33rd Annual Forum Conference - "The Personhood of the Psychotherapist"
It is the aim of the Forum, our annual conference and spring meeting, to share the experience, training, and expertise of the psychoanalytic community. The 33rd annual Forum will take place on April 15, 2023, and we are excited to welcome presentations on topics of interest to our members.
Registration Now Open!
At this present time, we will not be requiring masks while attending the conference. We support and encourage those with health sensitivities and discomforts to do what they need to feel comfortable and be able to participate in the event and community. This, of course may change if there are some local or national changes.
About the theme:
The dictionary defines personhood as the quality or condition of being a person; we can think of this condition as one’s essential subjectivity. To be a person is to be a subject always in relationship with other subjects. In psychotherapy/analysis, therapist and patient come together as subjects in a mutually influencing relationship.
The genuine personhood of the therapist may be obscured by their identification with a persona shaped by academic and professional training, the dictates of a particular theoretical lens, social, cultural, personal, and familial history.
Yet, as subjects embedded in genuine human relationships, we are not “objective observers.” We are as vulnerable as our patients to every possible human emotion—the stuff of “countertransference” and enactments. As Sullivan beautifully said, “We are all much more simply human than otherwise,” and no more so than in the consulting room.
As the focal point of our next Forum gathering, NWAPS invites our community members to consider this rich and complex topic of the person of the therapist in its diverse theoretical, clinical, and (inter)personal implications.
Schedule:
8:30am Doors & Registration Open and Continental Breakfast
9:00am Presentations Series I:
“Of Failure and Faith: Credo of a Psychoanalytic Agnostic”
Peter Jabin
Through this presentation, in the homiletic style, I will share my identity as a Jungian-born, psychoanalytically trained, pastorally formed clinician practicing at the “dusking “of the Anthropocene. Its intertwining movements will include failure, grief and devotional practice. I will reflect upon current context of the emergent climate crisis as global existential crisis in which we are confronted by our inescapable collective and individual failure, guilt and possible extinction. I will share my experience in facilitating communal grief rituals, which can begin to reweave our profoundly frayed social fabric, opening a portal that can move us from psychic collapse toward the possibility of a (re)vitalizing responsiveness. I will share an understanding of pastoral psychotherapy as devotional practice, wherein the frame becomes ritual and the client makes an offering to the “altar” of the intersubjective space which is understood as containing Ground of Being/Ultimate Reality/God, the ultimate mutative agent.
The Cool Adult: Exploring Aunt/Uncle Countertransference in Working with Teens.
Christine Hutchinson
When working with adolescents, it is a common experience for therapists to hold parental countertransference feelings, particularly if the therapists have themselves raised children through adolescence. It is also understood that work with adolescence often evokes one’s own adolescent experience, both the processed and unprocessed material. This presentation explores a countertransference that embodies both parental and mirroring experiences in the therapist of adolescent patients, one that can be thought of in terms of an Aunt/Uncle/Parent’s Sibling countertransference. The Aunt/Uncle/Parent’s Sibling relationship is a kind of liminal space - not quite parent and not quite sibling, which echoes the liminal space (not child, not adult) of adolescence itself. Using a clinical example, modern essays, and psychoanalytic journal articles, the presenter will explore this Aunt/Uncle countertransference as a common countertransference experience when working with adolescent patients.
The Supervisee’s Supervisor’s Supervisor: Becoming Oneself Knowing and Not Knowing: Audacious Supervision
Rachel Newcombe and Erin Pierson
The desire to supervise suggests a belief we have something to offer. But what are we offering? This presentation will explore how learning to supervise is an endeavor that privileges the process of learning as the foundation for becoming a critical thinker. How we impart knowledge, the love of knowledge, and a respect for ideas is the art of supervising. We will describe why inviting supervisees to share internal musings, hunches, fears, and free associations engages them in the process of learning to form their own questions.
- When is someone ready to supervise?
- Who is the supervisor doing the supervising?
- What does a supervisor study to become a supervisor?
These questions will be explored through stories and a dialogue with attendees. The gift of supervision is teaching and engaging with a supervisee in a manner that helps them become curious about everything: theory, moment by moment clinical interactions, and gaps.
Becoming an Analyst … or Myself? Identity, Emotional (Un)Availability, and A Fidelity of Experiencing
Caleb Dodson
A predominant experience of the contemporary patient is not of immediate peril or threat, but an overwhelmingly painful and tactfully defended sense of insignificance. Even us clinicians, have a fundamental need and longing for some self-cohesion. Something we can point to as ‘me’ or ‘I’. Coincidentally, this is much the goal of analytic training and the process of analysis/therapy. To get us in touch with our experience or the deeper ‘I’ amidst a constant deluge of stimulus that can pull us out of ourselves. This is our inherent vulnerability, consciously and unconsciously, as human-beings and the place of our most profound relatability and practice. The ultimate measure being our own emotional (un)availability to remain with experience and open to life. Yet this is not merely learned, but the most profound personal process thats cultivated. Our identity can get in our way. And, regardless of training, hours on the couch, degrees, or image, the very thing that makes us fellows with every Joe, Jill, or Jordan on the street.
10:00am Break
10:15am Presentations Series II:
Analytic Love, The Fortuitous Fit, and Other Musings about Our Psychoanalytic Work
Margaret Crastnopol
This presentation summarizes facets of the psychoanalytic work in an unusual pair of papers by Richard Frank and Mel Bornstein. Frank, an experienced training analyst, candidly discusses his personal treatment, while Bornstein offers his own perspective on it as Frank’s training analyst. My discussion gives particular attention to a phenomenon I call a “fortuitous fit” between analyst and patient, and to the nature and significance of “psychoanalytic love.” I engage with the question, “Is this analytic?” by offering reflections on psychoanalysis as I practice it. I examine the situation of there being a “gooey” kind of intimacy between analyst and patient, and consider how one’s own particular selfhood affects the way one practices analytic treatment. I touch on various underappreciated aspects (e.g., the analyst’s Achilles’ heels, inherent impediments to psychic change on the patient’s part) that can limit a treatment’s effectiveness. My talk will invite attendees to reflect on these fundamental matters.
Patient Betrayal and Group Mutiny: Surviving the Injury of a Negative Transference
Dawn Loerch
We develop meaningful, emotionally intimate, and strong attachments to our patients. We are trained to work with the transference, countertransference, and enactments that can ensue. Yet, this does not necessarily protect us emotionally when a client develops a negative transference. This presentation will discuss how the negative transference showed up with a long-term client seen both individually and in group. As the patient became more devaluing and disrespectful toward the therapist in the individual work, the group dynamics also became untenable for the therapist. We can psychologically understand the dynamics and defenses at play, but the vulnerability of the psychotherapist remains hidden. The pervasive perception that this kind of acting out is what we get paid for does not do justice to the heart and soul injury that happens when a patient withdraws genuine care. Understanding the personhood and vulnerability of the therapist will be the focus of this presentation.
The Diads Challenge of Facing and Addressing Abandonment Issues Sometimes Mistaken for Borderline Personality
George Ankuta
A discussion of the personhood of this therapist will be provided as it related to a late-30’s male patient’s dynamics in transference and countertransference in the mutually influencing psychotherapy relationship. A summary of some of the theoretical foundations important in the treatment of this patient will be provided from drive theory to relational approaches to attachment theory (Mitchell, 1988; Levine, 2012; Masterson, 1999; Linehan, 1993; DSM-V, 2013). The value and meaning of the diagnostic labels of borderline personality disorder versus abandonment issues from the patient’s and the therapist’s perspective will be discussed. The dilemma of the patient’s and therapist’s desire to help the patient versus the patient’s and therapist’s desire to help the patient’s girlfriend will be discussed.
Tales from the Social Unconscious: Expanding Personhood
Karen Weisbard and Pete Weiss
In this presentation, we offer a broader conceptualization of personhood and subjectivity that accounts for the social forces that regulate what is allowed to be known, felt, or considered part of one’s personal experiences. We explore the concepts of the social unconscious and normative unconscious processes to illustrate how the cultural hierarchies of race, gender, and heterosexuality exert constant force in our clinical work, in ourselves, and in our patients. Most often we are unaware of how we continue to norm social forces that we consciously work to dispel, hoping to offer our patients a freer and more expanded way to live, and yet regularly enforce whiteness, binary gender, and heteronormativity. Tales of our own social unconscious will bring us into these domains in a visceral way. We believe that social psychoanalysis changes the future of psychoanalysis, making it a more relevant and revolutionary practice for subjectivities in the world.
11:15pm Break
11:30am Presentations Series III:
When the Therapist is Hurt: Healing Through Personal Encounter in Existential-Analytical Clinical Supervision
Mihaela Launeanu
This presentation aims to illustrate that therapists are, first and foremost, persons who can be hurt by their clients and cannot always find protection behind their professional persona. As therapists, we are vulnerable to our patients. Boundaries can be breached, leaving us wounded, with agonizing questions about ourselves and our work. Shame creeps in and relentlessly takes over, paralyzing us and pushing us to hide. However, a personal wound can only be healed in a personal encounter where our subjectivity is taken seriously. Drawing on the framework of Existential Analysis (EA, Laengle, 2012) and its conceptualization of concepts of person, ego, boundaries, and encounter, we will introduce the audience to the lived experience of Anne, a therapist who came for supervision after a session deeply impacted her with her client, Nora. What the presentations hope to convey and bolster is that though being a therapist is a professional role, it also means, first and foremost, being a person with another person. This is not a presentation about interpersonal dynamics, per se, but more about what is happening within us as therapists, aka persons, amidst “difficult patients.”
Personhood and Embodied Self: Maps and Compass for a Lifelong Journey
Michael Galloway
In 1962 when I attended the Seattle World’s Fair, I was mesmerized by the 45 second elevator ride to the top. Unknown to me at the time, Thomas Kuhn had just published a fabled book entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Fifty years later I was enthused while reading Allan Schore’s The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy, where he writes “Thomas Kuhn asserted that paradigms consist of sets of propositions or hypotheses that order an investigator’s observations. When a paradigm is overthrown, a new one replaces it” (cited in Schore, 2012). Today’s workshop explores how affective neuroscience, coined by Jaak Panksepp (1998) turns 20th century Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy on its ear in favor of Affect Regulation Theory (Schore, (1994, 2012), Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2011), Sensorimotor and Somatic Narrative (Ogden, 2006) and others. This workshop playfully invites you to orient and map your journey of personhood with your embodied self.
Are your stars like my stars?: Self Disclosure and Working in the Analytic Tradition as a Trans-Clinician
Cameron Boisen
Self disclosure in the analytic tradition is a fraught and oft discussed topic, and the ‘blank screen’ of the analyst, one of the historically defining features of the psychoanalysis. While we understand that the material of the analyst’s personhood can interfere, suffocate, or obscure, gender has typically been seen as a self evident piece of information, without training or discussion as to how, or if, we disclose this to patients. What then of the body of the transsexual analyst? How do our bodies speak, and what can be learned from our unique experiences about disclosure, legibility, and the person of the therapist writ large? This presentation will unpack the broader ideological tenants informing practices of self disclosure, as well as consider how these are uniquely implicated in the world of gender, and the special considerations and opportunities present for trans clinicians and patients.
“The Personhood of the Therapist - Making Room for Differences.”
Karol Marshall and E. Kerry Bramhall
Psychodynamic therapists use strategies to gain access to complex aspects of ourselves, continually working to move beyond well-developed professional selves to make room for our own known and unknown inner differences. A case illustration will be presented concerning an ongoing relationship between an individual who is processing a gender change and a therapist who is processing the loss of her lifetime. Consideration of diverse relationship patterns in both participants can be a powerful help in giving richness, depth, and true relevance to the clinical relationship. In this workshop we will describe and demonstrate a tool we have developed to aid this process. This involves private free writing, encouraging ourselves to write both in and outside the margins of our usual coherence. Participants in this workshop will have the opportunity to experiment with this sort of personal writing and reflecting, privately and openly in the workshop.
12:30pm Catered Lunch & Social Time
1:30pm Annual Board Meeting and Lunch Continued
2:00pm Keynote
The Force Awakens: A Relational View of Mutual Destructiveness in Treatment
Sally Bjorklund and John Cardinali
A Relational view of analytic process views treatment as a co-created field of enactments through which the patient’s wounds are re-lived. Maroda further asserts that “both the analyst and the patient are motivated ideally to recreate our pasts with each other in the interests of making a difference we couldn’t make in childhood.” In our hope of healing our patients and ourselves, we emphasize the role of kindness and empathic care. However, many psychoanalytic thinkers have recognized that in order for sincere love and true healing to occur we need to allow hate and cruelty into the relationship. Oftentimes, to get to the place of sincere love, therapists must also be able to hate their patients because they “…want to see all the suffering that we cause them corrected one by one, to punish us for them, and then to wait until we no longer react with defiance or by taking offense, but with insight, regret, and indeed loving sympathy (Ferenczi).” The capacity for mutual forgiveness and understanding is what frees both patient and analyst from destructive enactments.
Sally Bjorklund, MA, LMHC is a psychoanalyst, supervisor and consultant. She was a co-founder of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Seattle. She is on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Perspectives and supervisor for the National Training Program at NIP. She was a contributor to Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst’s Life Experience: When the Personal Becomes Professional, and has written on topics including sex and gender, adoption, aging, working with hard to reach patients and erotic transference.
John Cardinali, PsyD, ABPP is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Seattle. He is on the faculty of SPSI where he is a Consulting Analyst and Analyst of Candidates. He has also served as Faculty Chair and Board President at SPSI. He has a long-standing interest in the integration of diverse theories within psychoanalysis and incorporates EMDR into his psychoanalytic practice.
3:30pm Further Discussion - Closing Remarks
Fees: $160 for Alliance members, $190 for non-members, $115 student non-members, $105 Alliance student members (all rates will increase by $10 after April 1, 2023)
Refund Policy: Refunds less a $35 handling fee will be given up until one week before the presentation.
Accommodations: The Alliance strives to host an inclusive event that enables all people, regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and ability, to comfortably attend and access presentation materials. So we can better meet your needs, please let us know at least two weeks in advance if you have a special accommodation request.
Financial Need: If you are experiencing financial need and would like to discuss reduced admission, please let us know within two weeks of the event.
This presentation has been approved for a total of 5.50 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.
