Psychotherapy Groups

** 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. - Past events

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

5. Working with Resistances in Psychotherapy - New Study & Experiential Group will be forming in fall of 2012.

Monthly Therapy and Support Group with Emphasis on the

Individual Mourning, Grief, and Psychic Change Process:

Opening Blocks to Love and Creativity (on-going)

-- This group is full, and not accepting new members at this time. Please contact Dr. Kavaler-Adler regarding the waiting list or individual consultations related to mourning, grief, blocked creativity, and psychic change.

Meets 1^st Saturday of the month, from September through June
Location: 115 East 9^th Street, 12P (corner of 3rd avenue), NY, NY 10003
12:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m., with a break at 2:00 p.m. for
refreshments and socializing. Fee: $130/ month

This group meets for an intensive therapy period, once a month for four hours, for ten months of the year (excluding July and August). As one members of this group has previously said, “I have to be able to love in order to create.” By dealing with individual life losses in the support of a group, individual group members are able to navigate past blocks, resistances, and psychic conflicts that have held them back in their life.

With Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler as the group leader, who has a specialty in grief, mourning, and the opening up of blocks to creativity and love, group members can face feeling states that were formerly intolerable to them and move forward to face their anger and their losses, with the result of re-opening capacities to love and to create.

Each group meeting begins with a psychic visualization led by Dr. Kavaler-Adler. This allows participants to come in contact with their internal worlds before they enter the external, interpersonal world of the group. Everyone closes their eyes and breathes deeply as Dr. Kavaler-Adler helps the individuals in the group to tune into who they wish to speak to in their inner worlds. Participants conger up mothers, fathers, husbands, past lovers, siblings etc., and begin to speak to them as they visualize them in their minds. They then see if these “others,” who they carry with them in their minds and psyches can respond to what they have to say to them. They listen and wait for a response, while still breathing deeply, with eyes closed.

They then respond back and see what their heart has to say to the person who appears in their minds, as well as what their stomachs might need to express. Over time, the visualization process may lead to a whole evolution of reparative relationship with the “others” who appear to them. Some participants become aware of their anger through the psychic visualizations. Often their anger is followed by sadness, forgiveness and compassion, as consciousness of anger transforms it. Many acknowledge yearnings and regrets that have long been buried during the visualization. The “others” within each individual’s internal world may evolve into people that can be related to, even when they had formerly been alienated. This is often due to the expression of formerly repressed anger.

After everyone opens their eyes following the visualization, the floor is open for those who wish to share their visualization experience with the group members. This sharing period opens all kinds of empathic engagements between group members. The individual who shares is deeply listened to and responded to by the others group members. Over time, each group member’s life- long psychological journey is revealed, while the internal others, who have haunted them in the past, are confronted and relinquished. This is a journey of mourning and grief. It includes becoming conscious of rage, anger, sadness, loss and love. Such consciousness frees each individual to move- on to re-own the parts of themselves that have been lost by having been regressively tied to unresolved conflicts and unspoken thoughts. The unresolved conflicts and unspoken thoughts can be resolved and spoken.

Group members can also trigger reactions in each other that relate to significant figures in each participant’s past, those who symbolically inhabit their internal worlds. Each group member can gain insight into their reflexive and self- sabotaging reactions as they see them played out with fellow group members. One person may prompt the reaction in another that relates back to a parent who they still feel engaged with in their minds. As the internal conflict is engaged in in the safe laboratory of the group meeting the hidden agendas of each person and their internal “others” can be brought to light. Insight and conscious awareness then allows the group member to let go of self- sabotaging modes of relationship that hold them back. As old modes of relationship are surrendered, new energies open to allow passion and involvement in the intimacy of the group relationships, which opens energy for intimacy and creativity in their daily lives with important others.

Group members become expert mourners, who can process all their feelings and thoughts, so that they need not be stuck and blocked in their life experience. When psychic regrets are faced, unfulfilled aspects of each person’s personality can begin to unfold. When losses are faced, as old modes of relationship are relinquished, regrets can also be faced and learned from. Then new modes of love and creativity naturally and organically arise. The group then profoundly validates and affirms the new potential in each individual as they are born and evolve.

Please call Dr. Kavaler-Adler at (212) 674-5425 or email her at DrKavalerAdler@gmail.com for more information on this group.

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

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

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

Dr. Kavaler-Adler is a skilled clinician, Training Analyst and Senior Supervisor, as well as a seminal theoretician and writer. Her well known three books and over 60 journal articles and edited book chapters are known in the US and internationally, as they are related to both theory and clinical work. She has integrated many aspects of British and American object relations theory in her own theory of “developmental mourning” as a critical psychic change process.

Dr. Kavaler-Adler has also written a great deal on the creative process as well. With a background in dance therapy and an honorary doctorate in literature, and books and articles on brilliant women artists and writers, Dr. Kavaler-Adler brings a rich cultural and artistic background to her 35 years practicing as a clinical psychologist and a psychoanalyst.

Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s unique perspective on character disorder developmental arrest as an internal world fantasy of a “demon-lover complex,” while seeing trauma and pathological mourning in object relations terms, - has offered clinicians all over the world a unique view of clinical work and psychological transformation.

In the monthly group (first Friday of the month, Sept-June):

In this supervision group, Dr. Kavaler-Adler invites participants to present their clinical case process, as well as to 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. When supervision group participants role-play their patients, they are responded to by Dr. Kavaler-Adler in the role of the psychotherapist/analyst, so that improvisational educational dialogues can evolve like an organic dance (Dr. Kavaler-Adler is a proficient Argentine Tango dancer).

As the group and Dr. Kavaler-Adler discuss the presentations and role-plays, Dr. Kavaler-Adler breaks down theoretical and clinical concepts and teaches them. She helps participants really use 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 internal parental objects, “the true self,” and “the capacity to be alone.”

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.

For more information on any of supervision groups or individual supervision, please email Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler at drkavaleradler@gmail.com or call 212 674-5425.

NB: This is a past event. Please inquire about this topic by contacting Dr. Kavaler-Adler at 212-674-5425 or by email, drkavaleradler@gmail.com

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

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.

Envy - Full-day workshops

Envy: Envy as Hunger, as Destruction of the Good, and as Inhibitor of Love and

Creative Self expression (Loss of Voice), and Envy as the projected Evil Eye

In that “eternal now” moment of Envy I am so consumed by wanting to be you that anything and everything I have, that I’ve achieved, that I’ve constructed and created, is totally and violently forgotten within my mind! I am totally inside of being you, and hating you at the same time for having what I feel so vividly to be all I’ve ever wanted. And it seems like you’ve gotten it all without any effort, effortlessly, while I trudge through the road of struggle! What’s more I can’t even imagine in this moment ever being able to get there myself. I can’t imagine it without magically transforming myself into you! You have it all. I just want to be you! - Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler.

How does one interpret envy, when it can feel like a put down if pointed out to anyone? Envy can be at the core of masochism, narcissism, paranoia and schizoid mechanisms. Melanie Klein spoke of it as the destruction of the good, and she implied the voracious and insatiable hunger in it by speaking of oral envy in particular. How is this related to trauma? How is this related to parents with disowned envy that is expressed in both subtle and not so subtle forms of contempt that can then be mimicked in the profound identifications of children? Both Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott struggled with the destructive and self destructive aspects of envy and how to modify them through making them conscious. This workshop will expound on these ideas as well as on the ideas of Peter Shabad as the child’s fantasy of the parent’s evil eye and how it can be seen in psychoanalytic cases by Dr. Kavaler-Adler. Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s cases and ideas will be interspersed with the seminal ideas of Klein and Winnicott, and the more recent ones of Peter Shabad.

Lecture and discussion will take place in the morning of the workshop. Then in the afternoon, Dr. Kavaler-Adler will engage all workshop participants in a personal and group experience journey through her skilled use of a psychic visualization. The psychic visualization will be used to promote internal dialogues both about one’s own envy and about one’s fears of being envied, both of which can hold back success in love and creativity.

Study Seminar on Projective Identification

10-week course - Please inquire!

This course will combine readings and discussion with role-plays and psychic visualization to teach the multi-variable phenomena of projective identification in a powerfully focused clinical context. The phenomena of projective-identification has been most profoundly validated in the most current and longitudinal studies of infant research, such as the research and writing of Beatrice Beebe. Clinically, in America, Thomas Ogden has offered long term cases with vivid illustrations of the profound objective countertransference experience of projective identification, but of course, the original thinking about the healthy, narcissistic, and overall defensive aspects of projective-identification, - the defensive aspects being so vividly and obviously displayed in borderline disorders, - stems back to the seminal writings of Melanie Klein.

From the psychic fantasy of projective-identification - to the intersubjective phenomena of it, which began to meet our attention with Paula Heinman’s first paper on “countertransference” and Wilfred Bion’s ideas on the psychoanalyst as a psychic container (for those spit off parts of the patient that are deposited in the psyche, soma, sensations, emotions, and cognitions of the analyst, interacting quite selectively with the analyst’s feelings, fantasies, and thoughts), the phenomena of projective-identification is a guiding light to understanding all the critical work we do today with character disorders.

Come into this course to come into the conversation, the transitional world dialogue that interacts with our internal world in psychic dialectic! This course can help open doorways to a much deeper form of clinical work: clinical narratives of “transference-countertransference” dynamics begin in the internal world, where the child self and the pathologically attached parental objects do their enactment dances, demon lovers, and inner witches and goblins of all kinds! See Racker, Kernberg, and Sandler on “role-reversal.” Let’s see it all together during this ten week seminar!

This 8-week group will help its participants to explore and learn to work with resistances through both readings and role plays with Dr. Kavaler-Adler, "getting inside the skin of your patients."

NB: This workshop is finished, but we encourage you to write (DrKavalerAdler@Gmail.com) or call (212-674-5425) Dr. Kavaler-Adler if you are interested to participate in this learning activity in future.

D. W. Winnicott transformed the practice of psychoanalysis, enlarging its scope to understand the developmental progressions, disruptions, and traumas that take place within with the whole, or the leaking container, of the “mother-infant matrix.” He introduced us to clinical practice with Character Disorders when he spoke of the “False Self” patient.

In this course Winnicott’s seminal ideas on transitional phenomena and objects, the “subjective object” (precursor to the self object), the phenomenon of “playing,” potential space, the capacity for psychic dialectic, empathy and concern, dream space, analytic space, “object survival,” “the capacity to be alone” will all be discussed. What is the real nature of “true self” experience, as opposed to the contrived “false” or constructed self? How do we or do we not manifest it? How does psychic dialectic begin, and how is it the route of all “intersubjective experience”?

In teaching Winnicott I always illustrate how Winnicott and his theories were a continual responsive dialectic with his former supervisor and teacher, Melanie Klein. It is so important to see how Winnicott’s own form of genius and uniqueness widened our clinical perspective into critical areas of developmental thinking that were just beginning to be whispered by Klein (and her followers) in Klein's profound focus on the internal world of psychic fantasy. In this way we avoid the often common pitfall of polarizing Winnicott and Klein. Winnicott spoke of the therapist's' presence and "environment" in a whole new way, but he did so in a continual response to the thinking of Klein. By seeing him in a dialogue with Klein, we can most value Winnicott because we see that in compensating for Klein's blind spots, and bringing alive the mother-infant matrix as a clinical holding environment, Winnicott's unique perspective as a pediatrician made clinically vivid Klein's beginning forays into "internalization" and mourning as critical developmental and clinical processes, so that both self integration and self evolution through development could be more deeply understood by all psychological clinicians, as well as by psychoanalysts. It is only by a dialectic between the ideas of both Klein and Winnicott that we get the full picture of how internalization opens up the capacity to mourn and self integrate, and mourning, in turn, with its full range of clinically expressed aggression, as well as grief, opens up the pathways to contact and connection that allow for the creation of new and more healthy internalizations. It is in this way that the ego capacities (including Winnicott's “ego relatedness”) organically evolve without the contrived focus on external functioning resorted to by ego psychologists and others.

Come join us to read, discuss, and listen to case examples related to these fundamental human and clinical phenomenons.

In this group, Dr. Kavaler-Adler will help participants to understand the underpinnings of self sabotage, fear of envy, and fear of success in both their patients and in themselves, by helping them to understand the unconscious loyalties that bind them to patterns of self sabotage.

Participants of this group will have a unique opportunity to look into their internal world experiences during the psychic guided visualization. Participants will be encouraged to share their experiences and develop a group bond to aid each other in working with their fears and conflicts.

Each session will begin with a guided psychic visualization. Those who share the dialogues from their internal worlds in the external world of the group will receive help to see how their internal conflicts around self sabotage, envy, and fears of success are inhibiting them on their journey through life. Participants will be helped to experience the feelings and thoughts that may be blocked or unarticulated due to loyalties to early life attachments, and due to internalized identifications with inhibiting and envious figures from their past and present.

The different affect states related to envy and retaliation against the self for ambitious strivings, which involve hostile and murderous impulses, will be defined when they are experienced in the group. In this way, the work of letting go can proceed through reaching affect states of grief and loss that renew love, and thus renew the basic human capacity for connection that inspires the individual creative genius in each individual.

Dr. Kavaler-Adler has led writing and creative process groups in her practice for more than twenty-two years in a twenty-eight year psychoanalytic psychotherapy practice. Her groups are unique in that they serve a dual role. They not only help participants receive feedback with actual writing and other creative projects, or with professional writing; but they also serve a therapeutic role in helping participants to gain insight into obstacles and blocks that are prohibiting them from doing the writing (or painting, or acting, or dancing, etc.) that they have always dreamed of doing.

Anyone who wishes to write can participate in this group. However, group membership is limited to six people, so that three out of six can get individual 30 minute turns during every group, on a group rotation basis. Those on a waiting list can be admitted to the group if the group’s six places are currently filled. Also, individual consultations are available on writing projects or on the writing process or the creative process itself.

All kinds of writing and creativity are welcome. Members of Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s writing groups have worked on poetry, plays, memoirs, fiction, short stories, novels, non-fiction books, professional journal articles and professional books, and on dissertations and psychoanalytic institute papers, etc. Sometimes it is only within the group itself that the individual finds which kind of writing they are truly interested in. A new sense of curiosity and intrigue can open up within the course of the group itself, as an “in the moment” experience emerges when the individual speaks to the group about his/her feelings and thoughts. They speak of long frustrated yearnings to write (create). They examine their conflicts around their wishes to write (create). They define the obstacles, resistances, and blocks that result from these conflicts, which left undefined had been holding them back. Through such “in the moment” experience and insight in the group, each group member learns how writing only becomes alive and offers pleasure to the writer when the writing process is one of “in the moment” opening up, as opposed to transferring some mental agenda onto the page (or computer screen). The writing group process can mirror the writing process in terms of the “in vivo” experience and effects.

Members of these groups also get to know each other in depth, learning about each others’ biography and of the personal struggles that each person faces as they deal with fears of exposing self expression. “In the beginning was the word,” is said in the Bible, and it is truly a life giving process when the individual finds the “word,” the apt words to express the deeper life that lies within them, including all the frustration and rage that they have had to keep secret. Now they can find new words and metaphors to express all the most poignant, tragic, and mundane aspects of life. As writing group members share this journey of the inner soul and spirit together, they open up to the resonant tune of others who are exposing themselves. They also find that the personal scripts they carry with them (often unconsciously), related to early dramas and deprivations with their childhood parents.

All writing group members have poignant and distinct stories about what holds them back as creative and “in the moment” evolving human beings. They hear each others stories and feel empathy and compassion. They then have to learn to have empathy and compassion for themselves. They see themselves in the stories of others. They are able to decipher the unique human being speaking to them in the group. As they get to know the others in the group they become increasingly free to offer critiques of the others work and to offer observations about the psychological dynamics that both propel and inhibit the other. They adopt certain understanding from Dr. Kavaler-Adler, the group leader, who is a writer and published author herself. This enables them to see how resistances to feeling and defining anger, loss, tenderness and vulnerability can all inhibit love. They learn also that love is required for creativity to emerge. Often the mourning process is part of opening up each writing group member’s creative process. Mourning involves facing painful feelings of rage, anger, shame, envy, and loss, so that the defenses against these feeling states can be relinquished, freeing up the avenues to the progressive life expression of love and creativity. Every group member speaks about the internal mother they carry with them in a psychological sense, and reaches out to the group to provide certain nurturing mother capacities, such as those of offering recognition and affirmation. Then the negative aspect of the internal mother can be surrendered.

For an article on the evolving mother biography of each person in one of Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s writing group, you may be interested in reading her article in Group (1993), Vol. 16 (1): 47-58, entitled “An Object Relations View of Creative Process and Group Process."

Another article of Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s on her psychoanalytic psychotherapy writing group, as it can interact with participation in her therapeutic mourning group appeared in Issues in Group Psychotherapy, in 2000, Fall, Vol. 4 (1). It is entitled, “Anatomy of Regret and Reparation: Resolution of Transference Resistances Through the Combined Use of a Writing and Creative Process Group and a Mourning Regrets Group.”

Writing and creativity can be a lonely process. The psychoanalytic psychotherapy writing group of Dr. Kavaler-Adler helps a lonely process to become a shared one. Capacities for new forms of intimacy develop in this group as intimacy between members develops and forges new ground. Trust can develop in a group that meets over time, with a small group membership.

This dramatically differs from writing workshops and writing classes. Often members have come to Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s writing groups who have been wounded by experiences in writing workshops and classes. Short- term workshops and classes do not allow time for individual participants to discuss their subjective experience or any of their free feelings and thoughts as they struggle with their own process. In contrast to this supportive psychotherapeutic writing group, in writing classes there is only time to read a work in progress and to get feedback from others who are essentially strangers. In an atmosphere of strangers rather than intimates, cutting and callous attacks can sometimes take place in the guise of constructive criticism. The wounds that result can never be discussed in such workshops or classes.

In Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s writing group, everyone can respond to those offering them feedback and critiques. There is time for each person to express what most moves them in a piece, not just offering technical advice. There is time for each member to relate what moves them in the current presenter’s piece to who that person is, as they have come to know this person. After a period of getting to truly know the presenter, they can help the presenting group member to understand what they may wish to express, beyond what the presenter is aware of. If anyone’s feedback feels hurtful and fails to be constructive criticism, or isn’t taken as such, this can be discussed. The journey of the group evolves over time, as does the journey of each individual within the group.

Painters have also been successful using the format of this creative process group, presenting slides of paintings, and then discussing both the paintings and their own subjective state at the time of doing the painting with the members of the group. Another article describes one female painter’s growth in self- integration and feminine self- development through her participation in Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s creative process group, with others wishing to express themselves through writing. It is entitled, “The Divine, the Deviant and the Diabolical: A Journey Through An Artist’s Paintings During Her Participation in a Creative process Group: An Evolution of Developmental Mourning.” This article appeared in The International Forum of Psychoanalysis (2000).

Those exploring other art forms would also be welcome. Dr. Kavaler-Adler herself is not only a writer and psychoanalyst, but also an Argentine Tango dancer and former dance therapist, who understands dancers in their creative process, as well as writers and painters. Dr. Kavaler-Adler participates in offering feedback to members in the group, as well as helping the communication process between members, and in addition using her psychoanalytic abilities to understand and interpret resistances, projections, and transferences, that may hold members back from fulfilling their paths of creative inspiration.

***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.

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