Language Games and Incommensurability in Psychoanalysis: An intersubjective-systems perspective (Non-Member)

Title of Workshop:
Language Games and Incommensurability in Psychoanalysis: An intersubjective-systems perspective

Format: In-person
Credit: 3 CEUs approved for Social Workers, LPCs/LMFTs and LADCs

Cost:
$0 for Non-Members
$0 for Members - Log into the Member Area to purchase
$0 for *Students - Click here to request a student discount
$0 for current Foundation 1 Students
*(Full-Time Undergraduate, Graduate, Doctoral students, and LMFT, LADC, LPC, Social Work, Psychology, and Psychoanalytic licensure/certification candidates

Speaker: Darren Haber, PsyD

Description:

In this presentation, Dr. Darren Haber will explore his clinical work with addiction, compulsivity, dissociation, and pathological accommodation through the lens of intersubjective-systems theory (IST). A contemporary field theory grounded in phenomenology and contextuality, IST views the analytic encounter as a mutually constituted relational field in which the subjectivities of both patient and analyst participate in shaping experience and meaning. Although the patient’s experience remains foregrounded, the analyst is not positioned as an objective observer standing outside the field, but as a participant whose subjectivity both enables and limits understanding, with inevitable blind spots that remain open to analytic exploration.

Haber will examine the difficulties of working with patients who have grown up in environments that demanded accommodation to dominating or subjugating others. Such environments can shape patients’ ways of relating, including how they perceive, think about, and communicate their experience. Their “language games” may concretize experience, disavow affect, or foreclose exploration, constraining both the patient’s capacity to articulate suffering and the analyst’s capacity to understand it. These dynamics are particularly evident in addiction and other compulsive strategies for keeping painful affect at bay, often sustained by entrenched relational patterns inherited from traumatic environments. Drawing on clinical vignettes from his two books, Circles Without a Center (Routledge, 2022) and Words Apart (Routledge, 2026), Haber will explore how an IST perspective can illuminate these clinical impasses while bringing classical psychoanalytic theory into dialogue with contemporary relational thought.

Learning Objectives:

Objective #1: Describe the core principles of intersubjective-systems theory (IST), including the mutually yet asymmetrically constituted nature of the analytic field and the role of the analyst’s subjectivity in shaping clinical understanding.
Objective #2: Identify how pathological accommodation to dominating or subjugating relational environments can shape patients’ affective experience, language, and capacity to articulate psychological suffering, particularly in addiction, compulsivity, and dissociation.
Objective #3: Apply an intersubjective-systems perspective to experienced clinical dilemmas, exploring how entrenched relational patterns and constricted “language games” may sustain compulsive defenses against painful affect and complicate the analytic process.

Speaker’s bio:

Darren Haber, PsyD, is a psychoanalyst practicing in west Los Angeles. He specializes in treating childhood trauma, addiction, and anxiety/depression. His latest book (just published), on the hidden disparities of language systems in psychoanalysis, is Words Apart: Dissociation, Compulsion, and Language Games in Psychoanalysis (Routledge). His book, Circles Without a Center: Addiction, Accommodation and Vulnerability in Psychoanalysis was published in July 2022, also by Routledge. Haber publishes a weekly Substack column called “Hearing the Worlds of Others” and is the winner of several analytic writing awards. He has published online at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Psyche/Aeon, Psychology Today, GoodTherapy.org, the APA blog site, and The American Psychoanalyst. He frequently teaches, and has published numerous papers in the journals Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, and Psychoanalytic Inquiry. His website is www.therapistinlosangeles.com and he is on Twitter/X at @darrenhabermft.