Workshop: Barriers to Success: Object Relations Psychoanalytic Perspective
Workshop leader: Susan Kavaler-Adler, PhD, ABPP, D.Litt
When: Saturday, November 12, 2011; 10am- 4:30 pm
Where: 115 East 9th Street (at 3rd Avenue); 12 P; NYC, 10003
Fee: $75/40 preregistration (regular/student); $85/50 at the door
In this workshop, Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler will address the core conflicts and fears that serve as self-sabotaging barriers to success in all areas of achievement, creativity, and love. In the morning part of the workshop, Dr. Kavaler-Adler will discuss the theoretical and clinical issues related to dealing with barriers to success. In the afternoon she will use an “in vivo” role-play, to demonstrate the clinical approach to such issues, where a volunteer workshop participant will play a patient, and Dr. Kavaler-Adler will play the analyst.
In life, we all aspire to both conscious and unconscious goals, but often there are psychological barriers that we may cling to and be haunted by, which block our aspirations. Projected envy and terrors of the actual envy of others can block motivations to succeed, when dissociated and/or repressed primal rage intensify the intimidating power of projected hostility and envy, and of perceptions of others as rivalries in areas of competition. Desire can be blocked by oedipal level fears of rivalry and hostile completion, but more primitive and primal fears of abandonment can also be at play, when developmental arrests have taken place in the preoedipal years of separation-individuation and self-integration.
How we address these psychological blocks in a clinical situation is critical to helping patients in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, to overcome all their inhibitions and intimidations, as they attempt to motivate themselves to succeed in life. Knowledge of the British and American object relations theories can be critical to help our patients free themselves up from unconscious conflicts that inhibit them, and from dissociated parts of them that are continually enacting self-sabotaging operations in their internal worlds, so that their external world progress is barred and blocked.
Dr. Kavaler-Adler will discuss Melanie Klein’s theories of unconscious envy and primitive rage related to blocks in love and creativity; Ronald Fairbairn’s “internal saboteur” operations, in which unconscious loyalties to primal bad objects sabotage all progress in life; D. W. Winnicott’s “hate in the countertransference” that highlights the provoked hostilities, which cause retaliations in public and private relations that can only be overcome by the psychotherapist’s “object survival;” and Wilfred Bion’s “attacks on linking,” in which one part of the mind attacks the other, as it disrupts all connections that could result in manifested motivations. She will also address issues related to pathological mourning shown in so many cases in her own writings on object relations theory, and specifically on “fears of success.”
For further understanding of all these issues, those interested can read Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s National Gradiva Award (from NAAP 2004) winning book, Mourning, Spirituality, and Psychic Change: A new Object Relations View of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2003), where detailed cases are presented. Also, Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s 2006 article on fears of success, entitled, “My Graduation is my Mother’s Funeral,” can be read in the International Forum of Psychoanalysis. (This article will be provided for all workshop participants.) Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s other books and articles also address issues of success in life through the progress of “developmental mourning” versus barriers to success in arrested and pathological mourning, as seen in “the demon lover complex.”
To register, email to admin@orinyc.org; call 646-522-0387, and send your check/money order (paid to “ORI”) to: ORI, 75-15 187 Street; Fresh Meadows, NY, 11366.
Registration form is available at www.orinyc.org. Cash is only accepted at the door. If registering at the door, please arrive by 9:30 am. Thank you!