The Ear, The Eye, the Heart, and the Hand: a core training in EDT and ISTDP

This IEDTA-certified core training will focus on mastery of the underlying principles of experiential dynamic therapy and ISTDP, and of the strategies for listening and intervening that can be derived from those principles. Participants can expect to graduate with a strong comprehension of these core principles and of the ways these principles find expression in the treatment techniques of Davanloo and others. They will be supported to apply these principles and strategies with their own patients in their own idiom—to live out these core concepts in their own unique way. The overarching goal of the training is to help therapists help their patients to more deeply experience and integrate previously repressed and dissociated aspects of their life and mind, and a broad spectrum of theoretical and technical ideas will be brought to bear for achieving this goal. We will train the ear and eye to receive unconscious communication, train the heart to experience and make sense of countertransference, and train the hand to reach out to the unconscious through skilled intervention.

Admission criteria: All core-trainees must be licensed/registered or in a recognized degree program that leads to licensure/registration, and be able to produce proof of this. They must be willing and able to attend all meetings.

 

Program structure: This 3-year, year-round core training will feature twice-monthly 4-hour online training sessions, and once-annual in-person immersions outside Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Twice monthly Zoom meetings: There will be a 4-hour session on the first Wednesday and third Friday of every month, year-round. The goal of these more-frequent meetings is to provide continuity and increase frequency of repetition, as this may enhance learning. These 4-hour sessions will consist of 2 didactic hours, 1 supervision hour, and 1 hour of group process. They will occur from 9am-12:50pm EST.

Annual in-person immersions: The immersions will consist of one 8-hour day (Friday) and one 5-hour day (Saturday), and will occur once per year of core training. The Friday schedule during immersions will include 4 hours of didactics, 3 hours of supervision, and 1 hour of group process, and the Saturday schedule will include 1 hour of didactic, 3 hours of supervision, and 1 hour of group process. This half-day Saturday will enable students to spend the afternoon exploring the local area (Delaware County, Pennsylvania, close to Philadelphia, Chester, and Montgomery counties), which has much to offer. Social events and/or shared meals out will be planned according to group interest.

IEDTA Certification: Over the 3 years of training, participants will receive 159 hours of didactic training, 15 hours of individual supervision, 75 hours observing group supervision, and 78 hours of group process, qualifying them for certification as “core trained” by the IEDTA.

Fee: The cost/year of training is $3,350 (USD). (The cost of this amount of content, if one was to obtain it through individual and group supervision and participation in other courses I offer, would be roughly $5,000/year). Payments are non-refundable.

 

Curriculum: The curriculum will be shaped to the needs of the participants, and is subject to change as we go, but the following is a general plan:

Each month of the 3 year program will have a specific focus, so there will be 12 major content areas covered each year, 36 in total. Didactic seminars will consist of reviews of the readings, discussions of theory, skill building exercises, role play, with heavy emphasis on viewing clinical vignettes of the trainer’s clinical work. Participants can expect about 60 pages of readings/month, tailored to the topic of the month and/or to other interests that emerge in the group.

Here is a general map of the course content for each year. While we will likely pursue the topics in something close to this order, topics will inevitably be interlaced due to the nonlinearity of psychotherapy learning:

Year 1, “The ear, the eye, and the heart”: Year 1 will focus mostly on hearing unconscious communication, with specific emphasis on how unconscious communication can inform us about patients’ responses to our interventions, and how formulations derived from unconscious communication can help us shape our interventions and tailor our treatment strategy to the emerging needs of the patient and the alliance.

Core themes: ISTDP “metapsychology” (resistance and unconscious therapeutic alliance), response to intervention, psychodynamic clinical thinking, listening for the 5 channels of unconscious communication, case formulation, establishing an effective focus

1. Psychodynamics, the science of unconscious conflict (Triangle of conflict, Triangle of person)
2. Transference and transference resistance
3. UTA #1: Listening for unconscious conflict in manifest content
4. UTA #2: Listening for unconscious conflict in process a) Anxiety — unconscious anxiety, non-verbal signals of anxiety, response to intervention, psychodiagnosis, pathways of anxiety discharge
5. UTA #3: Listening for unconscious conflict in process b) Defenses — defenses, non-verbal indicators of defense, response to intervention, psychodiagnosis
6. UTA #4: Listening for unconscious conflict in process c) Feelings and Impulses — unconscious vs conscious emotions, the role of emotions in psychic life, psychodiagnosis
7. UTA #5: :Unconscious supervision”, “dream work”, response to intervention
8. UTA #6: Understanding countertransference: turning our experience inside-out, response to intervention
9. UTA #7 Unconscious enactment, response to intervention
10. Will and Conscious Therapeutic Alliance
11. Rise in the transference, Davanloo’s spectra diagnostic system
12. Establishing an effective therapeutic focus

Year 2, “The hand”: The second year will focus on intervention strategies for achieving the aims of experiential dynamic therapy and ISTDP, namely regulating excessive anxiety and interfering with the functioning of pathogenic resistances, so that repressed material can be experienced and enter consciousness.

Core themes: intervention, tailoring intervention to psychodiagnosis, response-to-intervention

1. Anxiety regulation, thresholds
2. Regulating the anxiety caused by superego pathology and projection of superego
3. Formulating task, conscious therapeutic alliance
4. Pressure to (task, will, consciousness, acceptance, feelings, etc.)
5. Pressure against (defenses and resistance)
6. Spectrum of challenge, from subtly “casting doubt” and “calling into question” to “No”
7. HOC—“Undoing”, deactivating interventions, “a conversation about reality”
8. Navigating barriers to closeness, tailoring our interventions to particular resistances
9. Counterprojective maneuvers—working with paranoid patients
10. Counterenactive and “indirect” maneuvers—working with unconscious resistance
11. The role of interpretation
12. Consolidation, psychic integration

Year 3, Advanced topics: The third year will take on advanced topics that can now be better understood and put to use with a foundation of principles of listening and intervention in place.

Core themes: Clinical thinking, complex cases, advanced stages of therapy, advanced psychodynamic clinical concepts

1. Clinical thinking #1: hypothesis development and testing
2. Working with fragility and severe personality disorders: splitting and splitting-based defenses
3. Regression and regressive or defensive affects
4. Internalized Object Relations, their role in psychodiagnosis of the transference
5. Projective identification—how patients attempt to induce feelings and roles in therapists
6. Unconscious enactment/counterresistance—the therapist’s unconscious collusion with defenses and resistance
7. Clinical thinking #2: our relationship to our theory
8. Compliance, defiance, passivity, and dependency: Power dynamics in therapy
9. Therapist stance: anonymity and neutrality as they relate to ISTDP
10. “Breakthrough into the Unconscious”
11. Couples therapy
12. Termination

Supervision: Participants are expected to present their clinical work in group supervision five times per year, according to a schedule that will be set at the start of each year. Video recordings of sessions are the only acceptable format for presentation. Trainees must present session videos from at least 2 different patients over the 3 years. A maximum of 1x/year a student may present in some other format (e.g., audio recording, transcript), and should do so only if the patient that they want help with will not authorize video recording. A sample informed consent for recording will be provided to students upon request.

Supervision sessions will be 50-minutes each, with the first 40-minutes involving direct supervision between the participant and the trainer, and the last 10-minutes open for group discussion. In addition to supervision based on the video presented, supervision may also include role-play and prescription of deliberate practice exercises.

Contact: Comments and questions can be directed to mauricelouisjoseph@gmail.com

Program Information

Program Name: The Ear, The Eye, the Heart, and the Hand: a core training in EDT and ISTDP, Maury Joseph