The Therapist’s Choices in a Psychodynamic Treatment: Enhancement of Knowledge Provision of Experience and Engagement in Relationship (on-demand - non-member)

Title: The Therapist’s Choices in a Psychodynamic Treatment: Enhancement of Knowledge, Provision of Experience, and Engagement in Relationship

Speaker: Dr. Martha Stark, MD

Format: On-Demand

Cost:
$100 for Non-Members
$80 for Members - Log into the Member Area to purchase
$20 for *Students - Click here to request a student discount

*Full-Time Undergraduate, Graduate, Doctoral students, and LMFT, LADC, LPC, Social Work, Psychology, and Psychoanalytic licensure/certification candidates

Credit: 3 CEUs approved for Psychologists, Social Workers, LPCs/LMFTs and LADCs

Description:

Based upon her award-winning Modes of Therapeutic Action book (which is “required reading” – both in the US and abroad – for candidates in psychoanalytic training institutes and students in psychodynamic psychotherapy programs), Dr. Martha Stark will present a comprehensive approach to deep and sustained psychodynamic change that integrates (1) the interpretive perspective of classical psychoanalysis (with its focus on “interpreting resistance,” “developing insight,” and “resolving internal conflict”); (2) the deficiency-compensation perspective of self psychology (with its focus on “absence of good,” “grieving heartbreak,” and “filling in deficit”); and (3) the intersubjective perspective of contemporary relational theory (with its focus on “presence of bad,” “negotiating the in-between,” and “resolving relational conflict”).

Particular attention will be paid to the importance, in all three modalities, of the therapist’s continuous attunement to the level of the patient’s anxiety so that she can construct “optimally stressful” interventions that offer just the right balance between anxiety-provoking challenge of defense and anxiety-assuaging support of it. If all goes well, ongoing and judicious use, and working through, of these growth-incentivizing “mismatch experiences” will catalyze iterative healing cycles of disruption and repair and, ultimately, evolving of the patient from “defense” to “adaptation” – that is, from “psychological rigidity” to “psychological flexibility.”

Throughout her 3-hour ZOOM Presentation, Martha will be offering both brief and more extended case vignettes to demonstrate the translation of theory into clinical practice.

Learning Objectives:

1. Discuss the importance of staying ever attuned to the level of the patient’s anxiety
2. Elaborate upon the therapeutic use of optimal stress to provoke recovery
3. Construct a growth-incentivizing “conflict statement” to facilitate resolution of “internal conflict”
4. Create a growth-incentivizing “disillusionment statement” to facilitate grieving and “transmuting internalization”
5. Construct a “relational intervention” that highlights the patient’s “accountability”
6. Examine the therapist’s “use of self” to inform both understanding and intervention
7. Highlight the distinction between defensive, mindless reactions and adaptive, mindful responses
8. Explain the importance of cultivating dual awareness
9. Expound upon the cycles of disruption and repair that are generated as a result of the therapeutic provision of optimal stress

Speaker’s bio:

Martha Stark MD, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, is a holistic (adult and child) psychiatrist and integrative psychoanalyst in private practice in Boston, MA, and Clearwater Beach, FL.

Martha is Co-Founder / Co-Director / Faculty, Center for Psychoanalytic Studies, William James College; Former Faculty, Harvard Medical School; and Former Faculty, Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis.

Martha is the author of nine highly acclaimed books on the integration of psychodynamic theory with clinical practice, including the award-winning 1999 Modes of Therapeutic Action: Knowledge, Experience, and Relationship – chosen by Jason Aronson Inc as their “Book of the Year.”

Several of Martha's books have become "required reading" for candidates in psychoanalytic training institutes and students in psychodynamic psychotherapy programs both in the US and abroad.

Martha is the Originator / Developer of The Stark Method of Psychodynamic Synergy: A Multifaceted Approach to Deep Embodied Healing.

Board Certified by the American Association of Integrative Medicine, Martha also contributes chapters to integrative medicine textbooks and articles to peer-reviewed toxicology / environmental medicine journals. Additionally, she serves on the editorial / advisory boards of various holistic health publications and sits on the Advisory Board of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute.