Sonia Wechsler is a Clinical Psychologist, Child and Adult Psychoanalyst, and Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst with the Australian Psychoanalytical Society (APAS). She currently serves as the Deputy President of APAS and is the Asia Pacific Representative on the Psychoanalytic Education Committee (PEC) of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). Sonia teaches and supervises in infant observation and clinical practice, working with clinicians who wish to deepen and refine their therapeutic skills both locally and internationally. She maintains a private psychoanalytic practice in Sydney, Australia.

Public lecture

Coming to life: The experience of art in psychoanalysis

Can art impact the understanding of our patients? This paper examines how the film “Son of Saul” facilitated an analyst’s deeper understanding of her patient in analysis. Through the film, the analyst came to understand the deadness and deadliness inherent in her patient’s melancholic depression. The impact of the film created a pivotal point in a long analysis, ultimately enabling her patient to return to life. The paper examines the impact of the film on the analyst and then the patient’s analysis through a detailed account of clinical material and analysis of the film “Son of Saul”. The paper outlines how the film served as an analytic third (Ogden, 1994) whereby the patient affected the analyst’s experience of the film and allowed for the analyst to be altered, enabling psychic change in the patient.

Workshop

Analytic work with Emerging Adults in the modern age: challenges, technique and new understandings

This paper concerns the analysis of a young man who presented for treatment in an autistic psychic retreat (Steiner, 2011), close to suicide. The paper uses various parts of his extensive analytic journey to explore new understandings and developments in relation to social media and the role of parent work in this challenging age group. This paper explores Andre Green’s theory of negative narcissism and Frances Tustin’s work on pathological autistic objects to make sense of unrepresented experiences and behaviours. The clinical work is infused with themes related to difficulties in mourning and how it relates to life and death. This paper is for all clinicians interested in working creatively with children, adolescents and adults who use social media as a defence against living. This paper explores the notion of the flexibility of interpretations in action (Ogden, 1994; Durban, 2014) by using examples illustrating the patient’s unreachable mental states, where the author adapted verbal, non-verbal and concrete interventions to the treatment of a late adolescent. The author examines a developmental and transferential approach to the analytic stance taken in the treatment and seeks to examine the risks and benefits.

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