CrossCurrents
Expanding Psychodynamic Sensibility and Deepening Our Clinical Work with Patients
Working with Disturbed and
Disturbing Patients
May 18,2024
Three Sessions with “Jen”
Presenter: Hal Steiger
WHEN: May 18, 2024, 8:30 am arrival, 9 am - 12:30 pm program
WHERE: MPSI Psychotherapy Center at Semple Mansion Carriage House; 104 W. Franklin Avenue S, Minneapolis MN 55404
In this seminar, our second in the series of close readings, we will immerse ourselves in the session notes of another patient in China who has been so traumatized that she lives encased in a chronic sense of deadness, able to walk through life apparently functioning but walled off and numb, deeply depressed, with no sense of an internal world and no feeling of emotional contact with others. We will look closely at a sequence of three sessions where her psychoanalytic psychotherapist struggles to find a way to reach this very walled off patient. The fact that progress is made gives us an opportunity to ask questions about what facilitated the patient’s growth and transformation, how we might have approached various clinical moments in the treatment, and how a close reading of this case can help us in our work with disturbed and disturbing patients. The program should be informative, and the discussion will be fun.
In our first meeting in this series, we immersed ourselves in session notes from a rageful patient receiving psychoanalytic psychotherapy in China. There were twists and turns in the process beginning with enactments designed to destroy the therapist's reputation and office followed by transformative engagement leading to the patient sharing that they “liked” and felt close to their therapist only to amend that in the last session to say that she “needed” her therapist. (Developmentally in line with preparatory work for Winnicott’s Use of the Object).
Working with Disturbed and Disturbing
Patients
May 18, 2024
Presenter: Hal Steiger
This program is jointly sponsored by CrossCurrents, a platform for psychoanalytic learning and exploration, the MPSI Program Committee and the MPSI Psychotherapy Center. CEU Certificates will be available.
Refreshments will be served.
3.5 credits will be awarded.
Pricing:
$65 Nonmembers
$50 Members
$20 Students
$10 Fellows
CrossCurrents
Expanding Psychodynamic Sensibility and Deepening Our Clinical Work with Patients
The Mission of Crosscurrents is to provide programs highlighting new developments in psychodynamic thinking and practice. We are a joint project of the Minnesota Psychoanalytic Society and MPSI Psychotherapy Center. The name – Crosscurrents – reflects our understanding that human growth and development is constantly moving and ever expanding in scope, complexity, and integration. Unlike a river that flows directionally and follows a deliberate path, we recognize that what we prefer to call a psychodynamic sensibility involves turbulence as new ideas enter the gathering waters of accumulated wisdom that constitutes our psychodynamic history. Crosscurrents is dedicated to presenting programs that explore the creative flow, confluences and inevitable collisions of competing theories and technical approaches both within and outside the traditional frame.
“The ability to sit with, to contain, to join, to understand and to intervene with such patients is an art form and conjures up a Winnicottian willingness to accompany the patient on a journey into unbearable agony. Doing this kind of work requires courage and a willingness to be open, to be vulnerable and to tolerate not knowing.”
“A therapist with a psychodynamic sensibility does not need to have experienced the patient's trauma. But they must be willing to open a space within themselves that welcomes the patient's traumatic experience and with it all the traumatic experiences the therapist has personally faced and carries. Patients will not go where we fear to go ourselves.”
MPSI