Place for in-person consultations and groups: 115 East 9^th Street, Suite 12P; NYC 10003 (@ 3^rd avenue)

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 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,” as well as such challenging topics as developmental mourning, envy, and erotic transference.

For more information on this group, email Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler at drkavaleradler@gmail.com or call 212 674-5425.