Scholarly Dialogues: McGleughlin | ONTOLOGICAL WRITING: The Analyst's Necessary Vertigo

This paper reimagines psychoanalytic writing as an ontological practice centered on being and becoming, rather than interpretation and knowledge. Through clinical encounters, the author illustrates how therapeutic transformation emerges when analyst and patient enter shared states of experience and embrace nonsovereignty- a mutual openness to influence, misrecognition, and the unsymbolized. The paper critiques traditional case writing for reinforcing analytic authority, erasing patient subjectivity and privileging coherent narrative over affective complexity. It argues instead for experimental, self-implicating forms of writing that foreground the analyst’s involvement, acknowledge their performative nature, and create space for what resists representation. Such ontological writing challenges conventional distinctions between subject and object, analyst and patient, and positions storytelling itself as a constitutive act, capable of transforming clinical understanding and psychoanalytic knowledge.

Learning Objectives: 

1. Define how clinical storytelling in psychoanalysis functions as a generative rather than descriptive practice.
2. Explain the concept of the analyst’s “necessary vertigo” and its role in sustaining analytic engagement.
3. Identify the ways in which narrative “slant” (telling indirectly or askew) opens access to hidden or complex clinical truths.
4. Discuss how psychoanalytic writing reflects the entanglement of analyst and patient rather than the neutrality of the observer.
5. Differentiate between descriptive and performative modes of case writing and their implications for analytic theory and practice.
6. Analyze the risks of omitting the analyst’s voice in clinical storytelling and the impact this has on representation of the analytic process.
7. Apply the idea of clinical writing as a form of belonging to the task of presenting cases in supervision, teaching, or publication.
8. Reflect on how attention to narrative form shapes the ethics and aesthetics of psychoanalytic storytelling.

Speaker Bio:

Jade McGleughlin, L.I.C.S.W., is a Personal and Supervising Analyst, faculty member, Board member, and past President of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is also on the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), where she recently served as Visiting Scholar. She serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

In private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she provides psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, supervision, and consultation for children and adults, with particular expertise in the consultation of complex and difficult treatments. Her writing explores gender, the negative, the analyst's necessary nonsovereignty, and the use of visual art to illuminate problems of representation. She is also a portrait painter.

Her book, Clinical Storytelling, Art and the Problems of Being: The Analyst's Necessary Vertigo (Routledge, 2025), examines the relationship between psychoanalytic process, artistic practice, and the challenges of representing psychic life.

Special Instructions: Scholarly Dialogues--formerly called Masterclass, is an open discussion and learning session where small groups gather together with important scholars in the field to discuss 1-2 papers from their body of work. The intimacy of the setting allows participants to be able to ask personal questions about the author's ideas and share some of their own reactions and thinking about the material. Papers will be distributed in advance to registered attendees. 

15 PEOPLE MAX FOR THIS EVENT

$155 for Alliance Members $185 for non members.

Cancellation Policy: If you need to cancel your purchase, please do so before December 28, 2026, by emailing admin@nwaps.org to request a refund minus a 30% cancellation fee. We are unable to process or offer any refund for cancellations made after December 28, 2026. Allow 2-4 weeks to process your refund request. Note that participation in the entire event is required to obtain CE credits.