Online Seminars - Anne Alvarez

Reclaiming Psychic Life: Clinical Approaches to Empty States and Vitalization

presented by

Anne Alvarez

Thursdays 16, 23, 30 July

7.30 - 9.00pm AEST

We warmly invite you to attend a series of three online seminars

In this three-part seminar series, Anne Alvarez explores forms of analytic work with patients who feel empty, dissociated, unreachable, or cut off from emotional vitality. Drawing on decades of clinical work with autistic, severely deprived and deeply withdrawn patients, Anne will examine the analyst’s role not only in interpretation and containment, but also in processes of vitalization, emotional presence and psychic reclamation. Through this three-part series, she will reflect on the levels of analytic work aimed to recover aliveness, the musicality and emotional force of language, and the ways analytic contact may help patients rediscover curiosity, meaning, agency and psychic life.

Seminar One - 16 July
The Thinking Heart: Three Levels of Analytic Work and Levels of Psychopathology

This seminar examines different levels of analytic work required with patients whose capacity for symbolic thinking, emotional integration and object relatedness may be severely compromised. Anne Alvarez revisits and reformulates aspects of Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position, distinguishing persecutory states from more profoundly dissociated or empty states of mind. She suggests that certain patients may not yet be able to think in the reflective and explanatory ways usually assumed in psychoanalytic interpretation and may instead require forms of work centred on emotional contact, containment and vitalization. The seminar examines how analytic technique may shift moment-to-moment as patients move between fragmentation, dissociation and greater psychic integration. 

Seminar Two - 23 July
The Problem of Empty States of Mind, the Uninteresting Internal Object and Processes of Vitalization

This seminar explores a less explored area concerning patients who present as passionless, often mindless and empty. These clinical presentations may be the result not of a defensive or aggressive retreat but of having given up in despair or boredom. Such patients seem to be not hiding, but lost, not withdrawn but undrawn. Their internal objects seem to be unvalued rather than devalued where nothing much matters. This may affect curiosity and desire, even the desire to follow a train of thought. This seminar discusses what might be missing or underdeveloped and ways in which analytic technique may try to address these issues via processes of vitalization. 

Seminar Three - 30 July
Prosody, Vitalization and the Analytic Voice

In this seminar, Anne Alvarez explores the emotional force, rhythm and musicality of analytic language, and it’s role in reaching patients who feel dissociated, unreachable or psychically deadened. Drawing on clinical work with autistic, traumatised and severely withdrawn patients, she examines how tone, emphasis, rhythm and emotional presence may contribute to processes of psychic revitalization and emotional contact. The seminar considers how analytic language may help “make things matter,” sustain emotional experience, foster agency and support the emergence of new forms of psychic life. Alvarez also reflects on moments when interpretation alone may fail, and on the importance of emotional truth, vitality and prosody in analytic communication.

Biography

Anne Alvarez, PhD, M.A.C.P is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist (and retired Co-Convener of the Autism Service, Child and Family Dep't. Tavistock Clinic, London, where she still teaches). She is author of Live Company: Psychotherapy with Autistic, Borderline, Deprived and Abused Children and has edited with Susan Reid, Autism and Personality: Findings from the Tavistock Autism Workshop. A book in her honour, edited by Judith Edwards, entitled Being Alive: Building on the Work of Anne Alvarez was published in 2002.

She was Visiting Professor at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society in November 2005 and is an Honorary Member of the Psychoanalytic Centre of California. Her latest book, The Thinking Heart: Three Levels of Psychoanalytic Therapy with Disturbed Children was published in April 2012 by Routledge. A book by Kai Wung on Alvarez in a series on influential thinkers in psychoanalysis is in preparation for Routledge.

Details:

Where: Online via Zoom

Cost: $88 single seminar, $210 for all seminars (inc. GST)

Discounts available for IPA members & candidates, and full-time students. Contact apasconnect@outlook.com for more information.

Bookings remain open until the day 11.00pm the day before each seminar.