a kind of deep caring was something that Adam always had the ability to receive and exude - or did Khan - through his authentic if idiosyncratic care cultivates this in Adam?

A type of caring that I experience as being both drawn to and repulsed or overwhelmed by as a muti caregiver (female, mother, wifie, therapist, friend). It's just now made me amused by the word "caretaker" which oddly also means care giver - but also a take. 

But something about this tapping into our hearts seems related to Adam's easy, accepting, way with himself, his comfort with his and the world's "just-is-ness" (on parents going off to help other people, and that just is). He seems to take so much permission to be exactly who he is, without being imposing about it. What could be possible if we were all exactly who we are? And then had the opportunity to be in community with others and have our just-is-ness in relation, perhaps intersubjective reflection of some kind... The "just-is-ness" then relating to Winnicott's "good enough" or Bromberg's spaces for that matter. It felt like threads of this way of being were otherwise demonstrated in various points of the weekend: Nicole's embrace on her shitty memory (a passage to imagination?), the frayed/unfinished edges that seemed to characterize the talks about work with kids (paired squiggles, frame a means to an end?), Adam's reply to the guy who wanted to fight him regarding not talking about patients - aka you do you, buddy!

Thom Rini: 

Ron Taffel’s memorial tribute to Pearl Ellen Gordon opened a weekend that couldn’t have imagined itself matching the beauty, grace, and generosity of his intonations about her life.  That life, as we say, a very well lived one. Perhaps, because it was sublimely shared.

As Ron, the former ICP chairman of the board, took us through the chapters of Pearl Ellen’s journey, the moving richness of her relationships, professional and not, most of the audience sat riveted.  I imagine we felt grateful for moments of recapturing and cherishing the bits as he tugged forward the familiar from the gone.  We leaned in. And he gently scattered the ashes of her loss and ours. And then the conference began.

Weeks later, I now look back and remember that crescendo which began the weekend and escalated its pealing boldly throughout the weekend.

Adam Phillips was our beloved, familiar, and special keynote guest. He mingled gracefully with exciting new guests and participants and his natural humility barely evidenced the fact that the weekend was entitled “A Weekend with Adam Phillips.” He thrilled us throughout the weekend with presentations of his new writing, discussions with other guests and responses to audience members, all the time gaining collaborators aplenty and dissenters a few. All of them unselfconsciously gave - evidencing the best of thoughtfulness, in its dual meaning - and his engaging with them prompted deeper inquiry and curiosity. The presentations and subsequent exchanges flowed into rounds of fiercely stimulating and informative volleying of all the participants’ notable gifts and ideas. Adam, as usual, took us along to re-imagine the familiar along with the not so recognizable, in boldly fresh and exciting ways. His and the other speakers’ insights stimulated, challenged, and ultimately will potentially inform our own analytic work.  On this, Adam never fails us. His mind evinces delightful insights as well as deeply disturbing ones.  They flow out naturally, seemingly as effortlessly as his rather mild and measured breath.

I remembered back to 2016 when Adam was in NY and spoke of conversion phenomena. He posed calmly, typical of his natural style, the following question: What would you want if understanding wasn’t all of what you want?

Well, there are all kinds of answers to that question. The one that rings truest to me at this moment, is more life. He delivered it. As did his notable cohort of colleagues.

Special shout out to his dear friend Ed, who imagined it thus when he dreamt of it a year before and collaborated with others at ICP and made it happen.

Katie Hall:

The tone for the highly stimulating weekend with Adam Phillips was set by Ed Corrigan, Ron Taffel’s and others’ comments and remembrances of Pearl Ellen Gordon.  Pearl Ellen, her lauded teaching, supervision, knowledge and vision had more than personified many of ICP’s ideals. So, the fitting tributes to her conveyed, more broadly, much about the 50th anniversary of ICP as a nationally known, community minded psychoanalytic training institute and, also, center for other crucially important post graduate trainings.

From Adam Phillips’ Saturday paper, conversations with Nicole Kraus, Cecil Webster, Ed Corrigan, and the morning panelists, among others, to his close reading of Winnicott’s "Fear of Breakdown", it became clearer than ever... that his brilliance and more expansive ways of both thinking and questioning move beyond invitations.  Beyond invitations into almost exhorting us to think about context, history, what analysis and ‘education’ are what they each can do to...and do for…human beings.

For me, some of the most stimulating aspects of listening to Adam, in person, included considering the underbelly, questioning the assumed, wondering about traditions of ‘education’ and inculcation, and finding developmentally fitting ways to engage adolescents, and humanistic ways to accept everyone’s self-expressions and efforts to ‘find their way’, especially when anchorless, living in choppy seas and within shifting worlds with changing paradigms.

After a weekend and a seminar, of connecting, in person, with colleagues, and friends, I felt more fortified and encouraged to question the questionable and heretofore not-yet-questioned.   With gratitude to ICP, Ed Corrigan, Adam Phillips and all other presenters’ time, thoughtful presentations, and questions, it feels as though ICP will now move into the next decades, having benefited from the vision, and the administrative orchestration that it, undoubtedly, took to host such a gathering of-- thinkers, writers, expansively oriented therapists, and the growing community.

The weekend and week of seminars were a truly Inspiring gift to the whole community...which will be remembered for years and decades to come.