Learning from Life
The Acquisition of Psychoanalytic Wisdom
Recorded Saturday 20 April 2013
With Patrick Casement
CPD Credits: 3 hours
In his fourth and most personal book Learning from Life Patrick Casement gives us a fascinating insight into fundamental questions concerning the acquisition of analytic wisdom and how personal experiences shape the analyst’s approach to clinical work.
In this 3-part recording from a one-day seminar delivered in London he talks to us about how the psychoanalytic self comes into being, and how our own emotional truths consciously or unconsciously shape our practice and theory. These presentations will have a fresh and emergent quality and viewers can expect to hear inspiring, personal insights that illuminate the practice of psychoanalysis.
READ MORE...Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.
Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.
FULL PROGRAMME
Learning from Life: The shaping of the psychoanalytic self
In this lecture, Patrick Casement explores connections between psychoanalytic theory and practice, and the personal passage of our own lives. Recounting family history and childhood memories, he traces the origins of his journey to psychoanalysis, and the importance of attachment patterns in defining that route. In particular, he describes the anger he felt as a young man and the enactment between himself and his first analyst that enabled this to be creatively engaged with. Casement suggests that the ‘bad’ must be allowed into the analysis, and that it is the practitioner’s responsibility to facilitate this; that to foreclose on anger with pseudo-parenting is a clinical mistake.
Experiences that bring psychotherapeutic theory to life
Here Patrick Casement reflects on the importance for the distressed child of being able to communicate their terrible feelings to a parent who can bear them. If the parent cannot, the child is likely to receive back the unmanageable state of mind, but in a more insoluble state than before. These unshared affects are then stored as a “nameless dread” (Bion, 1962). Casement refers to trauma as “that which we cannot bear alone” and the analyst’s task as being alongside the distressed person and their nameless dread, experiencing whatever we can of their suffering. If we can survive their anguish or anger without collapse or retaliation, he suggests, we can offer the transformative experience of being emotionally with another in their pain. This talk is illustrated with case examples.
Ways in which learning from life can help how we work with patients
Bion used to remind us that we don’t know the patient of today – only the patient of the last session. Casement proposes that preconception is alien to analytic insight and that we should approach the psychoanalytic intervention not with a sense of knowing, but simply with curiosity. Touching on theories of projective identification, transference and interpretation of the unconscious, he suggests that the most vital skill is in allowing oneself to be used, and in positively choosing to remain non-certain. He cautions us against imposing theory and suggests that the work is not in making the connection, but in seeing if we can find it with the patient. Connections are not made, he says, they are found because the past pain is found to be alive in the present.