Abstract
In contrast to exploring the patient's mind from a safe distance, this conference will focus on the clinician’s feelings, subjective experiences, and histories, and their impact on the intersubjective space of the therapeutic encounter. Understanding our own motivations and difficulties with painful mental states generated in therapy is at the heart of an ethical clinical
practice. This authentic self-exploration is vital for every unique encounter within the shared space of both the analyst and patient. In this program, Dr. Shah will explore how the analyst’s uncomfortable and disowned emotional
states of mind are inevitably entangled with the therapeutic process and have the potential to derail or facilitate therapeutic work. Specific emotional/mental states will be explored in detail, including dread, arrogance, dissociation and shame. These experiences illustrate common ways in which therapists stop listening and struggle in the face of uncertainty and intensity. Through theoretical and clinical material, Dr. Shah will attempt to demonstrate how the analyst’s capacity to experience and work with these states is vital to understanding and metabolizing.
Learning Objectives
At the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:
1. Describe the three forms in which countertransference has been defined and used (and misused) by practitioners, and understand and apply its use in the ethics of the clinic.
2. Identify when interpretive strategies used in dissociated or arrogant states of mind serve a defensive function for the therapist and create potential negative therapeutic outcomes.
3. Recognize the experience of countertransference dread and guilt in work with suicidal patients, and identify the impairment of empathy and relatedness that follows from these experiences that can lead to poor clinical outcomes.
Biography
Dhwani Shah, MD is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst currently practicing in Princeton, NJ. He is a clinical associate faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a faculty member at the Psychoanalytic Center of
Philadelphia. He has authored articles on topics ranging from neuroscience, mood disorders, and psychoanalysis. Dr Shah’s book entitled The Analyst’s Torment: Unbearable Mental States in Countertransference was recently published by Phoenix Publishing House and was featured in Brett Kahr’s “Top Ten Books of 2022.”
References
Cooper, S.H.(2016). The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position: the Melancholic Errand of Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.
Howell, E.F. (2020). Trauma and Dissociation-Informed Psychotherapy: Relational Healing and the Therapeutic Connection. New York, NY: Norton.
Sedlak, V. (2019) The Psychoanalyst's Superegos, Ego Ideals and Blind Spots: The Emotional Development of the Clinician. New York: Routledge.
Shah, D. (2022). The Analyst’s Torment: Unbearable Mental States in the Countertransference. Bicester, UK: Phoenix.
