Holding like a father: Rethinking the clinical imagination of men and children

The Postgraduate Psychoanalytic Society and Institute

Co-sponsoring with MPG Consulting NYC

Invite you to our Sunday Dialogue Program

Holding like a father: Rethinking the clinical imagination of men and children

Ezra Yurman-Whyde, LCSW

Sunday, October 25, 2026, 1:00-3:30 pm (EST), on Zoom

3 CE credit hours for Social Workers, Mental Health Counselors, Psychologists and Licensed Psychoanalysts holding licenses in New York State

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This presentation embarks with psychoanalytic understandings of gender and subjectivity to articulate something of what happens when ideas of masculinity and nurturing mix. We will examine long-held understandings of the paternal function and how the concept has informed understandings of fatherhood and caregiving as primarily operating in an Oedipal register—asserting authority, serving as the “third” that breaks up the mother-child dyad, and introducing the child to the world. Drawing on theorists including Winnicott, Corbett, Diamond, and Benjamin, I’ll show how those occupying paternal and paternal-adjacent roles are performing many pre-Oedipal, “maternal” functions such as holding, integration, and containment. Together, we will think about how these functions become enacted in what I’ve come to think of as a kind of paternal erotic intersubjective space.

I will bring a clinical case vignette of my work with a Black, mixed-race seven-year-old boy whose family sought a paternal figure after his white father’s departure from the home. I’ll illustrate how race, gender, and sexuality shaped the unconscious fantasies a family projected onto me while in search of a “good male role model,” and how my own fantasies about race, gender and sexuality at times fostered and hampered a child’s psychic integration. I’ll also attempt to describe the role physical touch played in this process of integration. The central clinical importance of this work, as I see it, is in illustrating how a clinician can use his mind and body to help a child integrate aspects of himself that are psychically, familially and socially split.

Presenter:

Ezra Yurman-Whyde, LCSW is in private practice in New York City. He works with children, adolescents and adults. As a current clinical social work Ph.D. student at Smith College, his research interests include gender and sexuality development, masculinity and play. He has trained and practiced in settings including The LGBT Center, the Brooklyn Hospital Center, the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, Kings County Hospital and the William Alanson White Institute. Publications include “Choosing a frame: How Medusa tells the story of trauma and life after trauma” (2023).

Learning Objectives:

After attending this presentation, participants will be able to:

1. Identify some of the social fantasies about gender, race and sexuality as it applies to masculinity.
2. Better understand how varied fantasies and stereotypes about masculinity, absent fathers, gay boys or white saviors shape the paternal roles into which clinicians are unconsciously invited. 
3. Reflect on how a clinician’s own fantasies about race, gender and sexuality can foster or hamper a therapeutic process
4. Illustrate how clinicians can use their multiplicity of selves to help a child integrate aspects of his selves that are socially and psychically fractured.

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For further information or questions, please send an email to:

Russell Merritt, LCSW: rgm3@columbia.edu

MPG Consulting LCSW, PLLC is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work #0119, Mental Health Counselors #0044, Creative Arts Therapists #0021, Marriage and Family Therapists #0030, Psychoanalysts #0034 and Psychologists #0283 as an approved provider of continuing education. A NYC & NYS certified: M/WBE