From Shut-Down to Aliveness

Organised by:

Tavistock Relationships

Description

Rethinking Psychoanalytic Technique.

With Anne Alvarez & Graham Music.

Anne Alvarez transformed psychoanalytic thinking through her work with children who seemed unreachable. She showed that some patients are not withdrawing from relationship because of conflict or defence: rather they are undrawn deprived of the early relational experiences needed for emotional life, communication and symbolic thought to develop. The therapeutic task, therefore, cannot always be to interpret what is already there. Sometimes it is to help bring something into being. This has profound implications for technique. Alvarez developed a more active, responsive and vitalising form of psychoanalytic engagement, including the idea of the therapist’s urgent “call” to the child: not simply interpreting experience, but reaching towards a patient who may be lost rather than defended. She came to understand this as a process of reclamation and vitalisation.

Graham Music has built on and extended this work, bringing together Alvarez’s clinical innovations with contemporary developmental science, attachment research and an understanding of the effects of neglect on the developing brain and nervous system. Central to this approach is the distinction between conflict and deficit and experiences that are defended against and capacities that have never had the relational conditions in which to develop.

This distinction changes what the therapist needs to do. Interpretation remains crucial, but it is not always enough. Alvarez’s model of three levels of interpretation, together with Music’s focus on the development of a more embodied and responsive therapeutic practice, offer a way of thinking about when to interpret, when to engage more directly, and when the therapeutic relationship itself needs to provide something that is missing. At its heart, this is a question about what psychoanalytic therapy can become when we move beyond a model centred primarily on conflict and defence and learn to recognise when the task is not only to uncover what has been hidden, but to reclaim, develop, embody and bring alive what has never fully emerged.

For more information about this event, please visit https://trtogether.com/events/when-interpretation-isnt-enough

For more information about Tavistock Relationships, please visit https://tavistockrelationships.org

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