The Therapist’s Torment
Transforming our unbearable experiences into good therapy
Saturday 14 June 2025
A live webinar with Dr Dhwani Shah and Jane Ryan (Chair)
CPD Credits: 3.5 hours
- 20% Off Dhwani’s book ‘The Analyst’s Torment: Unbearable Mental States in Countertransference‘
- Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
- Bookings close at 10:00am BST Friday 13 June 2025
Being a psychotherapist requires, at times, an ability to surrender to unbearable emotional experiences in order to stay emotionally present with the client. Psychotherapy is difficult work to undertake. Yet we rarely discuss the depth of this difficulty or how to manage it.
READ MORE...Through theoretical and clinical material, Dhwani Shah will focus on some of the most agonising experiences he has had in the clinical encounter, including extremities of terror, dissociation, and shame. He will explore how these unique subjective reactions can arise spontaneously in relation to certain clients and how the risk of feeling the intolerable can quickly lead to therapeutic disengagement.
How we make choices when confronted with such mental states, he suggests, is at the heart of ethical practice. Dhwani will demonstrate how the therapist’s capacity to stay with their own deep emotions is both vital to understanding and metabolizing our patients’ emotional experiences, and to our own development as therapists. Acknowledging how difficult this can be, he will share key moments from his most challenging therapy relationships showing how, ultimately, these came strengthen both his work and resilience.
FULL PROGRAMME
10.00 BST
Introductions
10:15
The Therapist is Also a Subject
Countertransference, as a means of understand the analyst’s feelings in relation to the person in therapy, has a fascinating and sometimes problematic theoretical history. While viewing countertransference as an essential tool for understanding emotional responses to the client, Dhwani will consider how the concept may also obscure the significance of the therapist’s emotional history and the interplay between both subjectivities in the room.
In this talk, via the story of his painful work with a suicidal patient, Dhwani will explore how his historic anxiety, guilt and shame manifested in that relationship, impairing his empathy and adding to the patient’s vulnerability. We will hear how this was ultimately worked-through.
11.00
Discussion
11.15
Break
11:20
Escaping the Client: dissociation as a flight from dread
This talk will focus on the clinician’s experience of dissociation as a last resort in dealing with unbearable mental states when there is no other escape from the therapeutic relationship. Dhwani will present a detailed example of his own dissociative experience when he felt at risk of being overwhelmed by dread and anxiety in the consulting room. Reflecting upon the many ways such dissociations can occur in our clinical work, he will consider how these can be transformed into insights that lead to the best possible therapeutic outcomes.
12.05
Discussion
12.20
Break
13:00
Transcending One’s Own Shame and Hopelessness
In this third piece, Dhwani will explore two particularly difficult emotional states in the therapeutic relationship – shame and hopelessness – and how these can affect our ability to be with our patients. Offering a detailed case example, he will consider how his omnipotent fantasies of cure collapsed into a mental state that dangerously echoed his patient’s despair. How Dhwani processed these emotions will be explored.
13.45
Discussion
14.00
End
SPEAKER
Dhwani Shah, MD is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst currently practicing in Princeton, NJ. He is a clinical associate faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a Supervising Analyst and faculty member at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. He has authored articles on topics ranging from neuroscience, mood disorders, and psychoanalysis. Dr Shah’s book, The Analyst’s Torment: Unbearable Mental States in Countertransference was recently published by Phoenix Publishing House and was featured in Brett Kahr’s “Top Ten Books of 2022.”
GET THE BOOK
The Analyst’s Torment: Unbearable Mental States in Countertransference
(20% Discount code provided when purchasing this event)
Dhwani Shah moves the focus from using psychoanalytic theory and technique to explore the patient’s mind from a safe distance. Instead, he concentrates on the analyst’s feelings, subjective experiences, and histories, and how these impact on the intersubjective space between analyst and patient. His eight chapters each highlight a particular emotional state or problematic feeling and explore their impact on the analytic work, which requires emotional honesty and open reflection.