This Open House featured the interactive lecture on Working with Personality Disorders in Psychoanalytic Supervision: The Object Relations View, with Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler

Object Relations theory has been particularly necessary to understand those who have early developmental arrest within their first three years of life, when the basic core self structure is forming. At this Spring 2018 Open House, Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler will address the phenomena of Borderline, Narcissistic, and Schizoid conditions in developmental object relations terms.  She will speak about the different psychic structure character formations, and how they require different psychotherapeutic approaches. She will also speak about self-integration, psychic structure internalization, and separation-individuation – in relation to the psychoanalytic psychotherapist’s capacities to process dissociated trauma, since this dissociated trauma impacts the therapist as “objective countertransference” (Donald Winnicott) and as “projective-identification” (Melanie Klein, Heinz Racker, Wilfred Bion, and Paula Heimann). 

Dr. Kavaler-Adler will speak about how every psychotherapist can be helped with the difficult task of processing projective identification and “objective” or induced countertransference through an object relations mode of supervision. This supervision involves “in vivo” clinical experience in the form of “role-plays” as well as in the form of “meditative visualization.” As primal trauma and its sadomasochistic enactments are understood, rather than reacted to in a retaliatory manner, each therapist in this supervision learns about the clinical technique spoken about by D. W. Winnicott as “object survival.”

Through survival of primitive aggressive reenactments, patients can begin to tolerate containing their own experience (read Wilfred Bion on the “container” and the “contained”). Then, the therapist can begin to interpret the compulsive primitive enactments that were formerly too traumatically overwhelming to discuss. Once the patient/client/analysand comes to contain their inner compulsive reenactments, rather than to act them out in a dissociated way, they move from more primitive psychic state of being (Melanie Klein’s “paranoid-schizoid position”) to a more advanced one (Klein’s “depressive position”).  Then, symbolization develops naturally, along with all the organically evolving ego functions; and internal psychic space and transitional space (Winnicott) allow the person to become an “interpreting subject” (Thomas Ogden), as well as to receive new “internalizations.” The patient begins to receive interpretations, rather than experience them as an invasive persecutory assault. At the same time, the therapist interprets how persecutory they are perceived, when making interpretations. Can they then interpret being a Kleinian “toilet breast,” as well as a persecutory “bad object” (as the Kleinians do)?

Through all this, the therapist learns how to be there with a patient, who (by developmental necessity) must mourn the loss of an early symbiotic object (prior to the developmental trauma). Developmental mourning (Susan Kavaler-Adler) precedes, from the core self and object loss to later losses. This understanding of mourning overlaps with James Masterson’s “abandonment depression.” Without the working through of the “abandonment depression,” the patient seeks addictive highs that regressively return them to the “reunion fantasy” (James Masterson and Margaret Mahler) of being one again with the symbiotic mother (fused together with the mother in a split-off “grandiose self” structure in the narcissistic character pathology).

The role-play will be used to demonstrate how the therapist responds, moment to moment, to the patient’s developmental trauma enactment, and intervenes with empathic attunement, within the “in vivo” clinical process.  One of the Open House participants will have the opportunity to volunteer and play the role of his/ her patient, to get inside of their patient’s internal experience, with Dr. Kavaler-Adler who will role-play the object relations psychoanalyst. 

Spring 2017

When: Sunday, 4/23/17 (1:00 - 4:00 pm).
Where: In-Person location: 115 East 9th street, 12P, NYC, 10003   Virtual participation will be available via gotomeeting platform (with minimal technical requirements)

Interactive Lecture on The Subjective Experience of Time: Time as Persecutory, Frozen, or Holding:  An Object Relations Perspective for Clinicians by Susan Kavaler-Adler, PhD, ABPP, D.Litt., NCPsyA, ORI's Executive Director

We can experience all our primal affect states in relation to TIME. Clocks may register an objective aspect of time, but internally, we are all living with the subjectivity of time. During the analytic session, time manifests for our patients as a transference object, along with other objects, such as their parents, siblings, etc. Some patients want to suspend the intrusion of objective time, and luxuriate in its holding qualities on the couch, allowing the unconscious to emerge. They may like the lights dim and the blinds drawn. Some are terrified of time as the intrusive persecutor, with its impossible demands, and its unrelenting mortality. Those are the ones with the big watches and the ocular search for the clocks in your consulting room. And then there are those who block their thoughts and feelings, and feel like time is a frozen ice breast that refuses to melt. Internal objects, which are persecutory, holding, or frozen, are projected into our fantasy images of the persona of time. What happens when time as an internal object becomes time as a transitional object?  Can we play with time?  Can time, when holding, suspend our subordination to our mortality? 

Befriending time, rather than to be persecuted by it, can evolve into the “eternal now” moment that challenges the linear time construction of our mortality.  It can become a clinical moment or an Argentine tango moment.  This is Winnicott’s “creativity of everyday life,” and we can only get there through Klein’s depressive position journey, through the healthy mourning of life’s “necessary losses.” 

Come join us to play with all these questions, cultivating the Winnicottian capacity to play and the Bionian moment “without memory or desire.” Dip into the internal world with us, and then travel to the transitional world through the open house experience of an in the moment clinical role-play, in which one of you will get inside the skin of one of your patients, will experience the patient’s being from the inside/out, and will dialogue with Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler, who will play the part of the analyst in the role-play.        

Reference to read before or after the Open House: 

Kavaler-Adler, S. (2014). Dialectics of mortality and immortality: Time as an internal and transitional object experience and time as a persecutory vs. a holding object. Issues in Psychoanalytic Psychology, 35(1), 37-61. (can be found at

http://www.mindconsiliums.org/publications/2013/12/2013-12-Kavaler-Adler-dialectics-of-mortality-and-immortality-time.pdf

The Open House on 10/08/2016 featured the brief lecture of the Nature of Blocks to Self-Expression related to writing, speaking, and authentic communicating - by ORI's Executive Director and Founder, Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler, who is also a prolific author and the object relations theorist.  Dr. Kavaler-Adler will reference Freud, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Klein, and her own work, in terms of explaining the nature of blocks to “finding and sustaining one’s true self voice, and opening paths to success.”  Using her 40 years expertise in working analytically with writers and psychological blocks to their writing, as well as working with the developmental mourning process, Dr. Kavaler-Adler will speak about the psychodynamics of obstacles to writing, success, and communication that are so clearly understood in object relations terms.  She will also speak of the unconscious fantasies that block someone from finding their own voice, such as the fantasies of a male muse in female writers, which is so different from the female muse in male writers.  You can hear more of this in Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s 2^nd podcast interview on “New Books in Psychoanalysis” on “The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers” (Routledge, 1993; ORI Academic Press, 2013). Follow the link here: http://newbooksnetwork.com/susan-kavaler-adler-the-compulsion-to-create-women-writers-and-their-demon-lovers-ori-academic-2013/  The renowned Dr. Martin Bergmann noted Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s original ideas on this in his Foreword to one of her other books related to creative process, “The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity” (Routledge, 1996; ORI Academic Press, 2014).   Another unconscious fantasy to be discussed is that behind the terror of losing 2^nd Amendment rights in this country, and how this may relate to the blocked internal voice of the individual.

The Open House on 6/26/16 featured the interactive lecture on Envy, Hunger and Desire In Eating Disorders: Anorexia and Bulimia From Psychoanalytic Object Relations Perspective

This workshop had a precise clinical focus. Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler will present cases of anorexia and bulimia, which are current or/and which were described as case studies in her earlier clinical writings. The workshop participants were getting the understanding about eating disorders being directly related to an internal world where an envious, hungry Mother resides.  This kind of Internal Mother has disrupted and arrested the person’s self-integration and separation-individuation processes. 

The resolution of developmental trauma, which involves a “developmental mourning process” in treatment, and a clear look at the “demon lover complex,” within the internal world, as well as the blocked erotic desires that are part and parcel of arrested “developmental mourning” and the “demon lover complex”- will be illustrated and discussed. 

The role of symptomatic compulsive spending, in the case of the bulimic, will be seen as transitional stage phenomena in the resolution of physical bulimia, and in the emergence of psychic bulimia in the transference.  The role of self-righteousness and contempt will be seen as manic defenses in the case of the anorexic.

To read more about the workshop, follow the link HERE.  For a taste of the topic, please visit The Object Relations View mini-video series on YouTube (http://youtu.be/XDSVKLJAAh0) and on ORI’s web site (http://orinyc.org/you.html), to watch the video (part 13) on Eating Disorders: The Object Relations View.

The Open House on 9/20/15 featured the interactive lecture on Working with Personality Disorders in Psychoanalytic Supervision: The Object Relations View , with Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler

Object Relations theory has been particularly necessary to understand those who have early developmental arrest within their first three years of life, when the basic core self structure is forming.

The Open House on 7/19/15 featured the Interactive Lecture on Fear of Intimacy, with Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler.
The Open House on 3/15/15 featured the interactive lecture on Addiction to Bad Objects and “Nightmares and Object Relations Theories.”  
The Open House on 6/20/14 featured the workshop on In Session: Crying, Breathing, and Sleeping, with Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler.
The Open House on 3/9/14 featured the workshop on Envy, Hunger and Desire in Eating Disorders: Anorexia and Bulimia from Psychoanalytic Object Relations Perspective
The Open House on 9/22/13 featured the workshop on Character Disorders: Narcissistic, Borderline, and Schizoid, with Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler.

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