Unconscious Relational Patterns, Cumulative Neglect, and Therapeutic Involvement: Video Course

At this unique and practical training workshop, Dr Richard Erskine draws on an integrative therapeutic and relational psychotherapy approach that encompasses the primary dimensions of human functioning: cognitive, behavioural, affective and physiological, each within a relational system; that allows us as therapists in helping the client to assimilate and harmonise the contents of his or her ego states, relax the defence mechanisms, relinquish the life script, and reengage the world with full contact. It is the process of making whole: taking disowned, unaware, unresolved aspects of the ego and making them part of the cohesive self.

Through lecture, case vignettes and clinical discussions, the workshop emphasises how early attachments are formed through physiological survival reactions, implicit conclusions, explicit decisions, and introjections at various stages in the process of development.

Dr. Erskine will elucidate:

• How early physiological, affective and interpersonal experiences may inhibit the client’s intrapsychic processes, health and relationships
• The distinctions in our therapeutic approach based on Attachment styles and patterns
• The developmental impact of cumulative neglect and relational traumas
• The relationship of Attachment to unconscious processes and the formation of Life Scripts

The workshop posits that for effective in-depth therapy, it is essential that therapists understand the significance of internal working models; procedural, sub-symbolic and implicit memory; and the unconscious impact of cumulative neglect. Such an understanding requires taking into account many views of human functioning: psychodynamic, client-centred, behaviourist, family therapy, Gestalt therapy, neo-Reichian, object relations theories, psychoanalytic self-psychology and transactional analysis. Drawing on an integrative theme, Dr Erskine helps us comprehend psychotherapeutic interventions that are:

• based on research-validated knowledge of normal developmental processes
• and the theories describing the self-protective defensive processes used when there are interruptions in normal development

About the speaker

Richard G. Erskine, Ph.D., is a Clinical Psychologist and Training Director of the Institute for Integrative Psychotherapy (New York City and Vancouver).  Originally trained in client-centered child therapy, Dr Erskine also studied Gestalt therapy with both Fritz and Laura Perls.  He is a certified clinical Transactional Analyst and a Licensed Psychoanalyst who has specialized in psychoanalytic self-psychology and object-relations theory.  His work is an integration of these concepts and more than forty years of clinical experience, which has included working with disturbed children, inmates in a maximum security prison, borderline and narcissistic clients, post-traumatic stress and dissociative identity disorders.  Recently his research and clinical practice have focused on the treatment of the schizoid process and on the psychotherapy of obsession.

He is the author of several books and scores of articles on psychotherapy theory and methods.  His best-selling book (with Jan Moursund and Rebecca Trautmann) is “Beyond Empathy: A Therapy of Contact-in-Relationship” (1999, Brunner/Mazel) and most recently, in 2015, he has published “Relational Patterns, Therapeutic Presence” (Karnac).