The idea of the course is to open a creative process fueled by intuition, to feel your way into another human being’s life and formulate that person’s suffering in a way that would express his or her unique categories of subjective experience rather than the preformatted objective categories of received diagnostic wisdom.
To be a good therapist, one must have an emotional appreciation of individual persons as complex wholes – not just their weaknesses but their strengths, not just their pathology but their health, not just their misperceptions, but their surprising, unaccountable sanity under the worst of conditions. An appreciation of a client’s character type is one of the factors that influence therapists in their decisions to work with someone. We want to know what stresses account for any person’s coming to us at this particular time, how he or she has unconsciously understood those stresses, and what aspects of his or her unique background have created a vulnerability to this kind of stress.
The contents of the course include basic premises, goals of psychoanalytic therapy and case formulation; assessing what cannot be changed like physical realities and life circumstances; assessing developmental issues; defense mechanisms; identifications, relational patterns; self-esteem and nature of pathogenic beliefs.
This course is useful to people committed to working in the mental health field – psychiatry, psychology, social work, counseling, education, psychoanalysis and relationship counseling.
Duration: 12 weeks