Wine, Cheese, & Bad Objects

​Gather with the SPS community as we learn together with a talk from SPS board member Nicole Pardo, MD on "Borders, Bad Objects, and Psychoanalysis." This wine & cheese event meets on Friday, May 30th at 6 PM, with time before the presentation to meet colleagues, and an opportunity for group discussion afterwards. Snacks and wine are provided.

​Nicole Pardo, MD is a psychoanalytic therapist in private practice with a particular interest in working with complex trauma. She is an advanced psychoanalytic candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), and she is also currently enrolled in the Group Therapy Training Program (GTTP) at The Psychotherapy Institute (TPI). She is actively working toward her graduation paper for PINC, integrating her experiences with psychoanalytic and group training. This presentation covers her work on this project to date.


As the daughter of an immigrant Venezuelan father and a white mother, Nicole talks about the challenges of finding language for the totality of her psychic experience within the frame of psychoanalysis, in which the social unconscious has historically been excluded. She explores her own experiences in training, both through psychoanalytic training and group process, utilizing dreams and group theory to critique and push against the frame of the classical Freudian tradition. She specifically expands upon Fairbairn’s idea of internalization of bad objects, exploring its attendant omnipotent phantasy. She goes on to explore re-enactments of omnipotent phantasy within the field, and she invites us to consider the potential for enriching psychoanalytic thought via re-integration of theories that have been split off through scapegoating.