APPALACHIAN PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY
A local chapter of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association
Please see www.aps-tn.org for additional information.
2012-2013 Program Year
9/29/12 Learning to “Sink In”: Attachment and the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Anxiety, Mary Ellen Griffin, PhD
De Masi has written, “It is the body that, in the course of a panic attack, ‘speaks’… of its agony.” The infant’s attachment relationships with its parents are the context in which the infant learns - or doesn’t learn - to calm itself. In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, it is helpful to consider what a patient’s presenting anxiety may be saying to us about these important relationships, as the patient continues to struggle with overwhelming affect in the present. In this seminar, we will review the literature on attachment and its role in affect regulation, examine the relational basis for learning to “sink in” or soothe oneself by viewing videotapes of parent-infant interactions, and see how the attachment perspective can be put to effective use in psychotherapy by discussing the case of a young woman who presented for treatment in an almost constant state of anxious flooding. The case will also demonstrate how training the patient in mindfulness techniques can be a helpful adjunct to an interpretive approach in psychotherapy.
Saturday Morning Seminar- 3 CE credits available
10/12/12 Group Dream Analysis, Mark Blechner, PhD
This seminar is limited to 15 participants (first-come basis) and only those who are registered for the 10/13/12 Conference. The fee for this three-hour seminar is $50. There are no CE credits available for participation in this program.
In this three-hour Friday afternoon seminar, Dr. Blechner will present didactic material on the evolving psychoanalytic understanding of working with dreams. He will also lead an experiential dream group. This will be structured according to Ullman’s (1994, 1996) writings on group dream analysis as modified through Blechner’s years of experience utilizing this technique in training settings. This approach provides a secure, safe setting in which psychotherapists can become more comfortable with dream analysis, the unconscious and primary process.
10/13/12 Sexuality and its Vicissitudes: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Mark Blechner, PhD
Dr. Blechner will explore the historical confusion of sexual orientation and gender identity found in late nineteenth and early twentieth century sexology. In this context, Freud’s conceptualization of universal bisexuality will be critically examined, as will the work of some subsequent psychoanalytic practitioners. Yet other important contemporary psychoanalytic theorists and clinicians have charted new pathways for the understanding of human sexuality in all of its protean forms. Issues lived both outside of and inside our consulting rooms, including cross-dressing, voyeurism, and transgendered, gay, and lesbian identity, will be explored in their developmental trajectory and their transference and countertransference implications within the psychotherapeutic dyad. Illustrative case material will facilitate the application of these understandings in our daily clinical work.
Fall Conference - 6 CE credits available
11/17/12 Great Papers in Psychoanalysis Part VII:
The Reconstruction of a Traumatic Childhood Event in a Case of Derealization, James Gorney, PhD
This seminar will consider a classic psychoanalytic paper concerning the nature of trauma from the vantage point of technique. In “The Reconstruction of a Traumatic Childhood Event in a Case of Derealization”, Victor Rosen (1955) demonstrated how the denial of trauma by early care taking figures can become even more traumatic than the denied trauma itself. However, if this brilliant clinical account is read from another angle, different from the author’s intentions, it becomes a touchstone for learning how to adapt psychoanalytic technique for work with primitive and regressed patients. Theoretical and clinical implications of the denial of trauma, the utilization of “action interpretation”, and the evolution of therapeutic technique in accord with the patient’s diagnosis will be illustrated through an in vivo group reading of Rosen’s seminal essay.
Saturday Morning Seminar - 3 CE credits available
12/15/12 Existential Psychoanalysis: Will We Get There in Time?, Vance Sherwood, PhD
While psychoanalysis and existentialism have quite a lot in common, the latter has trouble with such bedrock psychoanalytic notions as developmental stages, the unconscious, and the importance of the patient’s past. Can one do psychoanalytic therapy without these notions while yet retaining the hard won accomplishments of such giants as Freud, Klein, and Winnicott? In this program, Dr. Sherwood tracks three cases to illustrate times when a psychoanalytic approach makes sense and times when an existentialist reading of the patient may be better.
Saturday Morning Seminar - 3 CE credits available
1/26/13 Meditation and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Tom Neilson, PsyD
This workshop will offer an introduction to Eastern meditation, including Buddhist mindfulness and shikantaza practices, and their relevance to psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Recent findings suggesting that mindfulness may be a useful and effective remedy for attachment deficits will be discussed. There will be an emphasis on the Eastern non-dual philosophical perspective and on the profound implications of this perspective for mental health and self-actualization. A psychoanalytic developmental perspective that runs from the pre-oedipal to the transpersonal will be fundamental to this workshop, and will be used to re-examine both Freud’s and Jung’s views on mysticism.
Saturday Morning Seminar - 3 CE credits available
3/16/13 Navigating the Fee as Reality and Symbol in Psychotherapy:
How to Get Paid and Still Respect Ourselves in the Morning, Joyce Cartor, PhD
This seminar will consider the practical challenges involved with charging a fee for our services as clinicians and then having to actually collect it. This seemingly simple chain of events stirs various feelings and transferences in both patient and therapist so that, in actuality, the act of getting paid is difficult for many practitioners. In addition, money has powerful symbolic, familial, and cultural value and meaning to both parties and these also inform the treatment and need to be analyzed. All of these ideas will be discussed.
Saturday Morning Seminar - 3 CE credits available
4/6/13 Reaching Toward Dreams, Taking the Transference, Gerald Fromm, PhD
Winnicott was a theorist of the unnoticed obvious. In writing about his “squiggle game,” whereby the child and the therapist together create a series of revelatory associational doodles, Winnicott stated:”One of the aims of this game is to reach to the child's ease and so to his fantasy and so to his dreams” (1971a, p. 115).What a lovely description of the easy interplay between two people leading to the communication of, even the creation of, inner life. But it is also a commonplace of clinical psychoanalytic practice that no sooner is inner life contacted, and a beginning link made to the external world; no sooner do both parties realize that the behavior that seemed so idiosyncratic actually has relational meaning, than something else happens: transference, and taking the transference - absorbing and living with it - becomes the new, vital and risky clinical problem.
This conference will take up clinical work in that intermediate space, perhaps the space between reaching toward dreams and taking the transference. We will explore a number of topics, including the role of aggression and the transmission of trauma from one generation to the next. We will end the day with a foray into applied psychoanalysis and the work of another English psychoanalyst. In 1961, Wilfred Bion published Experiences in Groups, a groundbreaking text leading to what came to be called Group Relations Conferences, which focus on the here-and-now operation of the unconscious among people engaged in collective work. Vignettes from these and other kinds of conferences will be used to illustrate the dynamics of group processes, even at the international level.
Spring Conference - 6 CE credits available
4/24/13 through 4/28/13 Division 39 Spring Meeting, Boston
5/ 11/13 Lerner Scholar’s Symposium
Weathering the Storm: The Role of Uncertainty in the Creative Process, Reva Heron, PhD, and Kathryn White, PhD
This symposium will explore how the tendency to see things in familiar ways can obscure the meaning and importance of creative productions, which include scientific, artistic and clinical communication. In “Playing with Fire: Transitional Space and the ‘Unthought Known,’” Dr. Heron will use the life of the creative genius, Nikola Tesla, to demonstrate how reified theory can impede new awareness in science and clinical practice. The psychohistorical analysis will be contrasted with her clinical experience working with scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Using Winnicott’s notion of transitional space and Bollas’s description of the ‘unthought known,’ Dr. Heron will describe Tesla’s creative process and explain why his brilliant formulations in the field of electrical phenomena work did not receive greater acceptance during his lifetime.
In “Seeding the Cloud: Creative Triggering of Affective Process,” Dr. White will link these concepts to experience, showing a video, Me and My Mother, which documents a series of interactions between the filmmaker and her severely mentally ill mother. Discussion interspersed with presentation explores how to apply these concepts as clinicians working with forms of traumatic process and ways to utilize the work of Brothers, Balint, and others to foster work with trauma, especially rage and the desire to forgive.
3 CE credits available
Members are encouraged to bring colleagues to APS programs;
affiliated mental health professionals accompanying an APS member may attend one Saturday Morning Seminar at no cost.
APS and Division 39 are committed to conducting all activities in conformity with the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles for Psychologists. APS and Division 39 are also committed to accessibility and non-discrimination in continuing education activities. If participants have special needs, we will attempt to accommodate them. Division 39 is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Division 39 maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
There is no commercial support for any of the these programs nor are there any relationships between the CE Sponsor, presenting organization, program content, research, grants or other funding sources that could reasonably be construed as conflicts of interest.