This workshop is an introduction to the area of clinical health psychology and addresses issues encountered by psychologists working with an inpatient or outpatient medical population. It explicates the common problems encountered when we work with physically ill patients; it provides a framework to formulate diagnosis and intervention with the physically ill; it offers practical skills useful in the area of clinical health psychology.
Most psychotherapy models assume that the client has an inner world, a self and the ability to relate- regardless of how inadequate or blocked those may be.
However, clinical experience has shown that we should not assume these attributes. Particularly borderline, psychotically and psychosomatically organized clients manifest many problems in the area of mentalization and symbolization.
In this workshop we will focus on the work of Peter Fonagy and other attachment theorists to study the mentalization process which takes place during infantile life and leads to the formation of their inner world. We will also discuss clinical interventions to use with adult clients with inadequate mentalization skills, which may help them develop further those skills and deepen their inner world.
Many therapists have discovered that inside an adult client there is a small child with his/her own needs trying to heal his/her wounds. In this seminar we will discuss how we can best approach this partly dissociated aspect of the client’s subjectivity and the problems usually encountered in this process.
Francoise Dolto, the well-known French psychoanalyst, has mapped the layers constituting our unconscious body during each developmental stage. Her work is a significant contribution to the puzzle of psychosomatic ailments in childhood or in adult life.
In this workshop we will investigate the legacy of the family to its offspring. Not only talents but also traumas, secrets and unresolved conflicts passed down from one generation to the next.
These unresolved issues play a significant role in the formation of current family relations and the « destiny» of each individual family member.
Specifically we will examine:
Several clinical vignettes will be presented and you can bring your own cases for discussion.
Why do we fall ill? Why do we get the specific disease? This seminar will provide answers to these questions based on different theoretical perspectives: psychoanalysis (Franz Alexander, Francoise Dolto, Joyce McDougall) alternative medicine ( acupuncture and homeopathy) and contemporary research findings with patients.
The following diseases will be explored from a psychological perspective: coronary heart disease and hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, ulcerative colitis, ulcer migraine headaches and cancer.
The participants will also have the opportunity to explore experientially their personal symptoms.
Many therapists believe that ethical issues seldom rise in the course of a treatment. Furthermore, they believe that since they behave ethically in all aspects of their lives, naturally their behavior will not provoke ethical conflicts in their professional work.
However, many issues of ethics are so common and so subtle that they slip by unnoticed, having managed to corrode the therapy process. In this workshop we will discuss some of the more salient issues such as the therapist’s self-disclosure, boundary problems, confidentiality when working with more than one client; we will also discuss more subtle forms of ethics such as the conflict between the values of the therapist with those of the client.
Actual cases will be presented to highlight these points and you can bring your own for discussion.
