Summer School Immersion Course in Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy. Featuring: Jon Frederickson, MSW and Allen Kalpin, MD.

Imagine you are studying with highly skilled Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy clinicians within a group of devoted students, surrounded by the mountains of the Shenandoah National Park. You are able to study videotapes and discuss clinical issues all day long and party all night with your new-found friends. Surrounded by nature, in the early evening you watch black bears amble down from the mountains to nibble cherries from the nearby orchard. You sit on the porch in front of your room gazing out over the mountain valleys watching the sunset. This is not a fantasy. It is the Summer School of the Washington School of Psychiatry Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy Training Program. Come join us for our annual intensive training week!

Theme: Building Capacity: The Often Forgotten Goal of ISTDP

Emotional breakthroughs on psychotherapy videotapes are so impressive that we think to ourselves, “I want one too!” But then we can make the mistake of pursuing a breakthrough before the patient has the capacity to bear the complex mixed feelings in the unconscious. We can become frustrated and dispirited in our pursuit of the seemingly ever elusive “unlocking”. When driven by our desires rather than by the patient’s needs, we may pursue premature breakthroughs. But these can lead to regression into depression or even increased psychotic symptoms after the therapy session. Thus, recognizing the patient’s capacity and how to build it in a graded format becomes essential for therapeutic success.

In this Summer school we will focus on the subtleties of building capacity in fragile, depressed, and somatizing patients: restructuring the pathway of anxiety discharge, restructuring the system of resistance, increasing affect tolerance, and developing self-observing capacity. These important principles can be applied to work with all of our patients, allowing the therapeutic alliance to pave the way for an “unlocking” to happen naturally, rather than trying to force it to happen unnaturally.

Space is limited. Your space is reserved once we receive your fee.

For more information, contact Jon Frederickson at jfrederickson@verizon.net