The Sándor Ferenczi Center

The Sándor Ferenczi Center

Steps Toward an Embodied Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

Steps toward an embodied psychoanalysis and psychotherapy

A Workshop on the Embodiment of Self and Other, Us and Them

 

Saturday, October 12, 2019
10:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Wolff Conference Room (Room D1103)
6 E 16th St, New York, NY 10013

 

Book your ticket here!

CE Credits (5 hours) available for NYS Social Workers and MHCs!
Free for New School students

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This workshop is a follow-up to the workshop led by Jeremy Safran, Jon Sletvold, and Adrienne Harris in 2017 and the workshop led by Jon Sletvold and Sue Shapiro in 2018. In this workshop, Jon Sletvold and Doris Brothers will once again use experiential exercises and embodied supervision to focus our attention on implicit, unformulated, sub-symbolic experience and enactments in psychoanalysis. Adrienne Harris will again be the moderator.

Jon Sletvold’s work on embodying psychoanalysis owes much to the pioneering work of Wilhelm Reich. It is 80 years since Reich, having been invited to the New School, was able to get on the last boat from Norway to New York before the Nazi occupation. During his work at The New School, Reich revised his 1933 book on The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Inspired by Reich’s work, we focus in this workshop also on the embodiment of fascist experience. Since dialogue may represent a way to combat fascism, we will explore embodied dialogue, in therapy and in society.

 

Presenters:

Jon Sletvold, Psy.D.

Doris Brothers, Ph.D.

Participants:

Adrienne Harris, Ph.D.

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Program

Welcome by Adrienne Harris

A body-based approach
As a supplement to the traditional concept-based approach, the idea of a body-based approach will be introduced. We will invite all participants to pay attention their own body feelings.

The first meeting
The very first–often non-verbal–meeting of patient and therapist will be explored. There will be an introduction, including excerpts from first meetings with Freud, followed by a practical demonstration and discussion.

The embodiment of us and them
Doris Brothers will present a perspective on fascist experience as based on the embodiment of us and them. She will invite the participants to explore the embodied experiences of sameness and difference.

Embodied supervision
An embodied approach to supervision will be explained and demonstrated, and some participants will get an opportunity to be supervised on cases of their own choice. In this model of supervision, the supervisee will be asked to roleplay his/her interaction with the patient. All the participants will be asked to register their embodied experiences of the supervisee and the patients they present. They will then contribute to discussions of the clinical examples.

Discussion led by Adrienne Harris

Jon Sletvold, Psy.D. is faculty, training and supervising analyst at the Norwegian Character Analytic Institute. He teaches embodied perspectives on psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Europa, USA and China. He has written articles and book chapters on embodiment in psychoanalytic theory, practice and training. He is the author of The Embodied Analyst: From Freud and Reich to Relationality, Relational Perspectives Book Series, 2014, winner of the Gradiva Award, 2015.

Doris Brothers, Ph.D. is a co-founder and faculty member of the Training and Research in Intersubjective Self Psychology Foundation (TRISP). She co-edited Psychoanalysis, Self and Context with Roger Frie from 2015 to 2019. She serves on the advisory board and council of IAPSP. She is the author of three books and many journal articles. Her latest book, Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty: Trauma-Centered Psychoanalysis was published by Analytic Press in 2008. She has presented workshops on embodiment with Jon Sletvold in New York, Beijing, Shanghai, Dublin and Vienna. She is in private practice in Manhattan, New York, USA.

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