Early Career Case Conference - San Francisco: This program offers early career clinicians an opportunity to engage clinical psychoanalytic listening skills and interventions, as well as to develop community with peers.

Paul Alexander, Celeste Schneider, Michael Korson, and Stephen Lugar

Wednesday Oct 16, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM, 24 sessions until Apr 30

PINC's Early Career Case Conference offers pre-licensed and newly licensed clinicians an opportunity to develop and deepen psychoanalytic knowledge and skills as well as consult together in a community of peers. Facilitators are seasoned analytic clinicians with a variety of interests and psychoanalytic theoretical orientations who enjoy assisting early career clinicians in developing their clinical approaches and practices.

We are happy to offer our annual Early Career Case Conference to the San Francisco psychoanalytic community. Clinicians who have completed graduate school training and are pre-licensure or up to 5 years post licensure are invited to participate in this program. Led by seasoned clinicians who are graduate analysts, advanced PINC candidates, or analysts involved in PINC training, the Early Career Case Conference will focus on case presentations, clinical discussion and community building. Readings may be assigned according to the interest of the participants and instructor.

The ECCC is an opportunity for participants to get to know and network with other clinicians at similar stages of their careers. Group members will learn from peers as well as from experienced facilitators who work with varying clinical approaches and within different psychoanalytically oriented frameworks. The continuity of working in a group over many weeks offers members time to develop their voice, expand their thinking, and deepen their clinical work.

The case conference will integrate psychoanalytic thinking about key issues such as the impact of remote therapy and technology on the therapeutic relationship, and working with intersectionality of identities such as, but not limited to, race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic context.

Group members will each have the opportunity to present a case (usually for three weeks). Each group is limited to 8 participants. We ask that you commit to attending all meetings (barring emergencies and unavoidable circumstances) so that an optimal work group can develop.

Participants in the case conference automatically become Community Members at PINC. Community Membership offers multiple benefits which include a subscription to Critica, the PINC newsletter, discounted or free admission to PINC lectures, events, Visiting Scholar programs, eligibility for a mentoring program, and belonging to a vibrant community of psychoanalytic innovators and forward thinking clinicians.

Continuing Education Credits (CEs) are available for a total of up to 36 CEs for the course.

CE Credits offered: 36

Course Objectives

After completing this course participants will be able to:

1. Articulate the essentials of a psychoanalytic setting, as both a framework and a position of address.
2. Describe the unconscious aspects of the field in which the presenter, the patient, and the case conference group are immersed.
3. Discuss transference and countertransference as enactments of the unconscious exchange between therapist and patient.
4. Describe what it means to make use of intuition when navigating confusing emotional situations with patients.
5. Consider the conscious and unconscious aspects of power inherent in the clinical situation from intra-psychic, interpersonal, and socio-cultural perspectives.
6. Articulate how unconscious emotional pain applies pressure and directs attention in the therapist’s lived experience with the patient.
7. Describe what it means to metabolize a patient’s protections.
8. Consider how different unconscious aspects of a case can be taken up by different people in a group, which, when approached inclusively, leads to a broader awareness of the overall field.
9. Utilize case conference as a setting in which to share experience with other clinicians and to deepen learning about clinical work.
10. Describe the process of clinical analytics listening.
11. Articulate their sense of the therapeutic action as it emerges in the case material presented.
12. Describe the importance of the frame in clinical work.
13. Consider countertransferential/emotional experience as it arises in the therapeutic encounter
14. Explain how defenses and anxiety pertain to case material.
15. Describe how clinical theories are relevant to work in the consulting room and the broader social field.
16. Discuss theoretical concepts that are relevant to the case material as they arise.
17. Explain how exploring cases together can cultivate their capacities to become aware of shifting states of mind in the clinical dyad.
18. Present their own case material.
19. Identify and discuss transference and countertransference phenomena and how to work with the clinical relationship to enhance the therapeutic effect.
20. Articulate how analytic listening differs from regular listening and how “effects created in language (what the patient’s language does ‘alongside and beyond’ what it says) represent an important medium in which the communication of unconscious experience occurs” (Ogden, 1997, p.20).
21. Define what reverie is and articulate how it is used by the therapist in the clinical encounter.
22. Identify how the sociocultural (race, sexual orientation, class and gender) provides areas of exploration and clinical focus in the clinical encounter.
23. Identify different “royal roads to the unconscious” (dreams, somatic symptoms, parapraxis and metaphor) and how to work with them.
24. Discuss how to recognize and address unconscious enactments in the clinical encounter.
25. Understand the importance of the therapist’s non-defensiveness, especially when working with impasse, clinical ruptures and negative transference.
26. Practice free association in response to clinical material presented in the case conference.
27. Demonstrate an enhanced ability to trust their intuition in their clinical work.
28. Describe and list transference and countertransference aspects within specific psychotherapy hours.
29. Identify and articulate the transference and countertransference processes in the clinical situation.
30. Articulate three potential difficulties that arise when there is a lack of awareness of countertransference responses to patients.
31. Analyze and define clinical material through a close reading of case reports and psychotherapy hours.
32. Compile and present clinical case presentations that detail the course of treatment and technical as well as theoretical issues.
33. List the ways in which sociocultural and sociopolitical dynamics impact both the transference and the countertransference in particular clinical situations.
34. Delineate how race, gender and sexuality impact the transference/countertransference relationship within any given dyad.
35. List the ways in which the presented interventions are effective particularly by listening for the patient reactions and resistances.
36. Define and articulate alternate technical interventions based on analysis of case material.

db.pincsf.org/events – 415-288-4050 — 530 Bush St, Suite 703, SF CA USA — pincsf@gmail.com

The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. PINC maintains responsibility for this program and its content. Visit db.pincsf.org/policies for policies and disclaimers.