Module #1: Listening for unconscious conflict in the manifest content (40 minutes)
When we listen to patients’ narratives, we can hear the ways that unconscious conflicts between unconscious forces affect their lives. We can see how compromises between these forces create their symptoms and presenting problems. And we can assess syntonicity and dystonicity by examining the relationship between sides of a conflict. All of these listening skills are essential for effective intervention. In this module, we will improve our skills for detecting and assessing unconscious conflict in the patient’s manifest content.
Module #2: Listening for unconscious conflict in the clinical process: Unconscious anxiety and unconscious resistance (40 minutes)
Defense and resistance are invisible psychological events. We infer their presence based on shifts in the patients narratives and behavior. Anxiety, however, thanks to Davanloo’s innovations, is quite visible. In this module we will learn how to track unconscious anxiety signals and changes in the content of patients’ speech to help us hypothesize about the presence and functioning of conflicting unconscious forces, namely unconscious anxiety and defense. We will look at this history of this way of working in psychoanalysis, and underscore Davanloo’s important contribution.
Module #3: Listening for unconscious supervision: Latent content and “dreaming the session” (40 minutes)
The mind has associative properties—when we have an experience, other experiences like it come to mind. When we listen for latent or encoded content, we listen for the ways patients' narratives may indirectly provide clues about how they are experiencing our work and our interventions—what images of relationships come to mind when they are with us? This has been called “unconscious commentary” or “unconscious supervision” because this approach helps the therapist gain feedback about unconscious feelings that might not be made explicit in response to direct inquiry. In this module, we will study the history of this concept, and learn to listen for patient’s unconscious supervision of our interventions and approach.
Module #4: Listening through countertransference experience: Projective identification (40 minutes)
Without meaning to, our patients make an emotional impression on us. Their speech and behavior can unconsciously evoke feeling responses in us that can help us understand their minds, histories, and current transference more deeply. In this module, we will read important papers in the history of countertransference analysis, and we will learn to turn our countertransference experience “inside out”— to use our feelings as potential sources of data about unconscious feelings and memories in the patient.
Module #5: Listening to enactment: The therapist’s unconscious participation (40 minutes)
Sometimes the unconscious mind and history of the patient reveals itself most clearly not in the content or process of their speech, but in the interpersonal process that emerges unconsciously between patient and therapist. We learn about their unconscious transference and the history that it conveys only when we realize we have been accidentally enacting a role in it! The ability to detect and work one’s way out of enactment is an essential clinical skill, as the presence of these unconscious, pathogenic repetitions renders our conventional interventions ineffective. In this module, we will study clinical theory about unconscious enactment, and discuss strategies for detecting and evading unconscious enactments.
Module #6: Clinical thinking: Metacognizing about our listening (40 minutes)
We try to work in a scientific way, focusing on response to intervention to test and modify our hypotheses. By listening from multiple perspectives, we can get an increasingly clearer and more useful understanding of the unconscious dynamics impacting the patient and the therapy. At the same time, listening for unconscious meaning is not an objective science. It is perspectival, subject to many biasing influences, and therefore quite fallible. In this module, we will study the literature on clinical thinking, examining the metacognitive processes through which we increase our understanding of the therapy interaction, and familiarizing ourselves with the biases that can impact this process.