Coping with Shame – An Intersubjective Self Psychological Perspective – June 5th, 2015
Shame – a powerful and destabilizing emotion – is a focus of treatment for so many in psychoanalytic therapy. Shame develops when affects and patterns of relating are felt to be unacceptable to important others. Such experiences are then not allowed into consciousness, left instead to become a sense of “defectiveness or badness . . . accompanied by feelings of isolation, shame, and self-loathing” (Stolorow, in Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2002, page 681). In this workshop we will talk about the roots of shame, the role of shame in...
read moreChallenging the Success-Failure Polarity in Self Psychological Practice – May 8th, 2015
Can we ever say that a therapeutic relationship is a complete success? Or a complete failure? Or are these relationships, like the humans involved, too complicated to reduce to this simple binary? As Lou Agosta suggests, “If a practice or method such as psychoanalysis cannot fail, then can it really succeed?” Some self psychologists believe that without working through their therapists empathic failures, patients cannot heal. Come join us on May 8th and be part of what’s sure to be a dynamic conversation. Doris...
read moreCase Presentation and Open House – April 17th, 2015
In presenting for discussion the case of an emotionally volatile and suicidal patient, I am interested in exploring the complex process of defining and pursuing one’s dreams/desires within an intersubjective self psychological therapeutic treatment. In particular, I want to explore sexual development and the desire to love another; and work ambitions and how they can be realized. In the discussion Leslie and I want to explore the possibility of using Intersubjective Self Psychology to co-create a capacity for mutual regulation of...
read moreThe Creative Couple: Enhancing the Creative Potential of Self Psychological Therapy – March 6th, 2015
My workshop “The Creative Couple: Enhancing the Creative Potential of Self Psychological Therapy” highlights the intersubjective engagement of analyst and patient, which leads to creative change. Psychoanalytic therapy in my view is an art form, similar to painting, composing, choreography, etc. Much of past psychoanalytic thinking about art is western-centered and limited by a romantic notion of the artistic hero, working in isolation and wresting artistic imagery from the unconscious – or some derivative of that myth. In my workshop I will...
read moreAbraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed: A Healing Selfobject Relationship – December 12th, 2014
I landed my first university teaching job at 28 years of age in 1972 at what was then Sangamon State University in Springfield, Illinois (now a branch of the University of Illinois). With my family, I lived on an old, decidedly non-working farm in the country. I did have chickens and horses in the barn, but otherwise things were a bit feral. My dogs fed on rabbits in the fields, there were lots of weeds, cars kept breaking down, and I never had enough money. I had a freshly minted PhD in European history from the University of Chicago and...
read moreThe Selfobject Transference – October 24th, 2014
In the opening event of TRISP’s 2014–2015 workshop series – Intersubjective Self Psychology – Peter Zimmermann used an illustrative metaphor to capture the shift from a traditional psychoanalytic approach to a self psychological approach. He said, “Where other perspectives ask What is the patient running from? the self psychologist asks What is the patient running towards?” The therapeutic pathway by which the patient runs toward health is the selfobject transference. Selfobject transference – Heinz Kohut’s groundbreaking contribution to...
read moreWhat is Intersubjective Self Psychology? Come to our September 19th, 2014 workshop to find out
What is intersubjective self psychology? At TRISP – Training and Research in Intersubjective Self Psychology – we have always combined the best of Self Psychology with the best of Intersubjectivity Theory. The result is that we offer training and continuing education in a highly effective and directly clinical theory of treatment. How is our theory self psychological? The founder of self psychology, Heinz Kohut, one of the most important American psychoanalysts of the 20th century, put the sense of self at the heart of his theory. He...
read moreLooking for Participants for A Study of the Long-Term Effects of Wide-Scale Traumatic Events
Koichi Togashi – founder of the Japanese Forum for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, and a psychoanalyst trained at TRISP – and I share an interest in finding out about the long-term effects and meanings of traumatic events. We are working together to understand how people who were traumatized by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the tsunami in Japan make sense of these devastating experiences. Do the meanings that the events had at first change over time? Are there cultural differences in the way people experience...
read moreMourning and Melancholia – A Self Psychological Dialogue – June 13, 2014
This workshop will focus on the conceptualization of mourning and melancholia (or depression) and what accounts for the differences between the two, a topic that Freud had addressed in his seminal 1915 paper “Mourning and Melancholia”. George Hagman and Peter Zimmermann tackle this question from the perspective of intersubjective self psychology. George has reconsidered the mourning process from a self psychological perspective and has published several papers and books on this topic, including the soon to be published:...
read morePandora’s Jar/TRISP Open House – April 4, 2014
We’re all familiar with the warning not to open a Pandora’s box of troubles – crack the lid and who knows what disasters might ensue? And yet we shouldn’t forget that Pandora herself – having opened the lid and let loose a swarm of calamities – found a surprising gift at the bottom of the box: Hope. Hope at the bottom of Pandora’s box of dreads is a useful and beautiful metaphor for our patients’ deeply buried yearnings for growth that lie hidden under their more immediately exposed struggles and traps. Our job as self-psychological...
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