This course will offer a brief overview of psychoanalytic defense theory in order to share findings from the field of neuropsychoanalytic theory, as laid out by Dr. Mark Solms. Through clinical reflection, we will begin to see defenses not as psychic maneuvers to avoid unwanted content but instead as parts of the foundational function in self-organizing systems.
This course will offer an orientation to psychoanalytic theory through close readings of selected papers, mapping the field's development from Freud through the relational turn, and laying the groundwork for deeper study. Each session is centered on a moment when the field revised its understanding of the mind and/or therapeutic change, and is anchored by one of the most-cited papers on PEP-Web.
One of the most difficult challenges in our work is a patient with entrenched depression. Sometimes we encounter this as the presenting problem but often it emerges only gradually as the hidden background of the personality. Tolerating the impact of deep depression session after session can be one of the most taxing elements of our experience as therapists.
Via Zoom | Max Capacity: 8
Via Zoom | Max Capacity: 15
Join us for a close reading of Stephen A. Mitchell's Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis, one of the foundational texts of the relational psychoanalytic movement. We will explore Mitchell's articulation of a relational model that places the wishes, needs, and emotional lives of both therapist and client at the center of the therapeutic process.
Via Zoom - Social gathering optional after series concludes—details to come. | Max Capacity: 30
What does it mean to be empathically attuned to a client's psychological needs? How do you navigate a therapeutic impasse, repair an empathic failure, or offer an interpretation without inducing shame? What does it suggest when you find yourself chronically bored with a client?
What does it mean to be racialized as invisible, not only to others, but to oneself?
And what happens when that invisibility enters the consulting room, whether in the experience of an Asian American clinician or patient? The therapeutic encounter may include psychic and relational dynamics that are often misrecognized: the burden of shame, the expectation for compliance, the pressure to appear “high-functioning,” and the quiet negotiation between being seen and remaining hidden.
In this recent book, Ron Britton, a British psychoanalyst in the object relations tradition, explores his experience working in psychoanalysis and what he has come to see as most important. We will read selected chapters from his book on these topics of sex, death and the superego. Britton especially explores the erotic transference-countertransference experience and the problem of the destructive superego. Please contact the instructor to enroll.
Working with adolescents poses challenges that differ in important ways from those encountered with adults. Adolescents are often resistant to therapy and struggle to articulate their internal experience. Parents, in turn, are often anxious or uncertain and may exert conscious or unconscious pressure on the therapist. This three-part seminar examines the technical and developmental complexities of working with adolescents and their parents in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.