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

Emily Seidel, Lani Chow, Melissa Holub, and Leigh Lyndon

Wednesday Oct 16, 5:15 PM – 6:45 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 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. List three ways to manage and use countertransference responses as an effective treatment strategy for facilitating and maintaining a psychoanalytic process.
2. Compile and present clinical case presentations that detail the course of treatment and technical as well as theoretical issues.
3. Describe and define the impact of racial, gender identity or other identity differences on transference/counter-transference responses.
4. List the ways in which the presented interventions are effective particularly by listening for the patient reactions and resistances.
5. Identify, through listening to the case presented by their fellow classmate and with the facilitators help, the most appropriate points for therapeutic interventions.
6. Formulate interpretations that capture the emotional message in their client’s discourse.
7. Describe, and reflect upon the processes within the therapeutic interaction of the presenting therapist as they occur.
8. Articulate ways that unconscious group dynamics in a case conference can express aspects of the case being presented.
9. Demonstrate an enhanced ability to trust their intuition in their clinical work.
10. Name and dissect conscious and unconscious countertransference responses to patients across the diagnostic spectrum.
11. Highlight and describe how the therapist can occupy the position of the patients’ inner object relationships through transference projections.
12. Delineate how race, gender and sexuality impact the transference/ countertransference relationship within any given dyad.
13. Demonstrate an enhanced ability to trust their intuition in their clinical work.
14. Demonstrate the ability to hear multiple levels of meaning in a client’s narrative, so as to deepen their clinical work.
15. Apply an ability to remain open-minded about meanings to allow for greater complexity to develop.
16. Demonstrate a broadened capacity for empathy, including for what’s most unappealing or most different in their clients.
17. Identify at least two leading anxieties and defenses to these anxieties in the case presented.
18. Describe, observe and discuss how verbal and nonverbal elements provide essential information in the psychotherapeutic process.
19. Define ethical parameters for presenting clinical work in a group setting in order to preserve patient confidentiality and preserve the clinical frame.
20. Prepare case presentations including a description of patient’s history and the course of treatment to understand patient’s levels of functioning.
21. Identify countertransference reactions and describe how they can be utilized to facilitate and maintain a psychoanalytic process.
22. Identify multiple levels of meaning in a patient’s narrative to deepen the clinical process.
23. Demonstrate an enhanced ability to trust one’s clinical intuition to expand one’s repertoire of clinical skills.
24. Define reverie and explain how it can be a useful tool to better understand our patients’ unconscious emotional life.
25. Delineate how race, gender, sexuality and class impact the transference/ countertransference dynamics within the patient/therapist dyad.
26. Demonstrate a broadened capacity for empathy towards one’s patients and one’s classmates to facilitate learning.
27. Discuss how the patient’s narrative can be referring to their experience of the therapist in the moment and enhance the therapist’s ability to address this in helpful ways.
28. Observe, describe, and discuss how verbal and nonverbal elements provide essential information regarding the therapeutic process.
29. Develop a capacity to attend to the process in the hour by noting ebbs and flows of contact, of attention, of topic and emotional tone.
30. Articulate ways that unconscious group dynamics in a case conference can express aspects of the case being presented.
31. Describe 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.
32. Explain and articulate interventions that capture the emotional message in their client’s material.
33. Demonstrate a capacity for “reverie” in response to patient material, ie an ability to creatively associate to the experience in the hour, such that unconscious aspects of the work can be brought closer to awareness.
34. Demonstrate an enhanced ability to trust their intuition in their clinical work.
35. Demonstrate awareness of identities and positions that impact the therapeutic dyad.
36. Articulate an understanding of transference / countertransference themes in the clinical material.
37. Demonstrate a capacity for uncertainty as evidenced in open-ended exploratory questions about, and responses to, patient 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.