From Breakdown to Breakthrough: Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis (student)

Saturday, April 26, 2025 9:00am - 12:00pm

Title: From Breakdown to Breakthrough: Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis

Speaker: Danielle Knafo

Format: In person only

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:

Dr. Knafo, who has worked with psychosis for 40 years, will present her approach to meeting the challenges of working with individuals undergoing extreme states. She emphasizes an approach that focuses primarily on providing safety, forging a working alliance by meeting the patient where they are and allotting them maximum personal agency, understanding their symptoms as attempts at adaptation and restoration of the self, coping with loneliness, and working with the transference and countertransference. There is a focus on strengths as well as weaknesses. Most importantly, Dr. Knafo's approach to therapy involves viewing the patient as a whole person rather than a collection of symptoms, prioritizing subjective experience and affect, and seeing the patient as a true collaborator in their own treatment. Clinical examples will illustrate her points.

Learning Objectives:

1. Explain why many mental health practitioners have shied away from working with psychosis
2. List techniques for working with psychosis and extreme states.
3. Discuss how to identify and work with positive and negative symptoms.

Speaker’s bio:

Dr. Danielle Knafo is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with expertise in the treatment of psychosis. During her tenure as professor at Long Island University’s Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program for 22 years, she trained doctoral students on how to work therapeutically and psychodynamically with serious mental illness. She received the prestigious Barbro Sandin award for this work. Currently, she is faculty and supervisor at Adelphi’s Postgraduate Programs and NYU’s Program for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She has written and lectured extensively on the topics of art and creativity, psychoanalysis, trauma and psychosis, sexuality and technology. From Breakdown to Breakthrough: Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis (with Michael Selzer) is her tenth book. Dr. Knafo maintains a private practice in Manhattan and Great Neck, NY.

Some of our seminars will be recorded for future educational purposes