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International Psychotherapy Institute blog, issues relating to psychodynamic psychotherapy, object relations theory and technique, psychoanalysis.
Anastasia Tsamparli welcomes Greek, American, Australian and South African participants to the IPI summer institute on child, couple and family therapy at the University of the Aegean in Rhodes, as David Scharff with whom she organized the course waits to give the opening lecture
We’ve been fascinated this weekend at IPI by Dr. Björn Salomonsson’s account of his psychoanalytic treatment of infants with their parents. To develop an effective theory and technique for helping infants in distress we need to look beyond attachment research and developmental theory to include analytic theory and technique in our approach. It’s easy to …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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, …
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 …
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