Early Career Case Conference - Distance

Adam Beyda, Karin Vandervoort, Molly Merson, and Carolina Bacchi

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 East Bay 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. Outline and analyze patient material, learning to identify unconscious elements and how to technically address them.
2. Describe and articulate potential difficulties that arise when there is a lack of awareness of countertransference responses to patients.
3. Identify, formulate and articulate latent versus manifest content in the clinic material.
4. Increase professional competence in understanding how to work with inner dislocation that both results from and contributes to sociopolitical and cultural disruptions.
5. Expand their ability to contain and work through trauma experiences in clinical practice.
6. Engage in personal and group learning around listening and the need for clinicians to be aware of the effect on themselves of the analytic process.
7. Observe, describe, and reflect upon the processes within the therapeutic interaction of the presenting therapist and patient as they occur.
8. List the ways in which to integrate the patient’s responses to the therapist’s interventions into further interactions, reflection, and interventions.
9. Describe, highlight and delineate transference and countertransference aspects within specific psychotherapy hours.
10. Use reverie to analyze the content of each weekly session and identify patient’s central anxiety.
11. Draw on their understanding of patient’s weekly anxieties to develop a formulation of patient’s conflicts and unconscious desire.
12. Describe two to three limitations of reverie in clinical work with patients.
13. Use case material to describe three ways in which sociocultural location impacts the psychotherapeutic couple.
14. Identify two potential difficulties when there is a lack of awareness of countertransference responses to patients.
15. Articulate three aspects of patient’s speech that enhances therapist’s sensitivity to moment-to-moment unconscious dynamics.
16. Consider the patient’s compulsion to repeat by identifying the patient’s conscious motivations for seeking treatment and two defenses and inhibitions that impede desire and change.
17. Describe Laplanche’s “Fundamental Anthropological Situation” and three reasons for its ethical and clinical utility.
18. Define the analyst’s ethical position of lack and list three ways it decreases therapist omnipotence and burnout as well as supports patients’ self-authorization.
19. Develop a capacity to attend to the process in the clinical encounter by observing the emotional states of the clinician and patient in the session.
20. Articulate unconscious group dynamics and parallel processes evoked by the case presentation that deepen the understanding of the patient's emotional experience
21. Engage in personal and group learning around therapeutic listening and the need for clinicians to be aware of the effect on themselves of the therapeutic process
22. Increase awareness of the clinical field and its fluctuations during therapeutic sessions.
23. Note how transference/countertransference dynamics evolve in sessions with patients.
24. Demonstrate capacity for self-reflection and insight into clinicians' emotional responses that impact the therapeutic relationship
25. Develop increased confidence in one's ability to intervene and listen to clinical material during sessions. Discuss the importance of the patient’s non-verbal and implicit communication
26. Demonstrate increased ability to register and respond to unconscious material emerging in the patient-therapist dyad.
27. Develop a capacity to attend to process in the clinical material through awareness of affect, shifts in tone and emotionality, signifiers, and countertransference.
28. Define ways in which unconscious group dynamics in a case conference can express aspects of the case being presented.
29. Attend to the ways unconscious clinical material can be taken up by and located in different people in a case conference, thereby helping us attend to unexpressed aspects of the clinical material.
30. Explain and articulate interventions that consider the political, cultural, structural, and social aspects of the patient’s and therapist’s unconscious processes
31. Articulate at least two ways in which structural, societal, and systemic power dynamics can impact the therapeutic dyad, transference/countertransference matrix, clinical interventions, and other attendants in the clinical hour.
32. 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 thought about together.
33. Demonstrate an enhanced ability to develop and trust clinical intuition, self-reflection, and humility in the work.
34. Articulate an understanding of transference / countertransference themes in the clinical material.
35. 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.