CPD Credits
7.5
Event Type
Live Online Event
Location
Zoom & Recording for 365 days
Time
2:30 pm - 4:00 pm
Standard
£250.00
Trainee/NHS
£215.00
Friday, January 19, 2024 - Friday, March 15, 2024
Clinical Impasse - A Five Part Series
When The Therapy Gets Stuck
With Salman Akhtar, Anthony Bass, Narendra Keval, Steven Kuchuck, Jill Salberg & Zack Eleftheriadou (Chair)
In this five-part series we will explore why, with some clients, the therapy ‘gets stuck’. A therapeutic impasse can lead to self-doubt among therapists, as well as concerns that the client may terminate the therapy prematurely. We aim to demonstrate that these challenging moments can offer great insights for both client and therapist, if they can be worked through.
More recently impasses, collisions, and collusions have been acknowledged as inherent and valuable aspects of clinical practice. This means that the experience of getting stuck or encountering a therapeutic impasse can actually help the therapist to understand more about the client's inner world and potentially shed light on how the histories of both the client and therapist are interacting unconsciously. Identifying, naming, and making sense of these clinical impasses can serve as a way forwards
Our speakers will cover themes including the recognising unconscious dynamics between therapist and patient which maintain a stasis in the therapy, the impact of intergenerational transmissions on progress, the phenomenon of "othering" within the context of relational psychoanalysis and racialized enactments, and the delicate art of being affected by the therapeutic process without becoming overwhelmed by it.
The primary objective for this series is to support therapists' capacity to navigate and work through these challenging phases. By participating in this series, therapists can gain the confidence and skills necessary to effectively address moments when they and their clients find themselves in the challenging position of feeling "stuck."
Programme
19 January 2024
14:30 Jill Salberg - Clinical Impasse as an Inevitable part of Therapeutic Action
Perhaps the greatest shift in clinical practice and literature is organised around a shared understanding across theoretical divides regarding the inevitability of impasses, collisions, and collusions in the treatment relationship. In this session, Jill will consider how inter-generational transmission affects both patient and analyst, infiltrating the treatment, disrupting alliances and blocks forward movement. Jill will discuss clinical material that illustrates how a mother’s early death came to haunt the lives of subsequent generations of mothers and daughters. I will address the impact of attachment rupture, trauma, envy, and shame as they reflect transgenerational transmission phenomena and how they were worked on, repaired, and utilised as therapeutic action.
15.10 Discussion with Zack Eleftheriadou
15.30 Q&A with participants
16.00 End
26 January 2024
14:30 Steven Kuchuck - The Analyst’s Negation of Self and “Other”: Sex and Love on the Upper East Side
Although the patient you will be introduced to in this session entered treatment in his later years, he was still very much searching for the boy he had not yet been while on his way to becoming a man. It was only recently that he came to accept a truth he had been running from for years. Banished by parents and society, sexuality had been forced underground for most of his life. Consequently, today’s tale is one of loss and painful longing. The analyst’s tendencies to Other in this treatment will be tracked as both an impediment to and component of the therapeutic action.
15.10 Discussion with Zack Eleftheriadou
15.30 Q&A with participants
16.00 End
2 February 2023
14:30 Salman Akhtar - Disruptions & Interruptions in Treatment
This presentation will open by defining and distinguishing ' Interruptions' and 'Disruptions'. Devoting greater attention to the latter, the presentation shall highlight six psychodynamic triggers that set it into motion. This includes unconscious guilt, anxious retreat from higher level conflicts, envious and sadomasochistic attack on the therapist's calm and creativity, fear of separation from the therapist by improvement, shift in the patient's structural organization from a conflict-based to a deficit-based sector and failure of analyst's empathy and attunement. Therapeutic interventions directed at resolving each type of 'disruption' will be discussed and the various proposals made shall be anchored in psychoanalytic developmental theory and highlighted with the help of clinical vignettes.
15.10 Discussion with Zack Eleftheriadou
15.30 Q&A with participants
16.00 End
8 March 2024
14:30 Narendra Keval - Impasse as Enactment: Shaping the Destiny of the Racial Moment
Whilst it is in the nature of our clinical work that we will experience moments of impasse, these difficulties can become challenging to think about when they take the shape of a racialised moment. The different kinds of emotional predicaments and pressures they create makes it particularly difficult to listen with curiosity to some of the relational dangers associated with racial difference conveyed by the patient. Such moments can however become the place where the most crucial work can happen if it is possible to remain receptive enough to be emotionally affected but not infected to continue thinking, potentially shaping the destiny of the moment.
15.10 Discussion with Zack Eleftheriadou
15.30 Q&A with participants
16.00 End
15 March 2024
14:30 Anthony Bass - Growth, Impasse, Analytic Change and the Changing Analyst - The Mutuality of Relations at the heart of Analytic Change
In this presentation Anthony Bass will consider aspects of impasse, in therapies in which either therapist or patient comes to feel that they have reached a point of diminishing returns, or that the therapy has come to do more harm than good, from a two-person, intersubjective perspective that locates such problems and their possible solutions in therapist and patient mutually. Therapy at such times requires working through of the problem from both sides, with special attention to the dialogue of unconsciouses between therapist and patient as a source of illumination. Psychoanalytic therapies, when they are most helpful, are processes of personal discovery for both participants. Therapist and patient come to know more about themselves as a function of their encounter with one another, and both participants change as a result. Either patient or therapist may be the first to change, initiating an expansion of transitional space and therapeutic potential. I will consider such moments and some ways in which I believe a therapist can use him or herself to re-initiate change, growth and healing in the patient, therapist and therapeutic couple that can make possible a resumption of genuinely affecting therapeutic work.
15.10 Discussion with Zack Eleftheriadou
15.30 Q&A with participants
16.00 End
Salman Akhtar
Salman Akhtar, MD is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and a Training & Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. He has over 450 publications to his credit including 108 books (41 of which are solo-authored). He has served on the editorial boards of all three major psychoanalytic journals (International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and Psychoanalytic Quarterly). Dr. Akhtar has given Plenary Addresses at both the IPA and the APsA Meetings and has received the highly prestigious Sigourney Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychoanalysis. He is a published poet in three languages and serves as Scholar-in -Residence at the Inter-Act Theatre Company in Philadelphia.
Zack Eleftheriadou
Dr Zack Eleftheriadou MSc MA, Dip NCFED, Dip Psychopathology, is a Chartered Counselling Psychologist, Chartered Scientist, Supervisor and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (HCPC reg). She has trained as an adult, child and parent-infant psychotherapist (UKCP) and is a member of CPJA/UKCP as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She provides training and has published in the following areas: developmental issues, cross-cultural work; including the text ‘Psychotherapy and Culture’. She has been working as a psychotherapist and an infant observation tutor for 30 years. She is currently supervising infant observation students and infant observation tutors at IATE and AGIP (London). She is a guest lecturer and a member of The Bowlby Centre and is a visiting external examiner for Doctoral projects across the UK. Zack runs the consultancy service ‘Noema’, providing psychotherapy and supervision. She feels passionate about early intervention and presents on the psychology of the baby for midwives and paediatric nurses.
Anthony Bass
Anthony Bass, Ph.D. is an associate professor and clinical consultant at the New York University Postdoctoral Program for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is on the teaching faculty and a training and supervising analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in the department of psychiatry. He was a founder and is president of the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies, and a founding director of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He was a founding editor and is editor in chief emeritus of Psychoanalytic Dialogues: the International Journal of Relational Perspectives. He is on the board of the Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School in New York City. He leads study groups and conducts clinical workshops around the US and Europe on the therapeutic relationship, and Ferenczi studies.
Narendra Keval
Narendra Keval is a Psychoanalyst in private practice, having previously worked for over 30 years in the NHS. He has written and taught extensively on the subject of race and racism in the clinical situation, both in the UK, South Africa and USA. His book Racist States of Mind : Understanding the Perversion of Curiosity and Concern was published by Karnac Books in 2016.
Steven Kuchuck
Dr. Steven Kuchuck is Senior Consulting Editor (formerly Editor-in-Chief) of the journal Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Former Co-Editor; Routledge Relational Perspectives Book Series, Immediate Past President of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP), faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and supervisor/faculty, at the NIP National Training Program, Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center and other institutes. Dr. Kuchuck lectures nationally and internationally, primarily on the clinical impact of the therapist’s subjectivity. His recent book, The Relational Revolution in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, was published by Karnac Books (2021) and is being translated into multiple languages. In 2015 and 2016, he won the Gradiva Award for best psychoanalytic book for Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst’s Life Experience: When the Personal Becomes Professional and The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi: From Ghost to Ancestor (co-edited with Adrienne Harris). His newest book, co-edited with Linda Hopkins, is Diary of a Psychoanalyst: The Work Books of Masud Khan (Karnac, 2022). His clinical and supervisory practice is in Manhattan and his study groups are conducted virtually.
Jill Salberg
JILL SALBERG, Ph.D., ABPP is a clinical associate professor and clinical consultant/supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies, and a member of IPTAR. Her articles have been published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Psychoanalytic Perspectives. She is the editor of and contributor to Good Enough Endings: Breaks, Interruptions and Terminations from Contemporary Relational Perspectives (2010) and Psychoanalytic Credos: Personal and Professional Journeys of Psychoanalysts (2022). She has co-edited with Sue Grand, The Wounds of History: Repair and Resilience in the Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma, and Transgenerational Trauma and the Other: Dialogues Across History and Difference, (2017), both books won the Gradiva Award (2018). Their co-written book Transgenerational Trauma: A Contemporary Introduction is forthcoming this Spring 2024 published by Routledge. She has conceived of and co-edits a book series, Psyche and Soul: Psychoanalysis, Spirituality and Religion in Dialogue at Routledge. She is in private practice in Manhattan and online.
- Psychotherapists
- Couple and Family Psychotherapists
- Psychoanalysts
- Psychologists
- Clinical Psychologists
- Psychiatrists
- GPs
- Counsellors
- Social workers
- Teachers/Educators
Jill Salberg
- Participants will be able to identify aspects of transgenerational transmissions in the fragmentary ways in which they can enter the treatment as clinical impasses.
- Participants will learn to identify how transmissions occur through attachment abandonment and ruptures.
- Participants will learn how these transmissions become enacted in different ways for the patient and for the therapist and how to work on repair.
Steven Kuchuck
- Give one example from their own practice of how an aspect of their own subjectivity impeded and/or facilitated the therapeutic action.
- Define what relational psychoanalysts mean by Othering.
Salman Akhtar
- Define interruptions and disruptions in psychotherapy and their impact.
- Identify psychodynamic triggers for disruptions that cause therapy disruptions and apply this knowledge to enhance therapeutic interventions.
Narendra Keval
- Engaging meaningfully with racial preoccupations when they emerge in both patient and therapist to explore the nuances of what is being grappled with and communicated.
- Exploring the clinical challenges to remain receptive enough to be emotionally affected but not infected, to continue thinking under fire.
Anthony Bass
- Understand Impasse Resolution from a Mutual Perspective
- Recognise moments of change and personal discovery for both therapist and patient
Standard Registration: £250.00
Trainee, NHS staff and Third Sector: £215.00
Group Rates (for 4 or more): Contact lucysam@trtogether.com for customised pricing.
Trainee discount: To qualify for this offer you need to be taking a course which provides core practitioner training in counselling or psychotherapy that is at least 1 year full time or two years part time and recognised by the BACP or UKCP. TR Together reserve the right to ask to see evidence of training being undertaken.
Alumni: If you are a TR Alumni (TRAPC member) please email anitabruz@tavistockrelationships.org for a discount code to add at checkout
Your CPD Certificate will be available to download from your TR Together account 48 hours after the event.