Classes

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000; min-height: 15.0px} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} span.s2 {font: 13.0px Helvetica; font-kerning: none} Chronic pain (depending on severity) is a consuming and overwhelming experience that can become an abyss into which individuals fall and lose hope.

Grief is central to human experience.  We are all confronted with losses, disappointments, separations, disruptions, large and small, every day, and we are able to move forward in our lives only if we are able to grieve.  Our patients come to us with a tremendous burden of undigested sadness, and much of psychotherapy is our attempt to help them develop some capacity to mourn.  Since its beginnings in Freud and Klein, object relations has had as one of its central concerns grief work, and how it is that a capacity to grieve can be developed so that emotional growth can move f

Balint groups ‘unstick’ and re-energize therapy through direct practice of flexing the “muscle” of empathic, imaginative reflection. The group work spells out transference and countertransference dynamics gently and non-intrusively.  After an extemporaneous presentation of a case, group members describe what arises intuitively and imaginatively while focusing on the experiences of both members in the therapeutic relationship. We do not offer advice regarding technical management of the treatment process.

This course will cover adolescent development as it pertains to understanding therapeutic process with teens and the crucial part it plays in working with adults.

Daily, we engage in work that has been called “the talking cure,” yet we do so much more than talk in-session with our patient clients. “The communication cure” encompasses more fully what takes place in the developing relationship we call psychotherapy—a relationship of being together in ways that promote relief for the client through bits of emerging continuing growth and development. 

“The hope is to stimulate the creation of new meanings, to foster the unfolding of the patient’s dream, not to nail it down,” writes Barbara Stevens Sullivan in The Mystery of Analytical Work: Weavings from Jung and Bion.

This experiential course will utilize right-brain writing strategies that serve to “foster the unfolding” of inklings, dust motes, and hunches emanating from our right-brain that “thinks” in images and metaphor. We will discuss Winnicot’s stance on “unfolding” as it resonates with Sullivan’s thought in relation to our own discoveries.

We will be immersing ourselves into psychoanalyst Neville Symington’s new, integrative take on an old, commonly misunderstood disorder. Profoundly helpful and intimate with case examples, as well as drawing from literature, I hope you’ll join us as we explore this original work!

Donald Meltzer was one of the most creative contributors to the object relations tradition, and there is much to be gained from reading and rereading his books.  This class will focus on selections from two of his works: Dream-life, and The Claustrum.  In Dream-life Meltzer entirely revises Freud's understanding of dreams, describing dreams as emerging out of the most creative and advanced parts of the mind.  In The Claustrum, he describes how this creative capacity of mental life can be severely undermined and damaged in retreats from ment

Donald Meltzer was one of the most creative contributors to the object relations tradition, and there is much to be gained from reading and rereading his books.  This class will focus on selections from two of his works: Dream-life, and The Claustrum.  In Dream-life Meltzer entirely revises Freud's understanding of dreams, describing dreams as emerging out of the most creative and advanced parts of the mind.  In The Claustrum, he describes how this creative capacity of mental life can be severely undermined and damaged in retreats from ment