September – December 2016
“It Shouldn’t Be This Hard!” Using psychoanalytic thought in challenging encounters with psychotherapy patients
As mental health clinicians, we at times face such difficult clinical encounters as to feel doubtful, or even defeatist, about our capacities and efforts. We may despair of what is occurring between ourself and our patient, including discoveries of interacting with a patient in uncharacteristic and unhelpful ways. We can feel hopeless about possibilities of extracting ourselves from an impasse, or cynical about reaching someone who feels unreachable. In these contexts, we struggle to understand why and how to transform the interaction to a more constructive one. This user-friendly, ‘experience-near’ set of seminars will provide participants with a window into the consulting room of several experienced analysts. Making use of a ‘case-based approach’, our seminar leaders will review their own experience with some challenging patient encounters. The overarching aim is to demonstrate how psychoanalytic technique and theory can provide a means, not only to survive, but to even thrive in the face of similar complex clinical situations to which the participants can frequently arrive at with their patients”.
Course Objectives:
- Utilize an increased knowledge of the psychoanalytic literature and various psychoanalytic perspectives in dealing with difficult clinical encounters.
- See clinical difficulties not only as threats to the therapeutic work and relationship, but also as potential opportunities and space for growth.
- Use an enhanced understanding of the patient’s personality, early experience, (including traumatic experience), and concurrent stresses in their approach to the patient who is experienced as difficult.
- Better recognize and develop an approach to clinical challenges when immersed in countertransference experiences that overwhelm our capacities within the therapeutic dyad, including our ability to think.
- Identify when they require consultation with colleagues when in a difficult clinical situation, and to identify and work towards respecting and accepting limitations in their therapeutic objectives.
2016 Dates:
September 9 – Where did all this blood come from? ‘Unkind Cuts’ in the psychotherapeutic relationship
September 23 – Hate and Love in the Countertransference
October 7 – Goodnight nobody: when the ‘impossible profession’ meets a dead zone
October 14 – Feeling Our Way Toward Creating Moments of Emotional Contact between a Despairing Borderline Patient and the Therapist
November 4 – Introjection as Process in Formation of an Inner World, and as a Technical Parameter in Therapy
November 18 – Splitting and Projective Identification: The difficulty of bearing the unbearable in the consultation room
December 2 – The frame as the site for the expression of primitive aspects of the psychic organization
December 16 – Doom and the Analyst’s Compulsion to Go Down with the Ship
Target Audience: Frontline psychotherapists and trainees (from private practice, community and hospital-based mental health clinics, and senior level mental health training programs).
Planning Committee: Paul Steinberg, MD FRCPC, Darren Thompson, MD FRCPC,
Jo Hoffman, MD FRCPC
Fees: $380.00 for professionals or $260.00 for candidates
[/column] [column col=”1/4″]Location:
Arbutus Club
2001 Nanton Ave
Vancouver, BC
4pm to 7pm