One of the most difficult challenges in our work is a patient with entrenched depression. Sometimes we encounter this as the presenting problem but often it emerges only gradually as the hidden background of the personality. Tolerating the impact of deep depression session after session can be one of the most taxing elements of our experience as therapists.
Via Zoom | Max Capacity: 15
Join us for a close reading of Stephen A. Mitchell's Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis, one of the foundational texts of the relational psychoanalytic movement. We will explore Mitchell's articulation of a relational model that places the wishes, needs, and emotional lives of both therapist and client at the center of the therapeutic process.
Via Zoom - First and final class optional in-person. | Max Capacity: 30
What does it mean to be empathically attuned to a client's psychological needs? How do you navigate a therapeutic impasse, repair an empathic failure, or offer an interpretation without inducing shame? What does it suggest when you find yourself chronically bored with a client? What does it mean to function as a selfobject, and how do you recognize when you are experienced in the transference as a mirroring selfobject rather than an idealized selfobject?
What does it mean to be racialized as invisible, not only to others, but to oneself?
And what happens when that invisibility enters the consulting room, whether in the experience of an Asian American clinician or patient? The therapeutic encounter may include psychic and relational dynamics that are often misrecognized: the burden of shame, the expectation for compliance, the pressure to appear “high-functioning,” and the quiet negotiation between being seen and remaining hidden.
In this recent book, Ron Britton, a British psychoanalyst in the object relations tradition, explores his experience working in psychoanalysis and what he has come to see as most important. We will read selected chapters from his book on these topics of sex, death and the superego. Britton especially explores the erotic transference-countertransference experience and the problem of the destructive superego. Please contact the instructor to enroll.
Working with adolescents poses challenges that differ in important ways from those encountered with adults. Adolescents are often resistant to therapy and struggle to articulate their internal experience. Parents, in turn, are often anxious or uncertain and may exert conscious or unconscious pressure on the therapist. This three-part seminar examines the technical and developmental complexities of working with adolescents and their parents in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
Lindsey Walker, MA, LMFT
“Started seven years of useless couch life. Felt I was stupid.” -Fritz Perls
Fritz Perls was a trained psychoanalyst who (with others) created gestalt therapy in the context of the rise of the authoritarian Nazi regime, and in part as antidote to the authoritarian nature of analysis. Gestalt therapists took patients off the couch, and sat them face-to-face with their therapists, in a move to make the patient an equal, as knowing a participant as the therapist.
This seminar is open to all beginning and experienced clinicians looking to fortify their theoretical and clinical understandings as related to psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
While this CLINICAL ISSUES seminar is a continuation of the Fall 2025 THEORETICAL seminar on A Basic Analytic Approach to Psychotherapy, it is not a prerequisite to have taken the fall 2025 seminar.
Learning Objectives:
Drawing on mythology, psychoanalytic investigation and sociocultural trends this seminar will explore the ever-changing landscape of masculinity from classical images to current-day sociocultural perspectives on the male gender.