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Welcome   to the official website of Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler. Here you will find information about Dr. Kavaler-Adler's life and work in the field of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and Object Relations theory.

Dr. Kavaler-Adler has been practicing psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in NYC for over 35 years. She is an Executive Director, Faculty, Training Analyst, and Supervisor for the Object Relations Institute (see www.orinyc.org). Dr. Kavaler-Adler is a prolific author with three books published by Routledge and about sixty professional articles in peer-reviewed journals.

If you are interested in joining any of Dr. Kavaler-Adler's upcoming or ongoing groups, click the Groups tab above.

For information on individual and couple's psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, please click the Private Practice tab above.

To read about Dr. Kavaler-Adler's books, articles, and other publications, please visit Books and Articles pages of this web site.

For a special treat, visit the Tango page!

Calendar of events (Nov 2011- Spring 2012)

Past event -  11/12/11 (Saturday, Full day workshop at ORI, 10am-4pm) – Barriers to Success: Object Relations Psychoanalytic Perspective. Location: 115 East 9th street; 12P; NYC, 10003. Fee: Pre-registration: $75/$40 (professionals/students).  At the door: $85/$50 (professionals/students). To register, please contact ORI administrator at admin@orinyc.org or by phone, 646-522-0387.

Past event -  11/18/11 (Friday, 7:30-9pm) – Tribute to Joyce McDougal – Discussion at NPAP (with Susan Kavaler-Adler, PhD, ABPP, D.Litt). To RSVP, please contact NPAP. For an article (by Dr. Kavaler-Adler) "Tribute to Joyce McDougal", please follow link HERE.

Past event -  11/30/11 - 12/21/11 (Wednesdays, 7:45-9pm) - 4-week Supervision Study Group: The Clinical Moment as a Hologram of Patient’s Internal and External World. Location: 115 East 9th street; 12P; NYC, 10003. Fee: $200/ 4-week group. To register, please contact Dr. Kavaler-Adler at 212-674-5425 or via email, drkavaleradler@gmail.com .

Past event -  12/10/11 (12-5pm) - ORI Holiday party and Celebration of establishment of the ORI Press.  First two books planned for publishing through the ORI Press are "The Creative Mystique" and "The Compulsion to Create" (by Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler), earlier published by Routledge (see Books page HERE). Location: Lafayette Grill (54 Franklyn Street (between Broadway and Lafayette), NYC, 10013).  For map or this location, follow this link : http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&om=0&ll=40.716184,-74.002597&spn=0.010994,0.019956&z=16&layer=c&cbll=40.717097,-74.002805/. To RSVP, please contact Administrator of the ORI and Editor-in-Chief of the ORI Press, Dr. Inna Rozentsvit, at 646-522-0387 or via email, ORIPress@orinyc.org .

_____ 2/25/12 (Saturday, 9:30am- 4:30pm) – ORI’s Annual Conference: Voyages into the internal world: Archetypes, Internal Objects, and Internal Saboteurs.  Three ways of looking at self-sabotage (with Jungian, Kleinian, and Fairbairnian perspectives). To register, please contact ORI administrator at admin@orinyc.org or by phone, 646-522-0387. Early bird registration is still available.

_____ 3/15/12-5/24/12 (10-weeks at ORI; Thursday evenings) - Contributions of Ronald Fairbairn to the Object Relations Theory (with Susan Kavaler-Adler, PhD).

_____ 3/16/12 – Dialectics of Mortality and Immortality: Time as a Persecutory vs. Holding Object - Lecture/ paper presentation at The Postgrad* Psychoanalytic Society (with Susan Kavaler-Adler, PhD). RSVP with The Postgrad* Psychoanalytic Society. See description below.

_____ 4/18-22/12 - Invited Panel (with Beatriz Dujovne, PhD): "In the Arms of a Stranger" - at the APA's Division of Psychoanalysis (39) Spring meeting, "The Leading Edge of Creativity," Santa Fe, NM.

NEWS:

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.  ... To read more - CLICK HERE

***

Monthly Supervision Group (on-going) - First Friday of the Month (Sept-June), 1:15-2:45 pm  

Accepting New Members! Fee: $75/ month

4-week Supervision Study Groups:

The Clinical Moment as a Hologram of Patient’s Internal and External World

Wednesdays (Nov 30 – Dec 21, 2011 & Jan 11 – Feb 1, 2012), 7:45- 9:00 pm  

Forming Now – All Mental Health Practitioners are Welcome! Fee: $200/ 4-week group

Location: 115 East 9th Street (@3^rd Ave.), Suite 12P, NYC, 10003

Individual supervision (case-by-case or on-going)- is available via video- and audio- conferencing.

In the monthly group:

Participants are invited to present their clinical case process, as well as role-play their patients, to get inside the skin of their patients, to experience a subjectivity that can transform their view of who their patients are.

As the group discusses the presentations and role-plays, Dr. Kavaler-Adler breaks down theoretical and clinical concepts and teaches them. She helps participants utilize practically the concepts of “projective-identification,” therapist's “object survival,” the analyst as a “psychic container,” “the holding environment,” “primitive” vs. neurotic transferences, “primal envy” and its manifestation in treatment, “the transformational object,” “object internalization,” “objective vs. subjective countertransference,” empathy developing through the Winnicottian “capacity for concern” and Kleinian “depressive position,” capacity to process loss, and “existential guilt,” self-sabotage related to “unconscious loyalties” to patient's internal parental objects, “the true self,” and “the capacity to be alone,” as well as such challenging topics as developmental mourning, envy, and erotic transference.

In the 4-week study groups (Wednesdays, 11/30/11-12/21/11 and 1/11/12-2/1/12):

In addition to case presentations, role plays, and discussion of clinical-theoretical concepts of therapy as a “holding environment” and therapist as a “psychic container,” Dr. Kavaler-Adler will discuss how these concepts are related to the presymbolic and pre-verbal expression of patient’s character, and how it is brought to a symbolic level by the analyst. She will offer a view of the clinical moment as a hologram of the patient’s internal and external world, which also includes all transference and countertransference experiences.

*****

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.

To read the Interview with Dr. Kavaler-Adler, Encountering Clinicians, by Dr. Jack Schwartz, please CLICK HERE.

 *****

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.

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

Video recording of this workshop - COMING SOON!

*****

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 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.

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

Disclaimer: This site and its services, including the contents of this site are for informational purposes only. It does not
provide medical or any other health care advice, diagnosis or treatment.   

*Copyright © 2000 Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler. All Rights Reserved.
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