Working with Personality Disorders in Psychoanalytic Supervision: The Object Relations View

When: Sunday, 4/29/18 (1:00 – 4:00 pm) 
Where: In-Person location: 115 East 9th street, 12P, NYC, 10003   Virtual participation will be available via gotomeeting platform (with minimal technical requirements)

Everyone is welcome! No fee, but RSVP is required! 
For more information about this open house and the virtual participation – please contact ORI’s administrator at 646-522-1056 or by email to admin@orinyc.org .

This Open House will feature the interactive lecture on

Object Relations theory has been particularly necessary to understand those who have early developmental arrest within their first three years of life, when the basic core self structure is forming. At this Spring 2018 Open House, Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler will address the phenomena of Borderline, Narcissistic, and Schizoid conditions in developmental object relations terms.  She will speak about the different psychic structure character formations, and how they require different psychotherapeutic approaches. She will also speak about self-integration, psychic structure internalization, and separation-individuation – in relation to the psychoanalytic psychotherapist’s capacities to process dissociated trauma, since this dissociated trauma impacts the therapist as “objective countertransference” (Donald Winnicott) and as “projective-identification” (Melanie Klein, Heinz Racker, Wilfred Bion, and Paula Heimann).

Dr. Kavaler-Adler will speak about how every psychotherapist can be helped with the difficult task of processing projective identification and “objective” or induced countertransference through an object relations mode of supervision. This supervision involves “in vivo” clinical experience in the form of “role-plays” as well as in the form of “meditative visualization.” As primal trauma and its sadomasochistic enactments are understood, rather than reacted to in a retaliatory manner, each therapist in this supervision learns about the clinical technique spoken about by D. W. Winnicott as “object survival.”

Through survival of primitive aggressive reenactments, patients can begin to tolerate containing their own experience (read Wilfred Bion on the “container” and the “contained”). Then, the therapist can begin to interpret the compulsive primitive enactments that were formerly too traumatically overwhelming to discuss. Once the patient/client/analysand comes to contain their inner compulsive reenactments, rather than to act them out in a dissociated way, they move from more primitive psychic state of being (Melanie Klein’s “paranoid-schizoid position”) to a more advanced one (Klein’s “depressive position”).  Then, symbolization develops naturally, along with all the organically evolving ego functions; and internal psychic space and transitional space (Winnicott) allow the person to become an “interpreting subject” (Thomas Ogden), as well as to receive new “internalizations.” The patient begins to receive interpretations, rather than experience them as an invasive persecutory assault. At the same time, the therapist interprets how persecutory they are perceived, when making interpretations. Can they then interpret being a Kleinian “toilet breast,” as well as a persecutory “bad object” (as the Kleinians do)?

Through all this, the therapist learns how to be there with a patient, who (by developmental necessity) must mourn the loss of an early symbiotic object (prior to the developmental trauma). Developmental mourning (Susan Kavaler-Adler) precedes, from the core self and object loss to later losses. This understanding of mourning overlaps with James Masterson’s “abandonment depression.” Without the working through of the “abandonment depression,” the patient seeks addictive highs that regressively return them to the “reunion fantasy” (James Masterson and Margaret Mahler) of being one again with the symbiotic mother (fused together with the mother in a split-off “grandiose self” structure in the narcissistic character pathology).

The role-play will be used to demonstrate how the therapist responds, moment to moment, to the patient’s developmental trauma enactment, and intervenes with empathic attunement, within the “in vivo” clinical process.  One of the Open House participants will have the opportunity to volunteer and play the role of his/ her patient, to get inside of their patient’s internal experience, with Dr. Kavaler-Adler who will role-play the object relations psychoanalyst.

Then will be the time for all questions about the Object Relations Institute’s One-, Two-, and Four- year Certificate Training Programs.  Questions about the rich curriculum and high level faculty will be answered, along with questions about requirements for full psychoanalytic certificate training, and about requirements for one or two year educational certificates, which can be stepping stones to the full psychoanalytic training @ORI. Discussion about our multiple and re-structured traditional and virtual training programs will be complemented by examples of therapeutic role-play with   implementation of the object relations clinical technique.

Learn about special scholarships at the ORI! The ORI had established Dr. Jeffrey Seinfeld Scholarship Fund, and since 2013-2014 academic year, we are offering scholarships to the social workers, mental health counselors, and other mental health professionals  who are interested in object relations psychoanalytic training.

Learn about our new Parent-Child Development Program, which includes our traditional courses – on works of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Ronald Fairbairn, as well as the Infant Research course, and  some  newly introduced  courses on Child’s Play and the Neurobiology of  the Parent-Child Bonds.

In the meantime, please do not hesitate to call/email to:

Susan Kavaler-Adler, PhD, ABPP, Institute’s Executive Director – at 212-674-5425; drkavaleradler@gmail.com
Inna Rozentsvit, M.D., PhD, MBA, MSciEd, Administrator, Registrar, and Community Relations Coordinator – at 646-522-1056 or admin@ORINYC.org.

Educational Activities which will be discussed are:

Our Traditional and NEW – Virtual and Integrated – Certificate Programs
Our Traditional and NEW – Virtual and Integrated – Certificate Courses

Virtual programs are be offered via audio and video/audio meeting platform (with minimal requirements for a telephone and/or Internet connection).

ORI Community also enjoys the benefits of:

• Sliding fee scale therapy referral service for individuals, couples, adolescents, and children
• Professional networking and practice development
• Professional publishing and preparation for publishing
• Building the Cause (#361700) on Facebook: Support Mental Health Education
• Free educational mini video series “Object Relations View” – at our YouTube Channel, “ObjectRelations2009” (also available at www.ORINYC.org)