Contemporary Freudian Society – NY
Elective on Aging and Treating the Older Patient
Three Wednesdays
March 2015
Instructor: Batya R. Monder, MSW, BCD
The literature on aging has been growing over the past few decades as analysts have been more willing to face their resistance to this important subject and better recognize both how much growth can take place late in life and how critical it is to mourn the losses as they are experienced. This three-week course will address the
individual differences in how people age and and how much fuller and calmer some
older people could be if they better understood their own minds and emotions; in other words, how much they could benefit from psychodynamic and psychoanalytic treatment. This elective will discuss topics that are of great concern to older adults and perhaps manifest in somewhat different ways than in younger people: depression, loneliness, grief, alcohol abuse, envy, fears about illness and death.
Transference and countertransference will be an integral part of the discussion. As analysts of the older patient, we have to face our own preconceived notions about aging, our own aging process, and our fears of aging and death. We will look at some provocative papers on the subject, using them as springboards to think about the older adults we treat. We will read some papers on the subject by analysts who have
had exceptionally long lives as well as papers by analysts in their prime writing about their experience of working with a range of older adults and the issues they present. We will begin with a beautiful paper about the analytic treatment of a woman in her late 90s who had been an English teacher and a poet. In her last years, till her death at 103, she returned to writing poetry. Calvin Settlage writes about
this sensitive treatment and incorporates some of the patient’s poetry in the paper.
Dates and Time: 8:00pm on March 11, 18, and 25, 2015
Location: The home of Batya Monder, 510 East 86th Street #3B
Fee: $150.00
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The Contemporary Freudian Society
CFS-NY Elective on Aging
11 Bunker Hill Drive
Manalapan, NJ 07726
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