August J. Cwik, Psy.D.
Abstract
The idea of countertransference has expanded beyond its original meaning of a neurotic reaction to include all reactions of the therapist: affective, bodily, and imaginal. Additionally, Jung’s fundamental insight in Psychology of the Transference was that a “third thing” is created in the analysis, but he failed to demonstrate how this third is experienced and utilized in analysis. This “analytic third”, as Ogden names it, is co-created by analyst and analysand in depth work and becomes the object of analysis. Reverie, as developed by Bion and clinically utilized by Ogden, provides a means of access to the unconscious nature of this third. Reverie will be placed on a continuum of contents of mind, ranging from indirect to direct associative forms described as associative dreaming. Active imagination, as developed by Jung, provides the paradigm for a mode of interaction with these contents within the analytic encounter itself. Whether the analyst speaks from or about these contents depends on the capacity of the patient to dream. Classical amplification can be understood as an instance of speaking about inner contents. As the ego of the analyst, the conscious component, relates to unconscious contents emerging from the analytic third, micro-activations of the transcendent function constellate creating an analytic compass.

Click here for reading

We will view part one of a two part video presentation of David Wallin discussing attachment theory as it pertains to the practice of psychotherapy.

While attachment research shows that the parent’s security, insecurity, or trauma is unavoidably transmitted to the child, clinical experience suggests the same is true of the therapist in relation to the patient. Because we are the tools of our trade, no factor influences our effectiveness as therapists more than our own attachment patterns. Rather than our theories or techniques, it is who we are—and who we can become—that ultimately determines our capacity to create with our patients a genuinely therapeutic relationship.

Illustrating his approach with vivid case material and video examples, Wallin explores how the therapist’s mindfulness and reflection can transform impasses generated by attachment history into opportunities for insight and inspiration. Using attachment research to clarify the impact of the therapist’s attachment patterns as these interlock with those of the patient, he highlights the reality that for the patient to heal, the therapist must also change. Of paramount importance here is a focus on the nonverbal realm of experience that is evoked, enacted, and/or embodied. This focus opens a “royal road” to the awareness and integration of previously dissociated experience, not only in the patient but in the therapist as well.

David Wallin, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Albany and Mill Valley. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College who received his doctorate from the Wright Institute, he has been practicing, teaching and writing about psychotherapy for nearly three decades. He is the author of Attachment in Psychotherapy (Guilford, 2007) and coauthor (with Stephen Goldbart) of Mapping the Terrain of the Heart: Passion, Tenderness, and the Capacity to Love (Jason Aronson, 1996). He has lectured on attachment and psychotherapy throughout the United States and taught for The Wright Institute, the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology, and the extension programs of the University of California and the California School of Professional Psychology.

Click here for reading

The patient tells an incident with her husband and a story that she read in the newspaper. You make a comment and she is reminded of a dream about her mother, which makes her think of something that happened in her daughter's kindergarten class. You begin to comment on the dream she has told and she interrupts to tell you an apparently unrelated dream from the next night. Some of the material is obviously emotionally important to her and some she seems to have no connection to or feeling about. Besides which, you keep remembering an experience you had as a child. What is going on here?

In any hour, the quantity of stimuli we are trying to process is overwhelming. There is the surface layer of the patient's material, it's implications for the patient's inner world, for the patient's experience of the therapeutic relationship, for the patient's outer relationships and for his or her past. There are all the nonverbal communications from the patient and all of your own inner fantasies, memories, feelings, "irrelevant" thoughts.... How do we process all of this to arrive at some understanding of what the patient is "really" talking about, what he or she needs you to see and understand in this particular hour?

Barbara Stevens Sullivan will describe the process of listening to the unfolding hour as though it is a two-person dream that the therapist is both immersed in and trying to observe. She will present one or two process records of therapy hours that she and the assembled group will try to make sense of. Together, we will see how many layers of material we can unearth in a very ordinary hour.

Barbara Stevens Sullivan, M.S.W., LCSW, is an analyst member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She teaches in their analyst training program as well as in public programs for them and for The Psychotherapy Institute. She is the author of Psychotherapy Grounded in the Feminine Principle (Chiron, 1989) and The Mystery of Analytical Work: Weavings from Jung and Bion (Routledge, 2010).

Click here for reading
Click here for second reading

Title, readings, and objectives TBA. This presentation will meet the requirement of 2 CEU for ethics required for license renewal in September 2012.

Reading 1Reading 2Reading 3

Tim will present on psychosomatics from the point of view of Analytical Psychology and Object Relations.