Saturday Morning Seminar

with

Anne Adelman, PhD

on

Deep clinical work with challenging patients evokes strong emotions, powerful ideation, intense phantasy, and psychic turmoil within us as psychoanalytic clinicians. 

In this intermediate-level program, Dr. Adelman will explore shame, one of the "disenfranchised" aspects of the therapist's experience, as it enters into the analytic frame and informs our work. She will discuss why such feelings are often left out of our discussions and the importance of developing a shared language for this realm of the therapist's experience.

In the second half of the presentation, Dr. Adelman will explore many facets of friendship across the lifespan, examining why friends are important to us, how friendships take shape, and how they become meaningful.  She will also explore ruptures, loss and repair in friendship, and consider the affiliative longings and subsequent disappointments that characterize friendship across the developmental spectrum. 

Friendship is a central aspect of life. In the natural history of one's friendships, one could probably find the "all" of who he or she is, like a miniature book where the print is too fine to read but every word is buried within.  However, in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, we do not often look to friendships to understand our patients.  It is as if we consider friends to play, at best, a supporting role, but sense that the real analytic gold is elsewhere.  When therapists evaluate patients, we want to know whether they can make and keep friends, but we don’t necessarily count their friends among the important people on the therapeutic stage.  And yet, within the context of friendship, we can see the unfurling of the inner life of both child and adult.  Friends reveal who we are and who we aren’t.  Put all of my closest friends in one room and talk to them for awhile – you will know me by the end. 

During the course of this discussion, Dr. Adelman will explore how friendships shape who we are, what makes friendship possible and when it becomes impossible to remain friends. She will look at friendship through the eyes of psychoanalysis, and consider the multifaceted meanings of having, holding and deepening these bonds over time.

Presenter

Anne Adelman, PhD is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She received her doctoral degree in Psychology from the City University of New York, completed a two-year fellowship at the Yale Child Study Center.  She stayed on at the Yale University School of Medicine for several years after completing the fellowship, working alongside of other mental health and community professionals, including the New Haven police department, local schools and social service agencies to provide clinical services through many Yale Child Study Center-based programs.  Dr. Adelman graduated from the Baltimore Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis and is currently on the faculty at the Contemporary Freudian Society and at the New Directions in Writing Program at the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. She is co-author of "Wearing My Tutu to Analysis and Other Stories: Learning Psychodynamic Concepts from Life" and co-editor of "The Therapist in Mourning: From the FarAway Nearby." She has also published several chapters, including "The Bystander in Analytic Betrayal" in Betrayal, edited by Salman Akhtar, and "The Analyst's Sense of Shame," in Shame, edited by Salman Akhtar (in press).

Schedule

8:30am Registration and Continental Breakfast

8:50am Welcome and Introduction

9:00am The Analyst's Sense of Shame

When the Dr. Adelman's sense of shame was awakened in the work with a vulnerable analysand, understanding and working through the “disenfranchised” aspects of both analyst’s and patient’s experience led to a deepening of the treatment.

10:30am Break

10:45am Friendship as an Analytic Concept

Little attention has been paid in the analytic literature to friendship, although it is such a fundamental aspect of human experience – significant both in its presence and in its absence.  Dr. Adelman will discuss the developmental function and trajectory of friendship over time, intimacy and estrangement, competition, envy and the deep bonds between friends.

12:15pm Complete Evaluations and Adjourn

Learning Objectives

After attending this intermediate-level seminar in full, participants will be able to:

1) Identify aspects of the therapist's experience of shame that may be hard to articulate in order to increase the therapist’s ability to examine fully the patient/therapist relationship.

2) Describe the impact of shame on the therapist and describe ways to effectively work through these extra-countertransferential aspects of the therapist's experience.

3) Describe how development and the capacity for aloneness affect one's ability to develop and maintain friendships.  

4) Describe how play can facilitate the reparation of ruptures in friendships.    

Participants

This program is open to all APS members and other interested mental health professionals who may not be members. It is not limited to individuals practicing in a predominately psychoanalytic mode. The material will be appropriate for clinicians with intermediate levels of experience and knowledge.

Registration

Professional and Scholar Members:

$45 until February 27, 2017,

$55 after February 27, 2017.

Early-Career Professional Members:

Free if registered by February 27, 2017,

$10 after February 27, 2017.

Graduate Student Members: Free.

Non-members:

$60 until February 27, 2017,

$70 after February 27, 2017.

Although walk-ins will be accepted, please register online at www.aps-tn.org in advance to assure adequate food and seating.

If you prefer to pay by check, please mail your payment to:
Elaine Erickson, PhD
APS Treasurer
515 Booth Street
Knoxville, TN 37919.

Refunds honored with written/electronic notice at least 24 hours before date of conference. Contact Elaine Erickson, PhD. 

Contact the APS President Heather Hirschfeld, PhD to negotiate fees, if needed.

Facility is accessible to persons who are physically challenged. Reasonable accommodations will be made for persons requesting them.

APS Membership:
Eligible professionals can join APS or renew their membership for the 2016-2017 program year for $70. Scholars can join/renew for $50 and Early-Career Professionals can join/renew for $35. Graduate students may join or renew for $25.

American Psychological Association Approval Statement:
Division 39 is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Division 39 maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

Continuing Education:
This program, when attended in its entirety, is available for 3.0 continuing education credits. With full attendance and completion of a program Evaluation and Learning Assessment, a certificate will be issued. Psychologists will have their participation registered through Division 39.

APS and Division 39 are committed to conducting all activities in conformity with the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles for Psychologists. APS and Division 39 are also committed to accessibility and non-discrimination in continuing education activities. Participants are asked to be aware of the need for privacy and confidentiality throughout the program. If program content becomes stressful, participants are encouraged to process these feelings during discussion periods.

Selected References/Recommended Reading:

Buechler, S. (1992).  Stress in the Personal and Professional Development of a Psychoanalyst. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 20, 183-191.  

Davies, J.M. (2004).  Whose Bad Objects Are We Anyway?: Repetition and Our Elusive Love Affair with Evil. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 14, 711-732.  

Freud, A. (1982).  The Past Revisited.  Annals of Psychoanalysis, 10, 259-265.  

Silverman, S. (2006). Where We Both Have Lived.Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 16, 527-542. 

Winnicott, D.W. (1949).  Hate in the Countertransference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30, 69-74.

Contact:

If participants have special needs, we will attempt to accommodate them. Please address requests, questions, concerns and any complaints to APS President Heather Hirschfeld, PhD.

There is no commercial support for this program nor are there any relationships between Division 39, APS, presenter, program content, research, grants or other funding sources that could reasonably be construed as conflicts of interest. During the program, the validity/utility of the content and risks/limitations of the approaches discussed will be addressed.