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Group Supervision:  "Analyst as Instrument"

3rd Trimester of Year 1 of the One-Year, Two-Year and the Full Training in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
taken in tandem with the Clinical Theory Course
(can be also taken as an individual post-graduate certificate course; no pre-requisites)

Certificate Course with 12.5 hrs of post-graduate credits in psychoanalytic education. CE information is pending.

Instructor: Susan Kavaler-Adler, PhD, ABPP, NCPsyA

Dates: 4/01/21 - 6/10/21, Thursdays, 7:15 pm-8:30 pm. No class on 5/20/21

Place: VIRTUALLY ONLY during COVID-related restrictions (with minimal technical requirements for in real time participation)

To Register for the course, follow the link HERE

Course Description:

This class is a group supervision experience, in which students respond deeply to each others’ clinical work, and also risk sharing their own clinical work in order to get meaningful feedback.

The course is entitled “The Analyst as Instrument” because the focus is on how the clinician uses his/ hers own feelings, thoughts, sensations, and perceptions in each therapeutic session as an avenue to the most acute understanding of their patients (or clients).  Students learn through firsthand sharing of clinical struggles what is deflected and projected out from the patient’s internal world.  This approach is based on work of generations of object relations theorists, originally derived from the British object relations school.

This approach stems back to Melanie Klein’s concept of projective-identification, Paula Heimann’s understanding of countertransference, Heinz Racker’s contribution on “concordant” and “complementary” countertransference, as well as on Wilfred Bion’s views on translating concrete unprocessed “beta” elements (enactments) into symbolic “alpha” communication, which involves of processing projective-identifications as an integral part of countertransference phenomenon. Further contributions were made by the representatives of the British school, such as D. W. Winnicott (in his paper on “Hate in the countertransference”) and by the American theorists who wrote about ‘subjective” versus “objective” countertransference (Otto Kernberg, Lawrence Epstein, and Jeffrey Seinfeld).      

The basic idea is that everything that a psychoanalytic object relations clinician experiences while in the room with the patient can be mentally (Peter Fonagy’s “mentalization”) and symbolically processed, so that it is understood in terms of core traumas and conflicts within the patient’s internal world, which are enacted upon the therapist, because the patient cannot contain and consciously experience his/her own traumas and conflicts. Whatever is said by the patient is then seen as secondary to what the patient might be enacting at any one moment, especially in relation to a core developmental arrest trauma that disrupted basic self integration and separation-individuation.  This approach is critical with character disordered patients, as their psyche does not operate on containing repression; this results in compulsion to propel their own internal experience out into the other they are with, inducing feelings in the therapist of being either the traumatizing parent (part object) or the traumatized child self (part self).  Object relations theories help therapists to process those projective-identification experiences, so that they can understand the traumatic disruptions in patient’s core, stemming from the time of the early pre-oedipal parent-child sadomasochistic enactment.

For all patients, it is essential that their analysts understand/ feel how to be "in their skin".  In the case of neurotic patients, verbal associations do reflect such feelings in terms of core conflicts.  Thus, the understanding of these symbolically meaningful verbal associations and memories  allows the therapist to understand the patient’s core conflicts, as they are continually retriggered in the unconscious areas of a repressed psyche.  Participants of this course will also benefit from the mere experiential learning of how to process "objective countertransference," and such concepts as transitional space, transitional object, holding environment, psychic container, and projective identification.

Learning Goals: At the end of this educational activity, its participants will be able to:
1. Analyze how the patient/client may be operating with dissociated trauma in their internal world.
2. Analyze how trauma experienced by patients needs to be re-owned, felt, and understood – in order to heal, and in order to continue their development.
3. Discuss the distinction between dissociation and splitting (due to pre-Oedipal developmental arrest) and repression and defenses against psychic conflict (in neurotic patients)
4. Compare dissociation and splitting processes through clinical case presentations.
5. Discuss dissociation and splitting processes through the role plays of clinical situations.
6. Compare projection and projective identification phenomena.
7. Discuss projection and projective identification phenomena through clinical case presentations.
8. Discuss projection and projective identification phenomena through the role plays of clinical situations.
9. Experience firsthand, through the group sharing process, how each person in the group is struggling with the same clinical and developmental distinctions.  Also, for students to use the group to learn through others, as well as through their own presentations. 
10. Learn through empathy and identification with one another about how intrapsychic and internal world phenomena can be processed into meaningful symbolic understanding. 
11. Analyze the developmental process of mentalization.
12. Utilize the developmental process of mentalization to formulate inchoate enactments in communicable relationship terms. 

Bibliography:

Epstein, L. (1977). The therapeutic function of hate in the countertransference. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 13, 442-461.
Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1952). Psychoanalytic studies of the personality. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. L., & Targe, M. (2004). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. New York, NY: Other Press.
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and melancholia. Collected papers (Vol. 5). New York: Basic Books.
Heimann, P. (1950). On countertransference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 31, 81-84. 
Heimann, P. (1960). Counter-transference. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 33, 9-15. 
Kavaler-Adler, S. (1990). Supervisor as internal object. Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, 8(1), 69-76.
Kernberg, O. (1975). Borderline conditions and pathological narcissism. New York: Aronson.
Kernberg, O. (1980). Internal world and external reality. New York: Aronson.
Klein, M. (1940). Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states. Love, guilt and reparation and other works 1921-1945. London, UK: Hogarth Press, 1980.
Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 33, 433-438. 
Klein, M. (1957). Envy and Gratitude. New York, NY: Basic Books. 
Ogden, T.H. (1986). The matrix of the mind. New York, NY: Jason Aronson.
Racker, H. (1957). The meaning and uses of countertransference. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 26, 303-357. 
Sandler, J., Dare, C., & Holder, A. (1973). The patient and the analyst: The basis of the psychoanalytic process. London, UK: Allen & Unwin.
Sandler, J. (1976). Countertransference and role-responsiveness. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 3, 43-47.
Segal, H. (1952). A psychoanalytic approach to aesthetics. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 33, 196-207.
Segal, H. (1973). Introduction to the work of Melanie Klein. London, UK: Hogarth Press.
Segal, H. (1981). The work of Hanna Segal. New York, NY: Jason Aronson.
Segal, H. (1985). Chapter 3: The Klein—Bion Model. Models of the Mind: Their Relationships to Clinical Work, 35-47. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
Seinfeld, J. (1993). Interpreting and holding: The parental and maternal functions of the psychotherapist. New York, NY: Jason Aronson.
Winnicott, D.W. (1949). Hate in the countertransference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 30, 69-74.
Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Countertransference.  British Journal of Medical Psychology, 33, 17-21.
Winnicott, D.W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment. New York, NY: International Universities Press.
Winnicott, D.W. (1971). Playing and reality. Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books.

Read more about COUNTERTRANSFERENCE as the useful tool in analytic work HERE.
Read more about PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION as the useful tool in analytic work HERE.

BIO of the Instructor:

Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler is a founder and executive director of the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (ORI), chair of the ORI Board, as well as the chair of the Training Committee, advisor, training analyst, and psychoanalytic training supervisor. She has 40 years’ experience in object relations psychoanalytic practice, specializing in early psyhotrauma, character pathology, grief and mourning, blocks to creativity, and other challenging psychological issues.
Dr. Kavaler-Adler is a prolific author, with five books and sixty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters related to complex object-relations clinical phenomena of developmental mourning, demon-lover complex, erotic transference, female creativity, and many others. She has received 15 awards for her writing in the field of psychoanalysis including the Gradiva Award from NAAP in 2004 and four competitive Arlene Wohlberg Memorial awards.
Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s books are: The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers (Routledge 1993, ORI Academic Press, 2013); The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity (Routledge, 1996, ORI Academic Press 2014); Mourning, Spirituality and Psychic Change: A New Object Relations View of Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2003, Gradiva award 2004); The Anatomy of Regret: From Death Instinct to Reparation and Symbolization in Vivid Case Studies (Karnac, 2013); Klein-Winnicott Dialectic: New Transformative Metapsychology and Interactive Clinical Theory” (Karnac, 2014). For more information – visit www.kavaleradler.com.

Tuition: $450/ 10-week course/ trimester; Registration: $25/course (waived for candidates in training) - can be paid by CC via PayPal - follow the link: PayPal.Me/ORINYC.

Ask for our need-based scholarships and payment arrangements (call the administrator at 646-522-1056).

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