10/19/2022 - Monthly Meeting

Unspoken Secrets and Nonverbal Elements in Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma and its Relation to Addiction

7:30pm-9pm
1.5 CE Credits
Meeting Location: Zoom

Karla Lizette Gomez, M.S.

Through a previously conducted study the presenter discovered that a relationship exists between the unmourned trauma from ancestors or parents and the narcissistic loss in individuals struggling with substance abuse. The presenter proposes ideas on how to approach individuals struggling with trauma that cannot be spoken or cognized, and reenact trauma through repetition and working-through it preverbally. The presenter will focus on intergenerational transmission of trauma and the construction of a narrative within the individual.

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify links between intergenerational trauma and psychoanalytic conceptualizations of loss to addiction;

2. Demonstrate how the process of ego splitting that appears in drug addiction is related to the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

3. Identify whether or not nonverbal and unspoken trauma in the individual is in relation to unresolved parental childhood trauma.

Presenter Bio:
Karla Lizette Gomez received a Masters in Clinical Psychology from the Universidad de Monterrey, and is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in Mexico. Currently she is in the process of obtaining licensure in the United States as well. She has presented a case study in a live supervision panel with Nancy McWilliams at Division 39: Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology Spring meeting 2019. Karla is also part of the volunteer committee and is an active board member in the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society (APCS) and Section VIII Couple and Family Therapy and Psychoanalysis for Division 39: Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology. She was also a fellow in the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy. Her research (Mythological Bridge Between Intergenerational Transmission of Unmourned Loss and Addiction) was published in The Psychoanalytic Review in 2020. Karla used to work as a psychotherapist at Desarrollo Integral en Movimiento A.C., a residential rehabilitation center for substance abuse for 3 years, and is currently working as an Outpatient Family Therapist in Hanover Township Youth and Family Services in Schaumburg, Illinois. In addition to intergenerational transmission of trauma, her interests include art therapy, psychosis, and Greek mythology.

9/21/2022 - Monthly Meeting

7:30pm-9pm
1.5 CE Credits
Meeting Location: Zoom

Jim Harris, PsyD

Charles Dickens' classic character Ebeneezer Scrooge, from his beloved novelette A Christmas Carol, will be used to exemplify recovering from Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Scenes from the movie version of this story starring George C. Scott as Scrooge, and Pete Walker's book, "Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving", will bring to life the origin, nature and treatment of Complex PTSD.

Learning Objectives:

1. Differentiate Complex PTSD from PTSD;

2. Identify four basic responses to childhood trauma and their corresponding defensive structures;

3. Understand the possible origin of a tyrannical superego;

4. Understand modifications in psychoanalytic technique, such as the use of psychoeducation, to promote successful treatment outcomes.

Presenter Bio:
Dr. Jim Harris earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from Baylor University, with internship at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. He is past president of DSPP. He is published in peer-reviewed journals, and appears on local and national TV, internet, radio and print media. He conducts psychoanalytic psychotherapy and teaches and provides consultation to psychologists.

10/20/21 - DSPP Monthly Meeting

7:30pm-9pm
1.5 CE Credits
Meeting Location: Zoom

Nathaniel R. Strenger, Psy.D.

The time for neighborhood is now. Psychoanalysis, an institution among many, faces a political reckoning. This paper calls for, and moves towards, a renewal of real-life integration in the ways of clinical intervention and localism. Drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic theory, political philosophy, and case studies highlighting political difference, this paper aims to revive a neighborly American public sphere. One session at a time.

Learning Objectives:

1. 1. Summarize the role psychoanalysis has played in diminishing American neighborliness, and see the potential for restorative contribution it currently wields.

2. 2. Integrate psychoanalytic and political lenses, using these to situate clinical work socially.

3. 3. Draw on psychoanalytically oriented postures to promote neighborliness as a crucial element in any model of health.

Readings:

Altman, N. (2005). Manic society: Toward the depressive position. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 15(3), 321-346.
Botticelli, S. (2004). The politics of relational psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 14(5), 635-651.
Winnicott, D. W. (1986). Some thoughts on the meaning of the word 'Democracy.' Home is where we start from: Essays by a psychoanalyst. WW norton & Company.

Presenter Bio:

Nathaniel R. Strenger, Psy.D. is a licensed psychologist and the Director of Clinical Advancement at The Center for Integrative Counseling and Psychology in Dallas, Texas. As such he provides a variety of clinical services, supervises training therapists, and develops continuing education opportunities for clinicians and the broader public alike. As part of his studies and professional background, he has taught, lead workshops, and written on topics ranging from trauma, spirituality across the lifespan and the practice of psychology, emotional regulation in children, teens, and adults, community coordination in care, parenting concerns, and clergy family issues. He has worked in outpatient community clinics, private practice, medical centers, and in university counseling.

1/29/2022 - Diversity Workshop

9am-12pm
3 CE Credits
Meeting Location: Zoom

Stephanie Swales, Ph.D.

Drawing from Stephanie Swales' recently published book, co-authored with Carol Owens, Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan: On and Off the Couch (Routledge, 2019), this presentation will explore racism and other forms of xenophobia through a psychoanalytic lens, using the key concept of ambivalence and highlighting how and why libidinal investments, our modes of enjoyment, are wrapped up in our prejudices. Examples will be presented both from clinical practice and from contemporary social events, such as some of the social responses to the outbreak of COVID-19-including Sinophobia and "maskophobia". Participants will gain an understanding of how to apply the theoretical material presented to clinical work as well as contemporary social life.

Far from being about "mixed feelings," as Freud explained the concept in his paper Totem and Taboo, ambivalence involves the conflict between two equally strong currents that are "localized in the subject's mind in a way that they cannot come up against each other" (Freud, 1913, p. 35); when one current is conscious, the other is unconscious. To have an unconscious in these terms is therefore at one and the same time to be ambivalent. What is more, we are deeply ambivalent about our own jouissance, our own modes of enjoyment, and employ various mechanisms to reject the hated aspects of ourselves into the Other as embodied by our neighbor who may be different from us in terms of race, gender identity, religion, and so on. We are fundamentally ambivalent creatures, ambivalent about ourselves as well as about our neighbors, and therefore any account of forms of xenophobia (as the fear of "the foreigner", of the outgroup), including racism, must take into account our ambivalent human nature. Further, following the Judeo- Christian dictate to "love thy neighbor as thyself" we can take from Freud's account of the vicious punitive nature of the superego that we are actually not very good at loving ourselves, that we hate ourselves just as we love ourselves, so it might be more correct to command, "hate thy neighbor as thyself".

Learning Objectives:

Participants will:

1. 1. Learn how the concept of ambivalence can illuminate racism and other forms of xenophobia.

2. 2. Learn how to understand racism and other forms of xenophobia as intimately related to our ways of enjoying.

3. 3. Learn how to understand racism and other forms of xenophobia as phobias.

4. 4. Be able to make connections between the theory learned and how it could translate to clinical practice.

Readings:

Hook, D. (2018). Racism and jouissance: Evaluating the "racism as (the theft of) enjoyment" hypothesis. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 23(3), 244-266.

Recommended Reading: Especially the last two chapters of Swales, S., & Owens, C. (2019). Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan: On and Off the Couch. New York & London: Routledge.

Presenter Bio:

Stephanie Swales, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Dallas, a practicing psychoanalyst, a licensed clinical psychologist, and a clinical supervisor located in Dallas, Texas. She has authored two books: Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan: On and Off the Couch (Routledge, 2019), co-authored with Carol Owens, and Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject (Routledge, 2012). She is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters on the theory and practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis. She is the founder of the Dallas/Fort Worth area Lacan Study Group, serves as Secretary for the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (APA's Division 24), and is on the executive boards of the Dallas Postgraduate Program in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy as well as the Dallas Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.

9/22/21 - DSPP Monthly Meeting

7:30pm-9pm
1.5 CE Credits
Meeting Location: Zoom

Melissa Wallace, MD, PLLC
CV: http://www.gapdallas.com/about-gap-dallas/melissa-b-wallace-md-pllc

Dale C Godby, PhD, PLLC
CV: http://www.gapdallas.com/about-gap-dallas/dale-c-godby-phd-pllc

As we attempt to emerge from the trauma of the pandemic, we have the opportunity to reflect on how this trauma has impacted our sense of belonging: to DSPP, to our families, and to everything we love. Since we last met face-to-face, DSPP has witnessed the deaths of three of our past presidents, Pat Wood, Judith Samson, and Bill Gordon. In the shadow of these losses and the ongoing trauma of the global pandemic, we are presented with an opportunity to explore group attachment and what it means to belong. For our tenured members, DSPP has been a secure home from which we explore old and new ideas about the development and healing of the mind. Hopefully, our newer members will come to form secure attachments to the group and benefit from it in a similar fashion. Dale and Melissa represent these opposite poles-Melissa is relatively new to the group and Dale has been there from the start. It is our hope as presenters that representing the spectrum of membership in DSPP will aid in exploring the various experiences of belonging to the group.

All of us bring to the task of belonging unconscious social and cultural constraints. The ways in which we belong (or feel estranged) in our families, our schools, and our communities of faith make up part of our social unconscious and contribute to how we form attachments to an organization like DSPP. To what theory do we belong? What theory belongs to us? Or do we eschew theory in the service of being free? We all started out knowing nothing about theory. As we move from one theory to another, we are bit like immigrants, feeling awkward and wondering if we will ever be at home.

After some brief opening remarks, Melissa and Dale plan to invite the group into a conversation about the meaning of belonging in the context of DSPP as a professional home.

Learning Objectives-We plan to convene a conversation on the following:

1. 1) Reflect on how the pandemic has impacted your relationship to organizations like DSPP.

2. 2) Consider how your personal attachment style interacts with your organizational attachment style.

3. 3) Think about how attachment to DSPP effects your work with patients.

Reading: Kinley, J.L. and Reyno, S. M. The price of needing to belong: Neurobiology of working through attachment trauma. Psychodynamic Psychiatry 47, 39-51.

Presenter Bios:

Dr. Wallace graduated from Brigham Young University in 2011, with a major in physiology and minor in Spanish. She received her MD from Baylor College of Medicine in 2015 and continued on to psychiatric residency at UT Southwestern. During her residency, she taught medical student courses on pop culture's relationship to psychiatry, chaired the residency's literature and psychiatry committee, and received the John F. Hickman Award for Outstanding Resident in Psychiatry. After completing residency in 2019, she joined the Group Analytic Practice of Dallas as an associate member, primarily treating adults with a focus on individual and group psychotherapy.

Dale was the 4 th president of DSPP and has remained active in many ways over the years. This past year he and Tina Mohammad presented a workshop at the Group Analytic Symposium in Barcelona on The Languages of Faith and the Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Social Pre-Conscious. Unfortunately, it was virtual. Dale co-hosted the International Virtual Reflective Citizens' Koinonia Workshop with Serbian colleagues. Tina and Dale along with help from Melissa Wallace and other members of the Group Analytic Practice Dallas convened a monthly Reflective Citizens' Conversation on Race for the year following George Floyd's murder. With colleagues from the American Group Psychotherapy Association, he did a webinar on Experiential Training Groups in Psychiatric Residency and Other Training Programs. In 2020 Dale was awarded the Outstanding Clinical Teaching Award by the Psychiatry Residents Organization.

DSPP Fall Workshop
Galit Atlas, Ph.D.

11/12/2021 - 5pm-7pm (2 CE Credits)
11/13/2021 - 9am-12pm (3 CE Credits)
Meeting Location: Zoom

This workshop will focus on ideas from Atlas' new book Emotional inheritance. It will introduce a relational model to thinking about the ways two subjectivities collude in promoting dissociation and the ways inherited trauma both finds shelter and comes to life in the analytic dyad. Atlas will discuss cases from her upcoming book to illustrate how patient and analyst enter each other's inner world and discover themselves as participants within each other's psychic life. The cases will focus on loss and early trauma, the regulation of aggression, as well as the power of analytic love to address the many faces of inherited trauma.

Learning objectives:

1. 1. Participants will be able to define inherited trauma.

2. 2. Participants will be able to explain the term Erotic Reparation.

3. 3. Participants will be able to identify the analyst's dissociation as a defense against her family trauma.

4. 4. Participants will be able to explain the ways emotional inheritance shapes are behavior.

5. 5. Participants will be able to give at least one example of how analyst and patient collude in order to avoid pain.

6. 6. Participants will be able to describe the relation between analytic love and regulation of aggression.

Presenter Bio:
Dr. Galit Atlas is on the faculty at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and faculty at the Four Year Adult and National Training Programs at NIP. She is the author of The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing and Belonging in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2015) and Dramatic Dialogue: Contemporary Clinical Practice (co-authored with Lewis Aron, Routledge, 2017). She is the editor and a contributor to When Minds Meet: The Work of Lewis Aron (Routledge,2020). Her next book Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients and the Legacy of Trauma will be published by Little Brown in January 2022. Atlas serves on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Perspectives and is the author of articles and book chapters that focus primarily on gender and sexuality. Her New York Times article "A tale of Two Twins" was the winner of a 2016 Gradiva award. Atlas is a psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor in private practice in New York City.