32 Weeks | September 11, 2014 – May 7, 2015
Thursdays | 10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Location: St. Clement’s Episcopal Church
2837 Claremont Boulevard, Berkeley, CA 94705

When Things Go Wrong: Working With Couples
Shelley Nathans, Ph.D.
September 11, 18, 25; October 2, 9, 16, 23, 30

Working with three people in the room, rather than two, can be very challenging. Are there particular countertransference experiences that are especially hard to bear and can interfere with our capacity to contain or think about our experience with a couple? This course will examine some of the difficulties in the therapy relationship that can arise when working with couples and how these problems may be similar to or different from issues that arise in individual therapy. We will consider counter-transference responses, enactments, and impasses that can occur when working with “difficult couples” and how the couple psychotherapist might use these experiences defensively and/or to promote development and growth in the couple.

When Things Go Wrong: The Difficult Hours
Our impossible profession and “The fascination of what’s difficult…” (W.B. Yeats)
Dawn Farber, Psy.D., MFT
November 6, 13, 20; December 4, 11, 18; January 8, 15

As psychoanalytic therapists we offer patients our version of the analytic frame, and of our best containing capacities, providing an opportunity for them to do the profound and potentially transformative psychic work of learning to bear their (and our) unbearable states of being, acquire more mature defenses, and live their lives with more authenticity, responsibility, and love. Analysis, like life itself, is always a perilous and unpredictable adventure in which there is never room for complacency. Some analytic couples struggle to generate a genuine analytic process; other analyses hit impasses, requiring radical rethinking and shifts of direction; sometimes these impasses are intractable, and tragically, these analyses fail. What’s an analytic therapist to do, but fail, fail again, and learn to fail better, aided by the inspiration and example of our ancestors and colleagues.

When Things Go Wrong: Let Us Count the Ways
Lee Slome, Ph.D.
January 22, 29; February 5, 12, 19, 26; March 5, 12

When things go wrong in the consulting room, shame and the fear of analytic failure relegate therapeutic challenges to the shadows. Our lens shifts when we accept the painful fact that countless things can and do go wrong in the session and that attempts to rigorously avoid pitfalls paradoxically can create different ones. We will shed light on the multiple ways in which patient-therapist enactments can provoke momentary or sometimes permanent collapses in the analytic relationship. Psychotherapeutic zeal and susceptibilities to transference-countertransference collusions can precipitate harrowing clinical storms. We will explore common clinical challenges that can lead to a greater risk of unconsciously driven patterns such as narcissistic or perverse modes of relating.

When Things Go Wrong: A Study of Countertransference
Sue von Baeyer, Ph.D., and Mary Ewert, DMH
March 19, 26; April 2, 9, 16, 23, 30; May 7

Often, when we feel we have had a “difficult” hour, the difficulty we have had is due to a lack of awareness of our countertransference reaction to our patient. Using participants examples of “difficult” hours, we will review hours with the concept of après coup in mind and discuss the countertransference reactions of the group and of the therapist to the material. In this way we hope to elucidate the counter­transference that may have been felt, but not worked with or utilized during the hour and then see where the difficulties arose.