GUILT: From Neurotic to Existential Guilt as Grief and Compassion:
The Question as an Object
Susan Kavaler-Adler, PH.D., ABPP
Saturday, February 21st, 2009
10:00am-4:00pm (Registration 9:30am)
How can a question be an object that can transform through the developmental evolution of an object relations mourning process so that neurotic guilt converts into existential grief and all its modes of compassion and concern (see D. W. Winnicott on “Concern,” 1963)? Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler’s in-depth clinical cases illustrate this form of transformation. Reading prior to the workshops would include cases in her National Gradiva Award book, Mourning, Spirituality and Psychic Change: A New Object Relations View of Psychoanalysis (Routledge,2003). In the case of June, Dr. Kavaler-Adler writes (p. 84) : “How could she have been so numb, so detached, so indifferent, she asked herself, as to have `felt nothing’ when she left her family and decided to stay here in America, after a year’s visit? This question had haunted June for many years, but she only verbalized and articulated it when she felt I was with her and was listening to her. The symbolic message of a once articulated question can reverberate in the mind until it either annihilates or reveals the self. Like the unfolding of a Henry James tale, the symbolic message of a once articulated question can become a personified force, with a weight and shrill cry of its own, ever reverberating in the mind until it explodes into the alternate consequence of self-annihilation or self-revelation.”
This workshop will be experiential, as well as theoretical and clinical.
Two clinical articles by Dr. Kavaler-Adler can be read by those interested:
Kavaler-Adler (2006a). “”From Neurotic Guilt to Existential Guilt as Grief: The Road to Interiority, Agency, and Compassion through Mourning,” Part I, and Part II, American Journal of Psychoanalysis 2006, 66 (3) (Part I) and 66 (4) for Part II.
Workshop participants should feel free to bring in any relevant clinical material, or any personal examples related to the phenomena of guilt. After the lecture and discussion in the morning, Dr. Kavaler-Adler will conduct a guided psychic visualization in the afternoon, which will allow participants to engage with their own internal worlds and with any countertransference conflict in which they feel stuck, particularly in relation to guilt that they experience within themselves or within the patient.
SUSAN KAVALER-ADLER, PH.D., ABPP is the Founder and Executive Director of the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where she also serves as a Training Analyst, Faculty member, and Supervisor. She is the author of three books and 55 articles on psychoanalysis, object relations theory, heterosexual and homoerotic erotic transference, fear of success, creative compulsion or blocks versus free creative motivation, on well known women artists and writers, on psychotherapeutic writing groups, and on “Developmental Mourning” in individual and group treatment, and on psychic arrest and pathological mourning in terms of the “Demon Lover Complex,” etc. Her books are The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers (Routledge, 1993, Other Press, 2000),The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity (Routledge, 1996), and Mourning, Spirituality and Psychic Change: A New Object Relations View of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2003), which won the National Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis in 2004. Dr. Kavaler-Adler has ten other awards (including 4 Arlen Wohlberg Memorial Awards from Postgraduate Center for Mental Health) for her writing in the field of psychoanalysis and object relations theory and clinical technique. She has been in private practice as a psychologist for 34 years, and has uptown and downtown offices in Manhattan. She conducts both individual psychoanalysis and psychotheapy, and groups, including mourning, writing, and self sabotage groups. Besides her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Adelphi University’s Gordon Derner Institute (1974), Dr. Kavaler-Adler also has an honorary doctorate in literature from Ignatius University for her books and articles on the literature of well known British and American writers.
REGISTRATION INFORMATION:
Pre-registration fees are $50 for students and $75 for non-students. Day of Workshop or Conference Fees are $60 for students and $85 for non-students. To register or to get more information about this workshop or any of our Training Programs, call 212.268.8638 or Email Anna@orinyc.org or visit our website www.orinyc.org. Send your check to: Object Relations Institute, 511 Avenue of the Americas, #52, New York, NY 10011.
The Object Relations Institute has the right to cancel, postpone or change the date of its events, the topic of presentations, and presenters without prior notice.