WSPP-DC

Local Chapter of Division 39
of the Division of Psychoanalysis
American Psychological Association

Five Fridays 2013-2014

Friday Workshops 2013-2014

Ethics in the Crosshairs: When Therapy and Technology Intersect

Note: this seminar counts toward the CE Ethics requirement
Friday, September 20, 2013,  9:30am-12:30pm
Presenter: Ernest Wallwork, PhD
The workshop will probe the issue of how to think ethically about various aspects of clinical work on the phone and on Skype, as well as how to handle a patient’s ethically dubious use of the internet. After a brief opening presentation of the strengths and weaknesses of the different decision-making paradigms that clinicians use unconsciously in deciding moral dilemmas, the group will discuss a case presentation and several vignettes that will focus our attention on how to integrate ethical thinking and action with other technical responses to challenging problems in our clinical work.

Learning Objectives: at the end of the seminar participants will be able to:

  1. Identify three arguments for and against the use of the phone or Skype for psychodynamic psychotherapy and analysis;
  2. Name three different decision-making paradigms that can be used to make ethical and technical choices in teletherapy or Skype therapy;
  3. Name three commonly unacknowledged ethical issues that arise in the use of phone or Skype for psychodynamic therapy and analysis.

Presenter: Dr. Ernest Wallwork is Professor of Ethics at Syracuse University and a psychoanalyst in private practice in Washington, D.C. and Syracuse, New York. His books include Durkheim: Morality and Milieu (Harvard) Critical Issues in Modern Religion (Prentice Hall) and Psychoanalysis and Ethics (Yale). Dr. Wallwork chairs the Patient and Analyst Assistance Committee of the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. He is the founder and co-chair of the popular “Ethics Behind the Couch” Discussion Group at American Psychoanalytic Association meetings. Recent articles include “Ethics in Psychoanalysis, American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Psychoanalysis (2005, 2011); “Ethical Analysis of Research Partnerships with Communities,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (2008), and a review of Andrea Celenza, Sexual Boundary Violations, JAPA (2009). Dr. Wallwork lectures widely and runs popular clinical ethics workshops for psychotherapists.

Not Your Grandfather’s Psychoanalysis

Friday, December 6, 2013,  11:30am-2:30pm (note earlier time)
Presenter: Sally Bloom-Feshbach, PhD
Say farewell to the days when the analyst was a “blank screen” for the patient’s projections, the sole “expert” in understanding the patient’s psychic life! Welcome to modern relational psychoanalysis, in which patient and analyst together co-create the therapeutic process. Working in an atmosphere of trust and openness, both participants actively shape the analytic endeavor. When we bring two subjectivities to the analytic table (and not just one as in the old days), we open up fresh space in which to grow and explore. Relational thinking offers a new neutrality that does not assume who the patient is, or should be, that allows the therapist the freedom to respond flexibly with restraint or engagement. In the spirit of this modern take on psychoanalysis, let’s discuss the power of authenticity, and together consider how relational sensibility affects our work with our patients.

Learning Objectives: at the end of the seminar participants will be able to:

  1. Explain three ways in which a relational clinical orientation differs from psychoanalytic technique.
  2. Define relational co-construction in the therapeutic process.
  3. Describe how the analyst’s spontaneity can enrich the analytic relationship.
  4. Give three examples of how authenticity and negotiation can be used to deepen the therapeutic process.

Presenter: Sally Bloom-Feshbach, Ph.D, is a clinical psychologist in Washington, DC, where she maintains a private practice in individual and couples psychotherapy, supervision, and parent consultation. She is Adjunct Faculty Member and Supervisor at the Georgetown University Center for Psychological Services, and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the George Washington University School of Medicine, where she has focused on teaching medical students to treat the “whole person.” Dr. Bloom-Feshbach has been an active member of the teaching and supervisory faculty of the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis since its inception, and was a featured speaker at its Relational Perspectives Institute in 2010. She is co-editor of The Psychology of Separation and Loss, and has written on a range of subjects, including a recent article in Voices, entitled “Getting Oriented: Or, the Only Map that Always Faces the Same Direction is the Map of the Human Heart.” Her current interests center around the development of the self, the co-creation of experience in couples, and the integration of relatedness and autonomy.

Playing and Learning with Winnicott

Friday, February 21, 2014,  11:30am-2:30pm (note earlier time)
Presenter: Mildred Goldstone, PhD

This seminar will focus on Winnicott as a person, a theorist and a healer. Winnicott’s ideas enrich our understanding on many fronts. Not only do they illuminate aspects of our clinical work, but also our family life, our children’s experience, and our own childhoods. We will cover his major contributions, such as his research about the mother/infant dyad; his concepts of the good-enough mother, the holding environment, and the transitional object; his understanding of the infant’s developing sense of self, the capacity for concern, and the origins of creativity; his emphasis on play, on the true and false selves, and the importance of feeling real.

Learning Objectives: at the end of the seminar participants will be able to:

  1. Name and describe the three stages of development that Winnicott theorizes the infant goes through as (s)he develops a sense of self.
  2. Describe Winnicott’s concepts of the true and false self; “making use of an object,” and the capacity to be alone in the presence of another.
  3. Describe the way in which Winnicott believes the infant develops the capacity for play, and how this impacts the infant’s belief in his/her creative capacity.
  4. Define what Winnicott means by “impingement,” and describe its relation to the mother/infant dyad and the development of the infant’s true and false selves.
  5. Describe four of Winnicott’s most important ideas/concepts and how they are relevant to your work as a psychotherapist or psychoanalyst.
  6. Discuss the meaning of Winnicott’s most famous quote, “I want to be alive when I die.”

Presenter: Dr. Mildred Goldstone is a licensed psychologist with a clinical psychology practice in Washington, DC. In her practice, she provides individual, group, family and couple psychotherapy, hypnosis, consultation, and clinical supervision. Her orientations include psychoanalytic, Bowen’s Family Systems, Ericksonian hypnotherapy and existential therapy. She has studied Object Relations Theory and practice for 30 years, specializing in the work of the British Object Relations School, including the teachings of Klein, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Winnicott, Bion and Balint. During this time she has taught seminars for WSPP and WPSP, focused on Klein, Fairbairn, Guntrip and Winnicott. A particular area of focus has been D.W. Winnicott, one of the “Independents” in the British psychoanalytic Society, who maintained ongoing ties with both Anna Freud and Melanie Klein and their followers.

Conversations with a Child Therapist: Enriching Our Work with Adult Patients

Friday, April 11, 2014,  11:30am-2:30pm (note earlier time)
Presenter: Marc Nemiroff, PhD
Anna Freud once remarked that a clinician cannot successfully treat an adult patient without understanding work with children. Daniel Stern has more recently taken his groundbreaking filmed work with mothers and newborns and applied it to adult psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. When we sit with our adult patients, we are buffeted by transferences and re-enactments of their early childhood experience. In other words, we are often not talking to the adult patient’s mature sense of the world and of other people, but rather to their child-based sense of people, places, and things. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us when we see adults, to understand and use our knowledge of child development throughout its various stages and the ways that normal and pathological childhood developments are expressed in our adult patients. In this workshop, we will explore these issues and learn how to understand the adult patient from this perspective. Extensive case material will be presented and there will be ample time for discussion.

Learning Objectives: at the end of the seminar participants will be able to:

  1. Identify three reasons why awareness of child development is critical to adult psychotherapy.
  2. Use Daniel Stern’s application of his infant research to adult psychotherapy, to define and identify “moments of meeting” in psychotherapy sessions, and identify the sequelae of therapist responses to them.
  3. Define and identify “re-enactments” as they occur in treatment between the therapist and patient and distinguish appropriate from inappropriate types of therapeutic responses to such reenactments.
  4. Hear case material pertaining to trauma and identify how the child’s experience shows up the in adult’s trauma responses and identify two ways to respond to this.

Presenter: Dr. Marc Nemiroff earned his Ph.D. from Catholic University in 1975. He is affiliated with the Baltimore-Washington Center for Psychoanalysis, and on the faculty at The Washington School for Psychiatry in its Developmental Psychotherapy Seminar Program. He is a Fellow of the American Orthopsychiatric Association and former clinical faculty at George Washington University’s Doctor of Psychology Program. He is the author of eight therapeutic books for children, published by the American Psychological Association, and co-author of a text for clinicians, “Kids’ Club Letters: Narrative Tools for Stimulating Process and Dialogue in Therapy Groups for Children and Adolescents.” Dr. Nemiroff has dedicated one month a year pro bono for the past nine years (2005-2013) working with slum families, street children, and others, in Bombay and a nearby tribal village. He has worked with children for over 38 years and served as spokesperson for the American Psychological Association to the media during the Gulf War on topics relating to the effects of televised real violence on children. He is also the recipient of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill’s Wayne Fenton Award for his mental health service. Dr. Nemiroff maintains a private practice in Potomac, Maryland.

Keys to the Castle: The Citadel Complex and the Psychology of Masculinity

Friday, May 9, 2014,  9:30am-12:30pm
Presenter: Jonathan Stillerman, PhD
To understand, connect with and help our male patients, we must begin by understanding masculinity. Men who seek psychotherapy differ in many ways from one another but all have been shaped by powerful and pervasive cultural prescriptions for what it means to be a man. These dictates provide a blueprint for how “real men” should think, feel, act and relate, prizing traits such as independence, rationality, emotional control, aggression and heterosexuality to name a few. Diane Elise coined the term “Citadel Complex” to describe the psychic structure that results from such gendered training. Using examples both from inside and outside the therapy office, including case material from an ongoing men’s psychotherapy group, this presentation will provide an opportunity to explore in depth how the culture of masculinity influences male development and the unique challenges it presents for therapists of both sexes working with men.

Learning Objectives: at the end of the seminar participants will be able to:

  1. Be able to compare and contrast classical with contemporary theories of male identity development.
  2. Define “traditional masculinity ideology.”
  3. Describe the “Citadel Complex.”
  4. List three ways that the culture of traditional masculinity can impact male psychic structure and functioning.
  5. List two examples that illustrate how masculinity manifests in and impacts psychotherapy.

Presenter: Jonathan C. Stillerman, PhD, CGP, is a clinical psychologist and Certified Group Psychotherapist with a private practice of individual, couple and group psychotherapy and supervision in Washington, DC. He is Assistant Clinical Professor in the Professional Psychology Program at the George Washington University and serves on the faculty of the Washington School of Psychiatry in both the Clinical Program on Psychotherapy Practice and the Supervision Program. Dr. Stillerman is also the co-founder and former Co-Director of Men Can Stop Rape, a national non-profit empowering male youth to work as allies with women to prevent sexual violence. He has taught internationally on gender-based violence, male survivors of sexual assault and the psychology of masculinity, and has an expertise in working with men individually and in groups.