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AUTUMN SEMINAR SERIES - RUPTURE AND REPAIR
AUTUMN SEMINAR SERIES - RUPTURE AND REPAIR - the key to therapeutic change?
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PROGRAMME
10 MONDAY EVENINGS FROM SEPTEMBER - DECEMBER 2012 - LONDON
24 September 2012
Dr Joseph Schwartz
Rupture and Repair IS the Royal Road to Healing
I will briefly review some basic features of relational attachment-based clinical work as I see it. These include the concept of a secure-enough base, the difference between empathy and sympathy, the centrality of countertransference as the only thing we can truly know in the therapeutic encounter, and recent developments in right brain v. left brain functioning. I then will give clinical vignettes of ruptures and their outcomes, not all of which are positive. We can then reflect on when and how repair happens and why repair, not dreams, is the royal road in modern psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
 
1 October 2012
Dr Isha Mckenzie-Mavinga
Rupture and Repair and Anti-Oppressive Practice
This presentation will explore rupture and repair with specific recognition of anti-oppressive practice. More specifically, the context of race relations, clinical supervision and giving a voice to the unspoken will be addressed. I will draw on my experience in the training of counsellors and my book Black issues in the Therapeutic Process to encourage dialogue where ruptures evoke silence, humiliation and shame both in the therapist and client.
 
8 October 2012
Ruthie Smith
The challenge of mending broken connections
Much is written from an attachment based perspective about the value of rupture and repair as part of growth within a therapeutic relationship. The desire for perfection and the intolerable disillusionment of the ideal relationship, where it becomes impossible for the patient to recognise and accept the imperfections of the therapist, generate very challenging moments to negotiate within therapy. The process of repair is more easily said than done, especially since abandonment trauma is the most triggering, enraging and shaming of experiences, exposing need and activating the defences to extremes. We will consider how we can help the patient repair their disconnection from themselves and stay in the therapeutic relationship.
 
15 October 2012
Dr Jean Knox
What Empathy Really Is: How Rupture and Repair Creates Intersubjectivity
Experienced therapists know how important it is to identify with our patients - to understand their suffering from the inside. But we also need to mentalise, to take our own perspective on the unfolding dynamics in the consulting room. This complex interweaving of sameness and otherness is the basis for the therapeutic conversation, with its cycles of turn-taking, rupture and repair. I shall discuss the developmental and neuroscientific processes that become interwoven into a true experience of empathy in psychotherapy.
 
5 November 2012
Professor Maria Gilbert
Rupture and repair as an Intersubjective Creation
The concepts of rupture and repair have become central in contemporary discussions of the psychotherapeutic process. Ruptures can destroy a therapeutic relationship or lead to a creative and authentic encounter. We will look at the co-created nature of therapeutic alliance ruptures looking at the role of the therapist in this intersubjective process with a view to reflecting on how the therapist can recognise the impasse and initiate and participate in the process of repair.
 
12 November 2012
Jenny Riddell
Rupture and Repair in the Couple Relationship in Therapy
This talk replaces the previously scheduled presentation by Marsha Nodelman, who has unavoidably had to withdraw.
 
19 November 2012
Michael Soth
The therapist's embodied presence in the transformative repair of relational breakdowns
Enactments seem to occur suddenly, when we are caught unawares and plunged into them. But from outside the intersubjective entanglement it is apparent that they build up slowly, increasingly, over time. Before we become implicated in an obvious, explicit rupture, there have been implicit, unspoken, subliminal versions of the enactment which have passed unnoticed. Importantly, as we recognise with hindsight, our supposedly therapeutic responses have fed into and contributed to this build-up all along. Based on a multi-layered model of enactments, Michael will explore how the therapist's embodied presence, perception and self-awareness can make the difference between transformative repair of a rupture, or a destructive breakdown of the relationship.
 
26 November 2012
Jane Haberlin
Necessary Ruptures and Essential Repairs
One aspect of the psychotherapeutic endeavour is to make conscious the patient's destructive impulses, thereby rendering them less likely to be acted out. However, as the transference/relational configuration emerges, in its train will follow the felt shame from earlier ruptures in attunement. Shame, and its accompanying feelings of helplessness and vulnerability, results from repeated experiences of negative evaluation in infancy and childhood. How then to sensitively cast light onto those aspects of the patient's self which keep to the shadows without re-enforcing a sense of debilitating shame? A relational therapist's willingness to accept the inevitability of enactments, as well as to acknowledge her part in them with her patient, enlivens our notions about shame; we have to both become the shaming other and transform the experience.
 
3 December 2012
Dr Carine Minne
Negative Therapeutic Responses in the Patient and Therapist
I will present some clinical examples from forensic psychiatry settings where either the patient or therapist (or both) responded adversely to something that arose in a session. On certain occasions, this led to a momentary breakdown in communication only and at other times, several weeks or months were required for communication to be re-established adequately. The impact of these moments will be considered on the overall treatment of the patient.
 
10 December 2012
Morris Nitsun
The creative-destructive dimension in groups
The interpersonal and intersubjective processes at the heart of group psychotherapy predispose the group to rupture (through shame, frustration, misunderstanding ) and repair (through empathy, reconciliation, collaboration). The presenter's concept of the anti-group provides a framework for addressing the creative - destructive dialectic that is intrinsic to the group, highlighting the opportunities for group development arising from the rupture-repair process.
 
 
SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHIES
 
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