Scott Dowling has been appointed to chair the Workshop Series for Mental Health Professional succeeding Arnold Rothstein, who steps down after six highly successful years. In a related move, the name of the series has been changed to Seminars for Clinicians.
The first program under the incoming chairman's direction, “Conflict and Compromise: Therapeutic Strategies for Clinicians,” will be held in New York City at the Waldorf-Astoria over the weekend of November 18-19. Six thirty-minute papers will be presented on Saturday:
Conflict, Deficit and Trauma by Jacob A Arlow, M.D.
Conflict, Compromise Formation and Structural Theory by Dale Boesky, M.D.
Psychological Conflict in Childhood by Robert L. Tyson, M.D.
Therapeutic Strategies in Dealing with Neurotic Patients' Marital Problems by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, PhD.
Working with Conflict and Deficit in Borderline Patients by Martin S. Willick, M.D.
Therapeutic Strategies with Character Disorder Patients by Ernest Kafka, M.D.
On Sunday morning these papers will be discussed by Charles Brenner and Paul H. Ornstein. The program will be repeated, with different discussants, in San Diego on the weekend of March 17, 18, 1990. As in the past, the proceedings will be prepared for publication as a monograph by the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Dowling plans to continue the current format devised by his predecessor, in which distinguished theoreticians, clinicians and teachers are invited to discuss the chosen topic from different psychoanalytic points of view. “The papers,” Dowling promises, “will be brief, oriented around a specific clinical referent, with a wealth of information and clinical examples.” In order to allow more time for exchanges between audience and panelists, as well as for additional small group discussions, the number of formal presentations has been limited to six.
As Rothstein notes, the Sunday discussions have been a most important feature of the programs, a kind of “scientific happening” in which a different level of discourse develops. Clinical and theoretical issues, arising in work with patients, issues that may as yet exist only preconsciously, are articulated so that they may be examined as “scientific data” These three-hour “Conversations with the Panelists” have been extremely popular with those attending the programs. Their unique quality can only be sampled in the abbreviated versions which appear as monographs.
The Workshops, initiated in 1976 by the Program Committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association, were originally conceived as one-day programs. In November 1981 Evelyne Albrecht Schwaber organized and chaired a two-day program in New York City entitled “The Transference in Psychotherapy: Clinical Management” with Jacob A Arlow, Eleanor Galenson, Merton M. Gill, Robert Michels, Paul H. Ornstein and Arthur F. Valenstein as participants. The papers and discussions were published as a monograph (I.U.P. 1985).
In 1982, Arnold Rothstein, upon assuming the chair of the subcommittee of the Program Committee on Programs for Mental Health Professionals, instituted a change in format which, as he puts it, “serendipidously facilitated the process of developing the workshops into a series of basic books.” Each of the six programs under his direction has been “conceived to ask a basic question about the relationship of a fundamental theoretical subject to clinical work.” Four of the six programs are already in print: Models of the Mind: Their Relationship to Clinical Work, The Reconstruction of Trauma: Its Significance in Clinical Work, The Interpretation of Dreams in Clinical Work, and the most recent, How Does Treatment Help? On the Modes of Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. The two most recent programs, “The Relevance of Infant Observational Research for Clinical Work with Children, Adolescents and Adults” and “The Significance of Child and Adolescent Analysis for Clinical Work with Adults,” are currently being prepared for publication by the incoming chairman.
The monograph series is notable for providing an “historical record” of the current “state of the field” on a series of specific topics as articulated by leading psychoanalytic thinkers. “It would be interesting,” Rothstein muses, “to repeat the format on each of the topics in ten years,” to take another reading at a later moment in time. Dowling, too, sees the monographs as important “scholarly documents.” His effort as editor will be to create publications that are “conceptually solid” and at the same time “clear, simple and straight forward.” He is assisted in monograph series by an editorial board consisting of Shelley Orgel, Melvin Scharfman and Rebecca Solomon.
The second of the Seminars for Clinicians, now in the planning stages, will focus on the current psychoanalytic understanding of addictive behavior.
Henry F. Smith