Russell Meares is an Australian distinguished emeritus professor of psychiatry and innovator of psychotherapeutic approaches for complex developmental trauma. His work is appreciated by thinkers including Thomas Ogden and Allan Schore as a contribution toward neuroscience-informed psychoanalytic theory which offers a complex yet affirming view of human creativity and the development of a reflective, robust sense of self.
Meares’s work focuses on the clinical question: How to foster recovery of a person’s unique selfhood from the disruptions of relational trauma? His “conversational model” of therapy offers a way to think about and refine the use of limbic-to-limbic communication in psychotherapeutic conversation. While this method is used to treat highly symptomatic patients, Meares also frames his theorizing broadly enough to comprehend a wide range of human experience.
In this 8-week study group, we will read and discuss selections from Russell Meares’s most recent book, The Poet’s Voice in the Making of Mind (Routledge, 2016), as well as from his earlier works: Intimacy and Alienation: Memory, Trauma, and Personal Being (Routledge, 2000), and The Metaphor of Play: Disruption and Restoration in the Borderline Experience (Routledge, 2005), as well as his clinical writings on the conversational model. Participants will be welcome to bring clinical material to the discussions.
Instructor: Carol Poole MA LMHC is a psychotherapist in private practice, with over 20 years of experience working with individual adults and couples. She has taught a number of classes for NWAPS on topics including rupture and repair in psychoanalytic therapy, and introduction to the concepts of holding and containing. Her own studies include years-long forays in the theoretical traditions of object relations, contemporary relational psychoanalysis and neuropsychology.
Learning Objectives:
1. Participants will be introduced in detail to Russell Meares’s “Conversational Model” of psychotherapy, designed for traumatized patients who experience frequent alienating disruptions in their sense of self and other.
2. Participants will gain an understanding of Meares’s neuroscience-informed developmental model for the way the music of conversation is formative for human minds.
3. Participants will have an opportunity to bring their clinical material to class discussions, to integrate the readings into their clinical practice.
Fees: $240 for Alliance Members and $270 for non-Alliance members.
Class Size: Class is limited to a maximum of 10 participants. (Registration closes on 1/8/25)
Refund Policy: Refunds less a $30 handling fee will be given up until one week before the first class.
This presentation has been approved for a total of 12.0 CE’s for licensed mental health counselors and associates, marriage and family therapists and social workers by the Washington State Society for Clinical Social Work.
