In health care settings worldwide, psychological treatments of pain-related physical illness have been dominated by therapies aimed at conscious control and stress management (i.e., cognitive behavioral therapy and its derivatives) leading to the marginalization of psychoanalytic perspectives. This course will provide an alternative viewpoint. MORE
Dissociation has belatedly become a topic of inquiry in psychoanalytic clinical theory, usually as part of the phenomenology of trauma. A comprehensive psychoanalytic model of dissociation should account not just for its pathological effects, but also for its everyday function in psychical life. In this presentation, the specific mechanism of body-mind dissociation will be defined, and contrasted with our understanding of the mechanisms of repression and splitting. MORE
In this day-long conference Dr. Steve Kuchuck explores love, the effect that clinicians have been taught to keep quiet or to completely ignore. Because psychoanalytic history is full of love or lust that has led to broken boundaries and broken lives clinicians tend to be especially wary of exploring the enlivening and growth-enhancing feeling .. MORE
This intermediate to advanced course for mental health professionals begins with the awareness that our ability to predict suicide is little better than chance and that at present there are no consistently reliable empirically validated treatment techniques to prevent suicide. MORE
This workshop is informed by Wittgenstein’s observation that how we talk about things structures how we think about them. How we name and subdivide mental suffering has profound effects on how we understand and treat it. Psychoanalysts find the “neo-Kraepelinian” premise of the current DSM (categorical concepts, with present-versus absent criteria) inconsistent with clinical experience…MORE