Professional group study & Consultation
keeping ourselves alive & Engaged in our depth work~ January 2021 Theme ~
Letting Come, Letting Go, Letting In: Yielding
The Delicacy & Vitality Of Surrender
READINGS
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SELF EXAMINATION –Chapter 1 – What Am I Getting Myself Into?, pages 7-20; Chapter 3 – Calling One’s Self Into Question, pages 35-47.
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SOMATIC EXPERIENCE – Chapter 9 – Take Me: Erotic Vitality & Disturbance, pages 113-124.
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Saketopoulou-Limit consent and Overwhelm, Toronto Saketopoulou, by Avgi Saketopulou – especially pages 1-4
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PSYCHOANALYTIC CASE FORMULATION – Chapter 6 – Getting It Right About Affects, pages 116-121;
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Entering The Belly of the Beast – Surrendering To Something Larger & Other‘ – An Essay by Michael on Surrender
LECTURE NOTES
- Groups – 1 – Engaged Research – Landaiche – Mick Landaiche (Review Bion’s Holding Function – particular the section on Processing.
BOOK CHAPTERS
Highlighted & Underlined PDFs of Book Chapters
Maoschism, Submission, Surrender – Emmanuel Ghent
Groups – Chapter 1 – Engaged Research (Review of Processing – page 15-16)
NOTES ON THIS
MONTH’S PREPARATION
As you read, place your emphasis on the therapist’s vulnerabilities regarding surrendering to the client’s process and its relationship to enlivening functions in the work – and not just focusing on the vulnerability for the client.
Be aware of how both the client and the therapist can (and at certain points, must) be disturbed, all in service of surrendering to the unexpected – and a larger participation in life.
Ghent’s chapter on Masochism as a Perversion of Surrender is a classic in the field.
Parental delight, love, and anxiety can intermingle in our reactions to young, emerging bodies. This erotic delight is not to take possession of our children. Such parental delight throws them forward, outward into life, outward into the arms of others.
As therapists in passionate involvement with our clients, we engage, wonder, uncover, confront, protect, encourage, accompany, delight, and let go.
The therapeutic relationship is a means of creating and strengthening the capacity for vital and aggressive affects, as well as for the mitigation of distress and negative affects.
I would argue that while adult clients need a secure base to some extent, they also need (and I think hunger for) a challenging, enlivening relationship with a therapist, lover and others. I seek to provide the sense of a vital base, of a deeply engaged relationship which contains room for conflict, aggression, fantasy, insecurity, and uncertainty – in addition to security and empathic attunement.
Seduction, Surrender & Transformation:
Emotional Engagement In The Analytic Process
An APA Review Of A Classic Analytic Book by Karen Maroda
What is surrender? Maroda writes, “…surrender is the self-altering process. The patient surrenders through the medium of the emotional merger with the analyst and their shared regression. But the surrender is not to the person of the analyst, but rather a giving over to the patient’s own emotional experience – – losing herself to herself – – within the containing framework of the analytic setting”
Maroda’s view is that “felt emotion, on the part of both the patient and the therapist, is the key to the therapeutic enterprise” (p.181). And she adds, “If we take emotional honesty as the only authentic therapeutic stance, rather than the unachievable neutrality, then no emotions are off-limits or inappropriate for either person to feel”
Maroda describes the cycle of communication in an analytic process, and views the analyst’s ability to complete the cycle of communication in ways that show patients their own messages were understood by the analyst at an emotional level as a skill crucial to successful therapy.