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Workshops and Seminars

POSTGRADUATE PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY

March 16, 2012, Friday Evening Presentation

DIALECTICS OF MORTALITY AND IMMORTALITY:

TIME AS A PERSECUTORY vs. a HOLDING OBJECT

Speaker: Susan Kavaler-Adler, PhD, ABPP, D.Litt, NCPsyA

Place: Baruch College Library, 151 East 25th Street (between Lexington and 3^rd Ave); Room #320A

RSVP to Linda Meyer, LCSW at tolindameyer@gmail.com. Each RSVP will be acknowledged.

A former conference discussant for this paper on “Time as an Object,” Dr. Jeffrey Rubin, well known author of books on Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis has stated:

“Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler’s paper is a stimulating mediation on time, play and the potential revitalization of psychoanalysis. Any of one of those topics would have been enough of a gift to us. Susan gives us all three. Susan is playing with expanding Winnicott’s seminal – and unceasingly generative – notion of transitional or potential space. Potential space for Winnicott and Winnicottian-inspired analysts like Ogden is an atmosphere, an attitude, a spirit of openness and playfulness, rather than a physical location. People, experiences, life – all take on an added richness and aliveness. Susan is enlarging potential space and extending it into the zone of time; temporizing potential space, elucidating what we might call potential time.

Susan distinguishes between two different kinds of relation to time:

1) When we are obsessed or preoccupied and feel impinged on, trapped and imprisoned and persecuted by time; and

2) Time as a matrix in which the moment of experiencing opens up and we are connected to ourselves; allow ourselves to feel – especially intense and unresolved emotions – and are thus less bounded and more related and alive.

Susan’s lovely paper has many virtues. It illuminates an important and neglected topic – the role of time in object relations theory, the therapeutic relationship, and clinical process.”

Some of the topics that will be discussed within the broader topic are the following. Each will be illustrated with clinical case vignettes, and with dialectic, back and forth, between the “eternal now” clinical moment and the Argentine tango moment. While integrating theories of Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, and Kavaler-Adler, the subtopics within the paper are:

· Time as persecutory versus time as holding: patients’ negotiation of time or using time as resistance.
· Hate as blocking the flow of time or hate processed into symbolic meaning levels, so that it can be negotiated within the flow of time.
· June and the tissue mask on the couch: a transitional object phenomenon that transforms time as well as space.
· The female follower closing her eyes in Argentine tango.
· Defensive illusions versus developmentally enhancing illusions related to dealing with time.
· Projective identification and time.
· The analyst’s breathing.
· From Dueling to Dancing, From Polarization to Dialectic
· The full organic cycle of mourning, and of “developmental mourning.”
· Conclusion on the subject of time as an object.

For more information, please contact PostGrad Psychoanalytic or write to Dr. Kavaler-Adler at drkavaleradler@gmail.com / call 212-674-5425.

*****

Past event:

BARRIERS TO SUCCESS: OBJECT RELATIONS PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVE

In this workshop, Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler will address the core conflicts and fears that serve as self-sabotaging barriers to success in all areas of achievement, creativity, and love. In the morning part of the workshop, Dr. Kavaler-Adler will discuss the theoretical and clinical issues related to dealing with barriers to success. In the afternoon she will use an “in vivo” role-play, to demonstrate the clinical approach to such issues, where a volunteer workshop participant will play a patient, and Dr. Kavaler-Adler will play the analyst.

In life, we all aspire to both conscious and unconscious goals, but often there are psychological barriers that we may cling to and be haunted by, which block our aspirations. Projected envy and terrors of the actual envy of others can block motivations to succeed, when dissociated and/or repressed primal rage intensify the intimidating power of projected hostility and envy, and of perceptions of others as rivalries in areas of competition. Desire can be blocked by oedipal level fears of rivalry and hostile completion, but more primitive and primal fears of abandonment can also be at play, when developmental arrests have taken place in the preoedipal years of separation-individuation and self-integration.

How we address these psychological blocks in a clinical situation is critical to helping patients in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, to overcome all their inhibitions and intimidations, as they attempt to motivate themselves to succeed in life. Knowledge of the British and American object relations theories can be critical to help our patients free themselves up from unconscious conflicts that inhibit them, and from dissociated parts of them that are continually enacting self-sabotaging operations in their internal worlds, so that their external world progress is barred and blocked. Dr. Kavaler-Adler will discuss Melanie Klein’s theories of unconscious envy and primitive rage related to blocks in love and creativity; Ronald Fairbairn’s “internal saboteur” operations, in which unconscious loyalties to primal bad objects sabotage all progress in life; D. W. Winnicott’s “hate in the countertransference” that highlights the provoked hostilities, which cause retaliations in public and private relations that can only be overcome by the psychotherapist’s “object survival;” and Wilfred Bion’s “attacks on linking,” in which one part of the mind attacks the other, as it disrupts all connections that could result in manifested motivations. She will also address issues related to pathological mourning shown in so many cases in her own writings on object relations theory, and specifically on “fears of success.”

For further understanding of all these issues, those interested can read Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s National Gradiva Award (from NAAP 2004) winning book, Mourning, Spirituality, and Psychic Change: A new Object Relations View of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2003), where detailed cases are presented. Also, Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s 2006 article on fears of success, entitled, “My Graduation is my Mother’s Funeral,” can be read in the International Forum of Psychoanalysis. (This article will be provided for all workshop participants.) Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s other books and articles also address issues of success in life through the progress of “developmental mourning” versus barriers to success in arrested and pathological mourning, as seen in “the demon lover complex.”

*****

Past event:

Self-Sabotage as Loyalty to Internal Parental Objects: Theoretical and Clinical Integrations

Lecture and Role-play at the NJ Society for Clinical Social Work (CEU Approved)

with Susan Kavaler-Adler, PhD, ABPP, D.Litt

Date: Sunday, September 25, 11am – 2pm

Fee: $40 for non-members of NJSCSW

Location: 642 Pine Lakes Drive East, Wayne, NJ, 07470 (Use MapQuest for directions).

For more information, contact the host, Luba Shagwat, @973-831-1710 or 973-831-8758,

or contact the organizer, Dr. Jack Schwartz of NJSCSW, at psyjack@msn.com.

*****

Past event:

TRAUMA AND RESILIENCE: OBJECT RELATIONS VIEW

(download the flyer HERE)

Workshop at NAAP’S October 22^nd, 2012 Annual Conference @ The NY Marriott Downtown

Workshop Series II (3:40-5:10)

Workshop Leader: Susan Kavaler-Adler, PhD, ABPP, Litt.D., NCPsyA

This workshop will be both theoretical and experiential. The workshop leader will share brief case examples related to psychological trauma due to date rape, demon lover complex, fear of success, addiction, and early incest. Discussion will include: 1) internal world dramas that are re-played repeatedly in the external world until the trauma is experienced, understood, and worked through in object relations psychoanalytic approach; 2) schizoid, narcissistic, and hysterical character defenses that are related to the time of the developmental arrest caused by the trauma; 3) psychic capacities that allowed for resilience and recovery in each of the traumatized subjects and how these capacities were revived and revitalized by a developmental mourning process, when they were partially dissociated through the trauma itself.

In experiential portion of the workshop, Dr. Kavaler-Adler will lead a guided psychic visualization to help each workshop participant to go into their own internal worlds and have a dialogue with someone in that world about a past trauma in their own lives. Those who wish to share their internal world experience with the workshop group will be invited to do so.

For registration - contact NAAP by phone 212-741-0515; fax 212-366-4347, or via web - at www.naap.org

*****

Past event:

Introduction to the Object Relations Clinical Theory & Technique of Psychotherapy

(Trimester 1 of the 1^st Year of All Training Programs at the ORI.

This 10-week course can be taken as a separate non-credit course)

Date and Time: Thursdays, October 6 - December 15, 2011, 8:30-9:45pm

Professor: Susan Kavaler-Adler, PhD, ABPP, NPsyA, D.Litt

Location: 115 East 9^th Street; 12P, NYC, 10003

Download the Syllabus HERE Link to the full Course description and Syllabus HERE

Class 1: Introduction of the course and its readings. Clinical role-play will be offered, to illustrate the Object Relations clinical technique. Main reading: “The Matrix of the Mind,” by Thomas Ogden.

Class 2: The Psychoanalytic Dialogue. Instinct, phantasy, and psychological deep structure in the work of Melanie Klein. The concept of phantasy; the preconception and the realization. Freud’s conception of “Inheritance of Knowledge.” The symbolic form of early phantasy activity; the role of the environment.

Class 3: The paranoid-schizoid position: Self as an object. Splitting; early stages of integration; splitting as discontinuity of history. The depressive position and the birth of the historical subject. Transition into the depressive position; development of subjectivity; management of danger in the depressive position; and creation of history. Manic defense. Achievement of ambivalence. Depressive position and the Oedipus complex.

Class 4: Between the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive position. Acute regression to the paranoid-schizoid position. A foray into the depressive position; the creation of psychic reality; Oedipal-level transference and countertransference. Role-play experience in class.

Class 5: Theory of internal object relations. Transference, countertransference, and projective identification.

Class 6: The mother, the infant, and the matrix in the work of Donald Winnicott. The period of the subjective objects; the period of transitional phenomena, and the period of whole-object relatedness.

Class 7: Potential space. Dream space and analytic space. Winnicott’s language: the phenomenon of playing; potential space, and the dialectical process. Psychopathology of potential space. The symbol, the symbolized, and subjectivity. Empathy and projective identification. Dream space. Analytic space.

Class 8: Discussion about the article by Thomas Ogden, “Reading Susan Isaacs: Toward a radically revised theory of thinking.”

Class 9: Symbolism. Erotic transference. (Based on articles by Susan Kavaler-Adler, and the clinical case in her Routledge book, Mourning, Spirituality, and Psychic Change.)

Class 10: Role-play demonstration intertwined with discussion of course readings.

Fees: $450/ 10-week course, paid before 10/2/11 to “ORI,” by check/ money order (sent to: ORI Administrator; 75-15 187 street; Fresh Meadows, NY, 11366).

For more information, visit www.orinyc.org or contact ORI Administrator at 646-522-1056.

*****

Past event:

The Therapist-Analyst as Clinical Instrument: Processing Clinician’s Internal Experience

Four-week Course - Thursdays, June 9, 2011- June 30, 2011; 8:15-9:45 pm

Course Instructor and Experiential Role-Play Leader – Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler

115 East 9^th Street (@ 3rd Avenue); 12P; NYC, 10003

Topics Include:

Countertransference: Old and new perspectives. Objective countertransference as a clinical tool: How does it differ from subjective countertransference?

What is projection and what is projective identification? How do we process projections and projective identification, and why?

What developmental disruptions cause the dissociative phenomena that become projective identification as opposed to projection that is based on a core integrated self and repression?

Why is the key role of the processing of projective identification not understood? What scares people about the concept of projective identification?

Clinical examples and processing of these phenomena will be discussed and role-played.

Fee: $200/ four-week course. For more information, call Dr. Kavaler-Adler at 212-674-5425 or email DrKavalerAdler@gmail.com

To register, please send checks or money orders to Dr. Kavaler-Adler, 115 E 9th Street; 12P, NYC, 10003

To contact Dr. Kavaler-Adler, please call 212-674-5425 or email DrKavalerAdler@gmail.com.

Office address: 115 East 9th Street, Suite 12P; NYC, 10003

***Over 35 years Experience in Psychoanalytic/ Psychodynamic/ Object Relations Psychotherapy with Individuals, Couples, and Groups, while utilizing unique approaches to working with: ***Depression, ***Anxiety & Fears, ***OCD, ***Loss, Grief, & Mourning, ***Self-Sabotage/ Abandonment & Separation, ***Guilt & Shame, ***Trauma & PTSD, ***Relationship & Betrayal Issues, ***Divorce/ Domestic Abuse & Violence, ***Dissociative Disorders, ***Elderly Persons Disorders, ***Gay Lesbian Issues, ***Parenting issues, ***Blocked Creativity, ***Spirituality, ***Personality Disorders & Borderline Personality. ***Supportive therapeutic groups: Self-Sabotage, Fear of Success, & Fear of Envy; Developmental Mourning; and Creative Healing Writing. *** Group supervision for Mental Health practitioners: Utilizing the Object Relations approach in therapy, and Envy issues in personal and professional life of therapists.***Additional modalities utilized: Guided Psychic Visualization, Creative Writing, Life Coaching, and Dance Therapy.

Contact Dr. Kavaler-Adler: call 212-674-5425 or email DrKavalerAdler@gmail.com

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