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Susan Kavaler-Adler, Ph.D., ABPP is the Founder and Executive Director of the Object Relations Institute. She has been in private practice for 33 years as a clinical psychologist-psychoanalyst. Dr. Kavaler-Adler is the author of 3 books and more than 50 articles. Her third book, Mourning, Spirituality and Psychic Change: A New Object Relations View of Psychoanalysis (Brunner-Routledge 2003) won the National Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Dr. Kavaler-Adler has received ten awards for her professional writing, including 4 Arlene Wohlberg Memorial Awards from Postgraduate Center for Mental health for the best annual psychoanalytic articles, 3 book recognition awards from the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP) and 3 from Postgraduate Center for Mental Health. Her other books are The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers (Routledge 1993, OtherPress 2000) and The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity (Routledge, 1996), and 2 chapters on erotic transference in Gender, Erotic Transference, and Countertransference, edited by Joy Schaverien, which follows Dr. Kavaler-Adler's acclaimed article Vaginal Core or Vampire Mouth: the Visceral Level of Envy in Women and the Protosymbolic Politics of Object Relations in Gender and Envy (Routledge, 1998) edited by Nancy Burke. This past year, Dr. Kavaler-Adler was the guest lecturer at the 10th Anniversary of the Object Relations Institute in South Korea, where she lectured at a conference named for her theories: "Developmental Mourning versus the Demon Lover Complex." Her book Mourning, Spirituality and Psychic Change is being translated into Korean, and videos of her lectures have become part of the curriculum of the Object Relations Institute in South Korea, where Dr. Kavaler-Adler will return to lecture in the future.
An object relations understanding of countertransference is critical to helping patients reach a point of mourning primal loss to heal their disrupted abilities to sustain positive relationships. As defined by Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein and Annie Reich countertransference is an intrapsychic and unconscious experience of the psychoanalyst, which needs to be made conscious in the analyst's analysis so that it can be recognized when it is triggered with any patient. However, countertransference as defined by Paula Heinman, Betty Joseph, D.W. Winnicott, Otto Kernberg, Thomas Ogden, Lawrence Epstein, is a phenomena that can be consciously experienced when in the room with the patient, and which then can be used to inform the psychoanalytic psychotherapist of what is pressing for reenactment from the internal world of the patient. To distinguish these different views, and to recognize their usefulness on a clinical basis, Lawrence Epstein has expanded upon the ideas of D.W. Winnicott in his paper on "Hate in the Countertransference," with the theory of "objective countertransference" versus "subjective countertransference." When we are open to tolerating that which is felt as intolerable to the patient's inner child, we can consciously process that which is so critical and necessary for our patients to know as a way out of the internal prisons that they operate in (Fairbairn,). Without our willingness to consciously process what is enacted on us, projected into us, triggering particular parts of ourselves, our patients can remain in their individual modes of psychic hell. This early experience is continually replayed and projected out, not only as a repetition compulsion, but as a profound and provocative preoedipal enactment that destroys and spoils the essence of relationship. This prevents these traumatized souls from finding the love that can sustain them, and from finding the support that can promote their creative and self supporting endeavors in the world.
In this workshop, Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler, an expert on the healing and psychic change process of "developmental mourning," will discuss the various views of countertransference in the historical psychoanalytic literature, and will offer to role-play the analyst in conjunction with the workshop participants "getting inside the psychic skins" of their patients by playing the part of their patients in role-plays. Through guided visualization each workshop participant will be able to tune into an encounter with a patient that they can imagine within their internal world, and to promote a dialogue with that patient, so as to understand the subjectivity and the interaction between them, that needs to be brought to the symbolic level of a verbal dialogue.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
10:00 am - 4:00 pm
9:30 am Registration
41 Central Park West, 1C, NYC
(Entrance on 64th Street)
Registration by
tel: 212.268.8638
fax: 646.349.1498
email: news@orinyc.org
$50 student / $75 non-student2008 WORKSHOP SERIESProcessing of Countertransference to
Understand and Encounter Our Patients
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Susan Kavaler-Adler, Ph.D., ABPP, NCPsyA
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