2017 Seminars
Advanced Principles of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy I: The Therapeutic Process
Amelio A. D’Onofrio, PhD
The model of depth psychotherapy taught in this seminar integrates core insights of psychoanalytic theory regarding implicit and unconscious processes with elements of the existential-humanistic tradition that honors the intersubjective nature of therapeutic experience. This model appreciates both the power of unconscious dynamics and the patient’s own deep wisdom and capacity for integration and healing. Growth in psychotherapy begins to take place as the therapist is able to make contact with, tolerate, and contain the patient’s enacted traumas and difficult inner contents and create the kind of holding environment wherein new and healthier forms of relatedness can unfold.
This seminar offers training for clinicians who understand that there are rarely quick fixes to life’s complex problems and that the work of therapy is about co-creating new attachment bonds within the therapeutic dyad that allow the patient to earn more secure ways of being in the world. This view, of course, implies that the nature and demands of insight-oriented therapeutic work—where patients are received and known through the therapist’s own inner spaces—requires that we therapists have access to and understand not only the patient’s inner life, but our own. To this end, particular emphasis is placed on how we therapists listen and make contact with our patients deeper meanings.
This training is intended for therapists who wish to work at greater depths with their patients and who want to better understand the ever-present unconscious-to-unconscious dialogue transpiring between patient and therapist. Utilizing clinical examples and participants’ own case material, the seminars are designed to help therapists deepen their clinical understanding, expand their empathic horizons, work more proficiently with patients’ complicated dynamics and primitive processes, and refine their technical capabilities in responding therapeutically in the moment. Participants will learn to practice from a more mindful, intentional, and theoretically grounded stance and will emerge from the experience with a more refined and integrative approach to patient care.
This seminar is intended for clinicians who have at least a basic familiarity with psychodynamic or psychoanalytic thinking.
This seminar offers training for clinicians who understand that there are rarely quick fixes to life’s complex problems and that the work of therapy is about co-creating new attachment bonds within the therapeutic dyad that allow the patient to earn more secure ways of being in the world. This view, of course, implies that the nature and demands of insight-oriented therapeutic work—where patients are received and known through the therapist’s own inner spaces—requires that we therapists have access to and understand not only the patient’s inner life, but our own. To this end, particular emphasis is placed on how we therapists listen and make contact with our patients deeper meanings.
This training is intended for therapists who wish to work at greater depths with their patients and who want to better understand the ever-present unconscious-to-unconscious dialogue transpiring between patient and therapist. Utilizing clinical examples and participants’ own case material, the seminars are designed to help therapists deepen their clinical understanding, expand their empathic horizons, work more proficiently with patients’ complicated dynamics and primitive processes, and refine their technical capabilities in responding therapeutically in the moment. Participants will learn to practice from a more mindful, intentional, and theoretically grounded stance and will emerge from the experience with a more refined and integrative approach to patient care.
This seminar is intended for clinicians who have at least a basic familiarity with psychodynamic or psychoanalytic thinking.
Advanced Principles of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy I: The Supervisory Process
Amelio A. D’Onofrio, PhD
“The main problem in supervision, then, is not so much a matter of teaching and developing new techniques and ideas, as it is to find ways of freeing up the supervisee’s unconscious sensitivities and capabilities.” ~~ Robert Langs
“The bane of training is the unspoken myth that the therapeutic situation is normal.” ~~ Lawrence Friedman
Learning to be therapeutic—to help others heal from traumas and wounds that run deep—requires that one engage not only in cognitive learning but also in the development of one’s deeper capacities to come face-to-face with human suffering. Developing one’s sensitivities to suffering, cultivating the ability to make contact with that suffering, and endeavoring to be an instrument of transformation, requires great courage. We find this courage not simply through the mastery of the knowledge and methods of our discipline—the development of a professional self—but we find that this courage takes shape as we are able to make contact with and understand the suffering in our own depths. That is, in the authentic movement toward becoming therapeutic we are implicitly engaged in the often subtle but disruptive shift from being the person of good will who desires to help others, to becoming one who by necessity must embark on his or her own inner journey of personal transformation.
If taken seriously, this journey can be one of great self-discovery. It can be a sometimes frightening journey filled with encounters with unknown parts of self and with unfelt pain but it can also be a journey that can lead to profound personal integration and healing. It is through this journey that we therapists discover our own deepest sensitivities for human suffering and it is here where we are not only able to find our skills and abilities to be therapeutic but we can also find the courage needed to be so. Simply put, to become truly therapeutic—to become a healer—the psychotherapist is required not only to work to develop a professional self—to learn and master external knowledge—but it requires that the committed therapist be engaged in the practice and cultivation of his or her inner life and personal self.
To this end, the primary intent of this seminar is to explore the dynamics involved in the psychotherapist’s movement from being a helper to becoming a healer. As such, the seminar is intended to provide a broad conceptual model for how those of us who supervise other therapists may accompany and help those in our charge along this journey.
The model of supervision (and by analogy, therapy) I present in the seminar concerns itself, fundamentally, with the encounter with and capacity for depth. By this I mean that a psychotherapy that offers the possibility for deep healing for patients requires of therapists (and, by necessity, the supervisors who teach them) to be able to encounter the darker and shadowy side of that which is most profoundly human in the other—the pain, the tragedy, the trauma, and those most primitive parts (which we all possess) that may, at times, overwhelm, engulf, and even destroy. It is in the encounter with these parts of our patients (and in ourselves) and in our ability to engage, contain, and help make sense of them that we are able to bring relief to our patients’ suffering and help them become more themselves.
“The bane of training is the unspoken myth that the therapeutic situation is normal.” ~~ Lawrence Friedman
Learning to be therapeutic—to help others heal from traumas and wounds that run deep—requires that one engage not only in cognitive learning but also in the development of one’s deeper capacities to come face-to-face with human suffering. Developing one’s sensitivities to suffering, cultivating the ability to make contact with that suffering, and endeavoring to be an instrument of transformation, requires great courage. We find this courage not simply through the mastery of the knowledge and methods of our discipline—the development of a professional self—but we find that this courage takes shape as we are able to make contact with and understand the suffering in our own depths. That is, in the authentic movement toward becoming therapeutic we are implicitly engaged in the often subtle but disruptive shift from being the person of good will who desires to help others, to becoming one who by necessity must embark on his or her own inner journey of personal transformation.
If taken seriously, this journey can be one of great self-discovery. It can be a sometimes frightening journey filled with encounters with unknown parts of self and with unfelt pain but it can also be a journey that can lead to profound personal integration and healing. It is through this journey that we therapists discover our own deepest sensitivities for human suffering and it is here where we are not only able to find our skills and abilities to be therapeutic but we can also find the courage needed to be so. Simply put, to become truly therapeutic—to become a healer—the psychotherapist is required not only to work to develop a professional self—to learn and master external knowledge—but it requires that the committed therapist be engaged in the practice and cultivation of his or her inner life and personal self.
To this end, the primary intent of this seminar is to explore the dynamics involved in the psychotherapist’s movement from being a helper to becoming a healer. As such, the seminar is intended to provide a broad conceptual model for how those of us who supervise other therapists may accompany and help those in our charge along this journey.
The model of supervision (and by analogy, therapy) I present in the seminar concerns itself, fundamentally, with the encounter with and capacity for depth. By this I mean that a psychotherapy that offers the possibility for deep healing for patients requires of therapists (and, by necessity, the supervisors who teach them) to be able to encounter the darker and shadowy side of that which is most profoundly human in the other—the pain, the tragedy, the trauma, and those most primitive parts (which we all possess) that may, at times, overwhelm, engulf, and even destroy. It is in the encounter with these parts of our patients (and in ourselves) and in our ability to engage, contain, and help make sense of them that we are able to bring relief to our patients’ suffering and help them become more themselves.