EXAMINING THE FUNCTIONS OF AGGRESSION
FOR THE THERAPIST AND FOR THE CLIENT
A Half Day Professional Workshop
With Bill Cornell
Friday, January 22nd, 2021
10:00am to 3:00pm ET
Understanding The Function Of Agression
Aggression is not, in and of itself, hostile. Aggression is fundamental to human development – it can serve as destructive and/or constructive functions in the service of psychological health and the vitality of personal relationships.
When aggression is ignored, it will likely escalate into its more destructive forms. One of Bill’s most common experiences in the supervision of psychotherapists and counselors has to do with the consequences of therapists’ conscious and unconscious avoidance of aggression and human ugliness—their own and their clients.
Winnicott argued that the function of aggression is to “compel the environment to be important” and is, therefore, a sign of hope. Aggression within the therapeutic relationship may be defensive and destructive, or it may be a constructive and vitalizing demand upon the therapist. How do we distinguish between the two?
At The Working Edge…
- Aggression on the part of the therapist finds expression in two primary means of expression:
– 1) disturbing the defensive and characterological operations of the client;
– 2) surviving the emotional and relational attacks of the client with understanding and without retaliation.
- For this particular workshop, Bill will offer didactic teaching, provide some breakout groups, and engage in an ongoing group discussion.
- There will be a case presentation that will help to illustrate these ways of understanding, receiving, and expressing aggression.
- More workshop preparation details will be emailed to you upon enrollment.
WORKSHOP DETAILS
Friday, January 22nd
10:00am to 3:00pm ET
Online Format
Cost is $120.00
Click HERE to Register
Technology details to be forwarded
via email upon registration.
This workshop is only for those who have an active practice and are currently working with individuals.
About The Workshop Presenter
He is a co-editor of the Transactional Analysis Journal and has published extensively in a broad range of journals and psychotherapy books. He is the author of Explorations in Transactional Analysis: The Meech Lake Papers, editor of James McLaughlin’s The Healer’s Bent: Solitude and Dialogue in the Clinical Encounter, and co-editor with Helena Hargaden of From Transactions to Relations: The Emergence of a Relational Tradition in Transactional Analysis.
Recommended Books By Bill Cornell
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.
Bill Cornell – Somatic Experience: In The Expressive Language of the Living