NCSPP: ISG --- Breakdown & Breakthrough

This yearlong study group meets every Friday from November 8, 2024, to May 9, 2025, from 10 AM to 12 PM.

We live in a society obsessed with constant innovation and change, where promised breakthroughs can cause collective breakdown. In the clinical relationship, too, genuine breakthroughs can often be experienced as cataclysmic events, threatening the self by piercing the illusion of living in a predictable world. An important task of the contemporary therapist is to reckon with how the therapeutic relationship may be utilized to help patients access their emotional experience and vitality. This often involves a delicate balance between theory and praxis, tradition and the entirely unexpected.

Premature ruptures of defenses, empathic failures and, most severely, when reality itself begins to fracture … all may generate breakdowns. Yet psychological growth can also come on the heels of great pain and turmoil. Often, we associate breakthroughs with healing and the development of insight, but glimpses of sadism, psychosis, and the id also break through carefully constructed facades.

By delving into clinical aspects of cultural, social, and political upheaval, the 2024-2025 ISG will create space for clinicians to process, grapple, and play with experiences of and responses to the ever-shifting reality in which we and our patients find ourselves. In a way unique to psychoanalysis, this course explores the nuances of these phenomena while also exploring potential limits to what psychoanalysis can offer and what interdisciplinary ideas can enhance the breadth and depth of our thinking.

Tuition:

• General Public: $1620 ($700 deposit with registration)
• NCSPP Member Discount: $1260 ($340 deposit with registration)
• NCSPP CMH Member Discount: $1150 ($230 deposit with registration)

For more details about each section of this event, CE, and general information, please visit www.ncspp.org/events/psychoanalysis-breakdown-and-breakthrough

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

St. Clement's Episcopal Church, 2837 Claremont Boulevard, Berkeley, United States