Professional US group study & Consultation

keeping ourselves alive & Engaged in our depth work
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Theme for SEPTEMBER 2024

What it takes to process the client’s lived experiences

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The US Supervision/Study group meets monthly on a Wednesday from 1:00 – 4:00pm ET.

The group is private, and is by invitation only.  It is limited to a maximum of 8 people.  All group members must have an active caseload of individual clients.

The cost is $90 per person per group, regardless of your ability to attend each session.  Sessions are to be paid by the day of each session, through the PayPal link on the month’s preparation page.

All sessions can be recorded, viewable only for the participants of this established group.

2024-2025 bibliography

Clinical Books For The Study Year

Self Examination in Psychoanalysis  & Psychotherapy – Countertransference & Subjectivity in Clinical Practice – Bill Cornell

Somatic Experience in Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy – In the Expressive Language of the Living – Bill Cornell

Psychoanalytic Case Formulation – Nancy McWilliams

Catch Them Before They Fall – The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown – Christopher Bollas

The Maturational Processes & The Facilitating Environment – D.W. Winnicott

 Meaning & Melancholia – Life In The Age of Bewilderment – Christopher Bollas

Intimacy & Separateness in Psychoanalysis – Warren Poland

  

LOOKING Forward

Potential Areas Of Study

Working With Character in Depth Work -having what it takes to stay on the slow and steady road of profound but incremental change.  What Stephen Johnson called the ‘hard work miracle’.

Working With A Particular Character of Interest – taking a deeper dive into character issues that are quite relevant to the current social milieu, but tend to be under-identified and misunderstood – such as Hysteric & Paranoid characters.

Working With the Dynamics of Breakdown –bringing a deeper awareness to the implications of what happens when a client begins to deteriorate or fall apart, and contrasting that with when the facilitating environment fails the client.

Working Further With the Dynamics of Emergence vs Retreat – understanding the dynamic tension needed to sustain an ‘approach’ to what is possible,  vs. the tendencies to over-protect the self by retreating from perceived threats. 

archives

 Examples of

Monthly Themes

January 19th, 2021

The Borderline Condition & Countertransference Dynamics

How to hold the frame for both what the trouble is that has the client in the room, and how to frame the therapy process.

KEY CONCEPTS:

  • Addressing realistic expectations for the therapy process.
  • Providing psycho-education. about therapy and how it works.
  • Defining your expectations of the client.
  • Naming what you see to be your ‘job’.
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February 16th 2022

Next Study Group Theme:
 Theme Yet To Be Determined

How to assess and think about the trouble being presented by the client, and how to frame a workable therapeutic process.  

KEY CONCEPTS:

  • Whose trouble is whose?
  • Working with attunement and differentiation in mind & body.
  • Having the real trouble, beyond the presenting complaint.
  • How to hold the trouble with and for the client.
  • Being able to think about one’s own thinking – linking one thing to another to serve the client.
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March 16th 2021

Working With A New
Theme:

Not Yet Determined

 How to receive the unconscious communications of character, and process one’s CT reactions.

KEY CONCEPTS:

  • Addressing the character tensions between restraint and communication to others.
  • Bearing dynamic tension – using our bodies to receive our client’s unconscious communications.
  • Holding the client in mind and body as to support a process of dynamic tension.
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October 13th, 2021

Aggression, Intepretations & The Paranoid Character

How to hold the frame for both what the trouble is that has the client in the room, and how to frame the therapy process.

KEY CONCEPTS:

  • Addressing realistic expectations for the therapy process.
  • Providing psycho-education. about therapy and how it works.
  • Defining your expectations of the client.
  • Naming what you see to be your ‘job’.
Get Started

November 10th 2021

Traces of the Other:
 Thinking About Character & Using Interpretations

How to assess and think about the trouble being presented by the client, and how to frame a workable therapeutic process.  

KEY CONCEPTS:

  • Whose trouble is whose?
  • Working with attunement and differentiation in mind & body.
  • Having the real trouble, beyond the presenting complaint.
  • How to hold the trouble with and for the client.
  • Being able to think about one’s own thinking – linking one thing to another to serve the client.
Get Started

December 15th 2021

Working With Character, Interpretations &
Countertransference

 How to receive the unconscious communications of character, and process one’s CT reactions.

KEY CONCEPTS: 

  • Addressing the character tensions between restraint and communication to others.
  • Bearing dynamic tension – using our bodies to receive our client’s unconscious communications.
  • Holding the client in mind and body as to support a process of dynamic tension.
Get Started

June 16th 2021

Countertransference:
A Tool For Transformative Process

How to become informed by our experiences with CT, and but subjected to our reactions to CT.

KEY CONCEPTS:

  • CT requires attention in the body, and to our own lived histories.
  • CT is an unintentional, unconscious process.
  • CT holds no immediate meaning, it’s roots must be explored.
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July 14th 2021

Being A Steadying Vs Disturbing Force:
Using Reflections, Observations, Questions & Interpretations

How to establish, contain, deepen and further a process with our interventions.

KEY CONCEPTS: 

  • When are a therapist’s interventions self-serving, rather than serving the client?
  • Tracking whether a client can make use of what we offer.

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September 15th 2021

Working With Aggression:
Coming Up Against Another  

 How to…

KEY CONCEPTS:

  • Healthy aggression is an attempt to make the environment important again.
  • The function of aggression addresses a need for genuine recognition
  • Aggression moves one out and into the world; it says ‘I matter’.
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March 10th, 2021

 Assessment 2:
Building On The Foundation For Work

How to Gather A Client’s Personal History, and To Effectively Set the Stage for How the Process Works

KEY CONCEPTS:

  • What To Learn About A Client’s Past Lived Experiences
  • Providing ‘PsychoEducation’
  • Addressing What To Expect
  • Assessing A Client’s Resources & Their Capacity To Be Helped
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April 14th, 2021

Seeing The Function of Defenses: Holding Trouble In Mind 

How to think in new ways about the trouble our clients bring in to the therapy process.

KEY CONCEPTS: 

  • Understand The Creative Origin of the Defensive Posture As a Best Solution at the Time
  • Grasping  The Underlying Function the Defense  – how it serves.

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May 12th, 2021

 Becoming A Vital Holding Container:
Active Witnessing 

 How to appreciate the functions of witnessing for bringing forward unconscious material.

KEY CONCEPTS:

  • Engaged non-intrusiveness.
  • Don’t look away and don’t impose your knowledge.
  • The complimentary position to interventions & interpretations.
  • Being in service as an ‘other’.
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Bollas argues that character is not simply a defensive derivative:
“Being a character means that one is a spirit, that one conveys something in one’s being which is barely identifiable as it moves through others to create personal effects, but which is more deeply graspable when one’s spirit moves through the mental life of the other, to leave its trace.”
Bollas captures the paradox of character:  That while character contains the intention to constrain and foreclose otherness, it also needs the other to come to life, to make its mark, to find its meaning.  (This is a key understanding of character.)

– From Somatic Experience in Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy

 

COST-$90 per group


EXTRA RESOURCES

CIVILIZATION AND THE DISCONTENTED

A Presentation on 8-8-20 by Christopher Bollas

This is a remarkable presentation which  I was fortunate enough to attend via Zoom.   Bollas provides deep insight and thoughtful reflection into the collective mind of the US nation/state in these current times of chaos and disruption.