Celebrating the Working Alliance During and in-between ISTDP Sessions will be the theme of our international conference, which will be held in Berlin on September 11 and 12.

On Friday, September 11 and Saturday, September 12, 2015 the focus will be on establishing the conscious and unconscious working alliance with our patients, maintaining and  increasing it`s  quality during and in-between sessions.

Several  prerequisites of such an establishment are:

• the therapist`s ability to function as an external constructive superego
• helping the patient  to use the therapist`s eyes to win the intrapsychic battle against  his self-defeating  mechanisms
• helping the patient to understand the self-defeating function of their front door and cellar  door defenses and to quit them
• to assess the degree to which the patient´s anxiety is healthy/unhealthily regulated and to help the patient to adequately cope with his anxiety
• to assess nature and degree of a patient`s ego adaptive capacity and to help the patient to increase the quality of his ego adaptive capacity
• to help the patient keep his motivation to take responsibility for his own functioning and take his part of the working alliance

All presentations (including the workshops) will be highlighted with video vignettes from therapy sessions. All morning sessions will be plenary and all afternoon sessions will be parallel sessions of workshops and presentations.

One workshop will be on anxiety regulation (our Polish colleagues). The other workshop will be on helping the patient to quit their frontdoor defenses (our Italian colleagues). Presenters who already promised their participation are Kees Cornelissen, (the Netherlands), Alexandra Fanning (UK), Josette ten Have-de Labije (the Netherlands), Robin Kay (USA), Robert Neborsky (USA), Diego Rocco (Italy), Anthony Theuninck (UK).

Colleagues that take part in the making of the workshops are: Mark Stein (UK); Silvia Marin, Giovanna Pezzetta, Cyrus Roustayan, Lorenzo Zucotti (Italy), Ross Crowther-Green (UK); Poland : core group 2, teachers group.

Spoken Language will be English. The Conference is open to colleagues, working in the mental health sector and to psychology students in their last year of study and medical doctors, finishing their degree as psychiatrist.

Payment by Paypal (type Paypal in your internetsearch engine), choose transfer of money, use the following email address and add that you pay for the conference : cornelis.cornelissen@gmail.com
Name of the account is Stichting ISTDP Nederland

(Originally posted 24 December 2014)