WSPP-DC

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

Five Fridays 2015-2016

Five Fridays 2015 – 2016

Show Me The Money

Doug Favero, PhD (Chair), Suzan Stafford, EdD, Lynn Hamerling, PhD
Friday September 18, 2015 11:30am-2:30pm
Note: this seminar counts toward the CE Licensure requirement for Ethics.

In our efforts to make reasonable incomes, we psychotherapists could lose sight of ethical and clinical elements to be considered in setting and maintaining client fees. This workshop will address how these considerations have historically been most underlined and debated. Then we will review the current standards regarding fees highlighted in our professional codes of ethics. The group will then spend the majority of the time exploring various clinical vignettes. These vignettes will be designed to address the questions or dilemmas we practicing therapists run into most often in our attempts to take care of ourselves financially and yet be true to the best interests of our clients.

Learning Objectives: at the end of the seminar participants will:

  1. Gain a working knowledge of ethical principles around fees cited in the Codes of Ethics for Psychologists, Social Workers and Psychiatrists.
  2. Be familiar with three major points of debate around fees for psychological services from the time of Freud to our own time.
  3. Participate in a discussion of the dissonance between therapeutic considerations and fee considerations that can arise in our practices.

Presenters: Dr. Doug Favero is a D.C. psychologist in private practice since 1984 who specializes in adult individual, couples & group psychotherapy. He also offers psychotherapist supervision and consultation. Dr. Favero is the Chairperson of the DCPA Ethics Committee (since 2013) and served on the committee since 1995. He is also the Co-Chair of the DCPA Social Justice Subcommittee. Dr. Favero was a founding member and on the training faculty of the Washington Psychotherapy Training Institute (1989-1998). He was also the founding co-director of Whitman Walker Clinic’s “Group Support Program For Persons With AIDS And Loved Ones” (1985-1988) and has done extensive consultation with Whitman Walker counseling groups.

Dr. Suzan Stafford is a psychologist in private practice in Washington, DC since 1983. She specializes in couples counseling and trauma. Dr. Stafford is the At-large, Clinical member of the Board of the DC Psychological Association. She has been on the Ethics Committee for 4 years and is on the Social Justice Committee, the Professional Development Committee, and is Editor of the DCPA Newsletter. For more than 20 years, she’s taught a variety of workshops and had wide-ranging involvement in community crisis intervention and response. The latter has included the Police and Fire Clinic in Washington, DC, ARC Disaster Response and Services to Armed Forces, and training for Capital Area Crisis Response Team and the American Red Cross. She was President of the Capital Area Crisis Response Team and was the Coordinator of the Disaster Response Network in DC, a joint venture of the American Red Cross and the American Psychological Association. She was also on the APA Advisory Committee for the DRN.

Dr. Lynn Hamerling is a psychologist in private practice in Washington, DC working with individuals, couples and groups. Dr Hamerling is the Faculty Chair and Past President of WSPP, and has served on the Board for over 20 years. She is also an active member of the American Group Psychotherapy Society and the Mid-Atlantic Group Psychotherapy Society, currently serving on the Workshop Committee of the AGPA. Dr. Hamerling was at the DC Institute of Mental Hygiene from 1984-1995. While there, she was Chair of the Quality Assurance Committee, led the Supervision Group for Psychology Externs, taught workshops and was on the Supervisors Committee. Her training and orientation are psychodynamic, but she is also trained in Brainspotting (a technique that accesses subcortical parts of the brain, often allowing for deeper processing and help with stuck points and trauma that are less accessible to talk therapy).

How It Stacks Up

Ann-Louise S. Silver, M.D.
Friday, October 30, 2015 9:30am-12:30pm

Harry Stack Sullivan is the founder of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis. His techniques were influential across the country, but especially in Washington, DC, where he founded The Washington School of Psychiatry, and taught at Chestnut Lodge. This seminar will address his clinical theory and his life. We will examine how he became an “expert by experience,” having gone through a psychotic episode and hospitalization. This was the foundation of how he learned what was helpful and what was not. We’ll speculate about his breakdown and recovery by exploring the writings of the medical director of the small, very personal midwest hospital where he was likely institutionalized. This avenue will also lead to insights about William Alanson White, Smith Ely Jelliffe and Sandor Ferencz.

Learning Objectives: at the end of the seminar participants will:

  1. Learn the history of Harry Stack Sullivan’s life and how it leads to the development of the psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis.
  2. Be able to describe three core tenets of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis.
  3. Be able to define the concept “expert by experience.”

Presenter: Ann-Louise S. Silver, MD is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University (B.A., M.D), the adult program of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute and the family therapy training program of the Washington School of Psychiatry. She worked and taught at Chestnut Lodge for many years. During her career, Dr. Silver has written numerous papers on the psychotherapy of schizophrenia and related subjects, and has edited or co-edited a number of books. She is a Clinical Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and teaches at the Military Residency Training Program at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, and the Washington School of Psychiatry. Dr Silver is the founding president of the United States Chapter of the International Society for the Psychological treatments of the Schizophrenias and other psychoses, ISPS-US (1998-2008) (www.isps-us.org) and is past president of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. Dr Silver is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. She heads the Columbia Academy of Psychodynamics, and is in private practice in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Does Hysteria Still Exist? Ask The Beautiful Butcher’s Wife, Not The DSM-5 Manual

Macario Giraldo, PhD
Friday, January 8, 2016 11:30am-2:30pm

The hysteric subject as presented to us by Lacanian psychoanalysis is somebody (man or woman) caught between a push for being, a desire for knowledge, and a refusal of jouissance (a special kind of enjoyment, especially the sexual one). Freud’s work with hysterics led him to the discovery of the unconscious in neurosis and the founding of psychoanalysis. Perhaps the absence of hysteria as a clinical condition in DSM-5 is an indication of how far the clinical has moved away from truly conceptualizing the unconscious in the development of symptoms. By examining the dream of the beautiful butcher’s wife, one of Freud’s patients, and how Lacan expands Freud’s insights, we will attempt to restore the central aspect of identification in the hysteric subject.

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

1. Differentiate between Real, Imaginary and Symbolic In Lacanain psychoanalysis.
2. Apply these differences to the process of identification in hysteria.
3. Clarify the central function of Desire in the treatment of hysteric subjects.
4. Describe the key concepts from four contemporary psychoanalysts and MFT therapists about the difficulties in sustaining sexuality in long term relationships.

Presenter: Macario Giraldo Ph.D is the author of The Dialogues IN/OF the Group: Lacanian Perspectives on the Psychoanalytic Group. He is founding member of the Lacanian Forum of Washington,D.C. He has been faculty at the Washington School of Psychiatry since 1974 and has conducted numerous seminars, workshops and institutes at AGPA. Dr. Giraldo has presented at many international meetings over the past 20 years. He has a private practice in Arlington, Virginia.

Listening To You, I Get The Story. . .

Fred L. Griffin, M.D.
Friday, March 11, 2016 9:30am-12:30pm

Contemporary psychoanalytic thinking about the interdependence of subjectivity and intersubjectivity has re-envisioned the analytic process, and with it the very nature of creative and engaged psychoanalytic listening. But where can the psychoanalytic therapist go to learn how to practice this active form of listening?

Certain works of fiction create textured, sensory worlds in which complex characters possessing shifting states of consciousness live within fluid emotional atmospheres. By entering the worlds that original writers create in their texts, the psychoanalytic therapist may learn to attend more closely to varying emotional states that generate nuanced, multidimensional views of the analysand’s internal and relational worlds, and to capture more fully the sensory experience encountered by the analyst him- or herself when taking in what the patient communicates within the analytic space.

Making use of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Dr. Griffin will explore ways for the clinician to participate imaginatively in listening for/to intersubjective experience. Participants will have an opportunity to experience firsthand the benefits of accessing this piece of creative writing by doing a short piece of free-writing about clinical experience in response to selected passages from the novel, which participants may volunteer to discuss with the group.

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

  1. Expand their capacities to listen for and identify the multi-sensorial therapeutic experience and to make fuller use of countertransference as a source of communication regarding the patient’s inner and relational worlds.
  2. Make use of this more visceral view of the transference-countertransference to discover more precise language that fits the patient’s states of consciousness, affective tone, and embodied sense of self. Give two examples of healthy attachment outcomes in therapy.
  3. Apply these skills in the service of better attuned therapeutic engagement with patients, by which to facilitate an analytic process that not only addresses psychic conflict, but that also provides the potential for new development.

Presenter: Fred L. Griffin, MD is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Dallas Psychoanalytic Center, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, and member of the Editorial Board of the The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. He is also on the panel of writing consultants at the New Directions program in Psychoanalytic Critical Thinking and Writing sponsored by the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis.

His writings are published in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, American Imago, and Literature and Medicine, as well as a chapter in the anthology Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine. In addition, he has written a chapter for a book published in 2015, titled Therapeutic Action: What Works in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. He has just completed his own book, CREATIVE LISTENING AND THE PSYCHOANALYTIC PROCESS: Sensibility, Engagement, and Envisioning, which will be published by Routledge in early 2016.

He has a private practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Dallas, Texas.

From Being At Risk To Taking a Risk: A Modern Analytic Approach To Working With Barriers To Intimacy

Ronnie Lee Levine, PhD
Friday, April 1, 2016 9:30am-12:30pm (The morning session will be one of our regular Friday Seminars – free to members, $60 to non-members)

Afternoon Session: 2:00-5:00pm. This session is for members only and limited to 15 registrants. We will further explore the morning’s themes around barriers to intimacy through experiential process groups. All participants in the afternoon will be part of a whole demonstration group. Note: This afternoon session is filled.

Many patients coming to therapy have difficulty in relating: they may not feel lovable, they may not be loveable. They may feel overwhelmed, helpless, and engage in destructive ways of communicating intense emotions. We will use a Modern Analytic approach to explore some of the challenges in relating, and study the fears, desires and adaptations that interfere with and enhance developing mature intimate relationships. This maturational-developmental-object relational model is distinct from other approaches in the way feelings and vulnerabilities are addressed. Interpretations are not primary. Emotional interventions and the use of the therapist’s self are utilized as a way of developing the patient’s cohesive self and moving a person from a narcissistic mode of relating to a relational one. These issues will be discussed and demonstrated in our workshop.

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

  1. Identify fears that interfere with the group leader addressing feelings in group.
  2. Specify the challenges in relating that interfere with and enhance developing mature relationships.
  3. Identify the integrative component of regression and intense feelings.
  4. Develop interventions to facilitate the expression and adaptive utilization of intense feeling.
  5. Identify relationships along a spectrum from narcissism to mature love.

Presenter: Ronnie Levine, Ph.D., ABPP, CGP, FAGPA, has been practicing psychotherapy for over 35 years with individuals, couples and groups. She received her Ph.D at Adelphi University, was a Harvard Fellow, and graduate of the NYU’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Her influences are Lou Ormont, Modern Psychoanalysis, Object Relations and Relational Theory. She served as Director of the Psychology Internship Program at Rockland Psychiatric Center for 10 years. Dr. Levine is a Diplomate in group psychology and conducts an ongoing training group in Austin Texas. She has taught many workshops and institutes for AGPA and EGPS, and conducted training workshops in St. Petersburg, Russia: Belfast: Columbia; London; and Lisbon. Dr. Levine has been on the Board of Directors of the Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society (EGPS) and the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA). She is currently a member of the editorial committee of the International Journal of Group Psychotherapy and on the faculties of the EGPS Group Training Program and The Center for Group Studies.

In 2004, Dr. Levine was an awarded Fellow of AGPA. Her papers include “Treating Idealized Hope and Hopelessness, “Progressing While Regressing in Relationships” and “Modern Psychoanalysis and Leslie Rosenthal.” She presented the Lou Ormont Lecture at the 2009 AGPA annual conference in Chicago. In June 2011, the Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society honored Dr. Levine for outstanding achievement in the field of group psychotherapy. In addition to her vast teaching and presentations, Dr. Levine maintains a private practice in New York, providing individual, couples, and group psychotherapy and individual and group supervision.

Special Afternoon Group Process Session with Dr. Levine: This is a follow-up to the morning’s session (attendance at the morning session is necessary). Registration is on a first-come, first serve basis for members only (non-members are welcome to become members at any time). Dr. Levine is a highly respected and sought after presenter/group leader. We anticipate that this afternoon section will fill up quickly. Therefore, we are asking for registrants to contact Lynn Hamerling directly to secure a spot (lynnhamerling@gmail.com or (202) 722-1507). Please do not just mail in registration and assume there will be remaining spots. The cost of the afternoon session is $60.