Caroline Garland presented a psychoanalytic view of grievance, a hatred directed at that which came between the child and the gratifying, ideal maternal object. This obstacle may be the individual Oedipal rival or the parental couple, engaged in intercourse from which the child is excluded. This hatred for the parental couple is then displaced onto …
The IPI Blog
International Psychotherapy Institute blog, issues relating to psychodynamic psychotherapy, object relations theory and technique, psychoanalysis.
Aspects of Trauma
Caroline Garland speaking today at the International Psychotherapy Institute on aspects of trauma described how the traumatized person experiences the present trauma in the light of past trauma. Defenses against anxiety have broken down and led to extreme distress because the good objects have not been strong enough to protect against reality which now feels …
Alvarez on Thoughts and Object Relations
Anne Alvarez is interested in how thoughts are in dynamic relation and link together. Thoughts are highly active as people are. In health thinking is not static: it is always moving on; ideas can wait in line and do not disappear. Sometimes, however, our thoughts escape us and we feel frustrated if we can’t catch …
‘The Thinking Heart’
Anne Alvarez looked back over her clinical work of years ago and found her technique at that time insufficient for reaching the terror and despair of tormented, vulnerable children. The interpretation of projections into the therapist as defenses against wishes or of transference as resistance might be useful for those who can hold in mind …
IPI November weekend conference
Anne Alvarez is presenting today at IPI at the conference called The Thinking Heart (the same name as the title of her excellent book). Anne described three levels of therapeutic response — 1) explanatory, 2) descriptive, and 3) intensifying and vitalizing — depending on the state of mind of the patient. At the explanatory level …
‘Inside the Mind of the Child and the Parent” October 17-19, 2014
At the IPI weekend ‘Inside the Mind of the Child and the Parent” October 17-19, 2014, Vali Maduro and Janine Wanlass made an interesting distinction among our therapeutic approaches with adults, adolescents, and children. We adjust our approach to their manner of communicating unconscious conflict: Adults communicate in words and dreams; children communicate in play, …
Judith Chused, MD on the use of the analyst
To see us as separate beings with minds of our own, patients must have the capacity for mentalization. But they lose it temporarily in the course of therapy. Thus at times we are seen as real objects and at other times we become transference objects, misperceived in the light of forbidden fantasies, desires and affects, …
News of IPI participants at the TCCR-IPI summer institute in London
David Scharff and Janine Wanlass led a collaboration with TCCR to join in teaching and group-leading at the TCCR 2014 summer school “When a Twosome Becomes a Threesome: Developing and Advancing Skills in Couple Therapy” held at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships in London, England. David and Janine were joined by Jill Scharff and …
News of IPI participants at the IACFP Congress in Bordeaux, France
Caroline Sehon, Chair of IPI-Metro and Mary Morgan, Head of MA and Clinical Training in Couple Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships (TCCR) were elected, and Lea Setton and Hanni Mann-Shalvi were both re-elected, to the Board of the International Association of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis (IACFP) at the end of …
Ferro on the IPI’s Group Affective Model
Ferro said that in the few days of this weekend conference he had not tried to convey concepts. He is grateful for all the models he has learned over the years (Bion, Klein, Winnicott, Ogden), but what matters to him most is the democracy of models; for instance, Ogden’s “the analytic third” can be thought of as being a concentration …