General Information: These workshops are suitable for psychotherapists who wish to refresh and deepen their understanding of the psychotherapy process and it's vicissitudes.  The aim is to provide a forum for practicing clinicians to refresh their ideas, revisit theory, exchange ideas, explore difficulties and work together to explicate and develop their own models of practice. The workshops will offer a Kleinian Object Relations perspective, and each one will include a brief theoretical review of a previously circulated paper, followed by clinical discussion sessions.  Numbers will be limited to 12 participants.

The series of six workshops will focus on unconscious communication, and two fundamentals of the psychoanalytic process - Dreams and Free Association.   With the demands of clinical practice, therapists may lose awareness of the extraordinarily creative nature of the endeavor in which they are engaged, and the necessity to foster, develop and refresh their own creativity.  Therapists sometimes express dissatisfaction with their capacity to work as fluently with dream material as they would wish, while Free Association is such a central aspect of psychoanalytic practice that, paradoxically, it may slip out of focus.  The result can be a loss of liveliness, freshness and sensitivity in the encounter between patient and therapist.  These sessions offer an opportunity to rediscover the radical and exciting nature of the psychoanalytic conversation.