ISTDP Academy: Spring 2024: Rob Neborsky

The Danish and Swedish Societies for ISTDP are pleased to welcome their members to yet another semester of the ISTDP Academy! The ISTDP Academy is our shared platform for continued learning and inspiration, as well as for bringing together our Scandinavian ISTDP community. For our coming semester, we have four interesting presentations, all at 17.00 until 19.30. Please note that the last presentation this semester is NOT on the first Wednesday of the month as usual:

February 7th: Maury Joseph (US)
March 6th: Sandra Ringarp (SE)
April 3rd: Rob Neborsky (US)
May 8th: Josette Ten Have-de Labije (NL)

Attendance is possible for members of either of our two societies. It is important that you have paid for 2024-membership before the first presentation of the semester, as you will otherwise not be allowed entry into the session. Membership as well as participation in the semester can be bought through our online store: https://istdp-danmark.dk/store/

Please help us spread the word about the ISTDP-Academy to your colleagues in the Scandinavian ISTDP community.

Detailed information on this semester’s four presentations:

February 7th: Maury Joseph: “Enactment and counter-enactment with a compliant patient”

About Maury: I am a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in Washington, DC and Pennsylvania. Because of my background of training and teaching Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), I am a certified by the IEDTA as a Teacher and Supervisor. I trained and later served as faculty chair of the ISTDP training program at the Washington School of Psychiatry, and was a faculty member there from 2015-2020. I joined the ISTDP faculty of the New Washington School of Psychiatry in May 2023. I served as an assistant clinical faculty member at George Washington University and adjunct faculty at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, offering courses on psychoanalytic topics and supervision to clinical psychology doctoral students. I currently offer supervision groups and private seminars on psychodynamic topics.

About Maury’s presentation: While ISTDP training gives us a unique capacity to follow the patient, serving their conscious and unconscious agenda, it can also load us up with an agenda of our own—we pick up ideas about how therapy should go, how therapists should work, and what therapeutic processes are best, necessary, or important. Compliant patients may subtly encourage us to present an agenda that they can yield to and please in order to avoid their own conflicts, especially those related to power or individuation. If we accidentally do take a leading role in these situations the therapy may become a repetition of their problematic interpersonal patterns rather than a challenge to those patterns. Many good things may happen in the therapy despite this enactment, but the compliant pattern will be reinforced, and the problematic interpersonal and symptomatic impacts of chronic people-pleasing will continue. For this reason, it can be important for therapists to develop the skills that help them to detect the patient’s strategies for enacting a compliant transference, and to have strategies that can support their own efforts to refuse the authoritarian role that a patient may subtly and not-so-subtly prompt them to take. Diagnosis of and intervention against this pattern will be the focus of this webinar. Participants in this webinar will be supported to: 1) observe both the implicit nonverbal and explicit verbal signs of transference in a compliant patient. 2) learn counter-enactive strategies to challenge the transference role the patient is proposing (e.g., pressure against implicit, subtle resistance; explicit challenge to resistance when it becomes explicit). 3) learn more about the relational concept of “unconscious enactment” and “counter-enactment” by observing the process in a video-recorded initial session

March 6th: Sandra Ringarp: “The art of slowness in ISTDP”

About Sandra: Sandra Ringarp is a licensed psychologist and a certified ISTDP therapist and teacher/ supervisor. Sandra has worked with ISTDP since 2013 in a psychiatric clinic, a clinic for long term pain and now privately at the ISTDP clinic in Stockholm. After completing her core training in 2016, Sandra has continued to specialize in ISTDP through training and advanced supervision with Allan Abbass and Reiko Ikemoto-Joseph, among others. Sandra is chairman of the Swedish association for ISTDP. She is also the author of the book “Ångest för alla” at Natur & Kultur publishing house, soon to be published in Danish.

About Sandra’s presentation: With a big love for deep diving into the small things that makes a huge difference as we practice ISTDP, Sandra will focus on the art of slowness for this presentation. As Patricia Coughlin stated “go slow in the beginning so you can go faster in the end” – slowness can actually play a key role in the initial phase of ISTDP. While it may sound contraintuitive, the art of thorough, careful and slow inquiry in the beginning of a therapy actually lays the foundation for us to go “faster in the end”. Sandra will show the first 30 minutes of two trial therapy’s to illustrate what the art of slowness in ISTDP can look like, and how it can actually fasten up the work immensely.

April 3rd: Rob Neborsky: The history and evolution of Attachment Based ISTDP

About Rob: Robert J. Neborsky, M.D., is a psychiatrist in private practice in Del Mar, California, and a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCSD School of Medicine as well as UCLA School of Medicine (Hon). He was a founding member on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy. He served as guest editor of the Ad Hoc Bulletin of Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy. In 2003, Dr. Neborsky was honored by the UCLA School of Medicine clinical faculty association as the Distinguished Psychiatric Lecturer of the year for 2002. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland School of Medicine (1971) where he earned the Jacob Finesinger Award for excellence in Psychiatry. He interned in medicine at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta and performed his Psychiatry Residency at Emory University (72-75) where he earned the Hope Skobba Memorial Award.

About Rob’s presentation: For this presentation, Rob will offer an introduction to Attachment Based ISTDP, reviewing its history and evolution. He will show two cases of importance to its development, namely: 1) “Will you love me tomorrow? A Case of Ambivalent Attachment” and 2) “The Woman Who Lost Herself in Psychoanalysis and Restored Herself in ISTDP. A Case of Disorganized Attachment”.

May 8th: Josette Ten Have-de Labije: “The man who was stuck in a pecking order”

About Josette: Josette ten Have-de Labije is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist. She was trained as cognitive-behavior therapist ( individual and group setting), Couples therapist, therapist for psychodynamic individual and group psychotherapy, therapist for Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy From 1989 – 1992 she was member of the Dutch ISTDP core-group, which was trained and supervised by Professor Dr H. Davanloo. She has given workshops, training and supervision on ISTDP in the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, England, Denmark , Poland, Italy., Iran, China, South Africa, She has given several presentations at Dutch and at International Congresses on Behavior Therapy and on Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy. Until january 2013 she has been a member of the Board of Directors of the International Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy Association (IEDTA). At present she is in the IEDTA’s Advisory Board She is editor in chief of the Ad Hoc Bulletin for STDP : Practice and Theory

About Josette’s presentation: Many of our patients that enter the initial interview have lost hope and faith in their own capacities to fulfill their longings. The prerequisite for an effective conscious/unconscious working alliance is the therapist’s ability to help the patient to have hope and faith again in his own capacities, to regain the joy of comprehending own processes, doing effort in grasping and understanding new concepts, new ways of looking at themselves and at the outside world The therapy vignettes ( parts of the first three sessions, each of 3 hour duration) you will witness will show consecutive steps toward establishing a conscious and unconscious working alliance with the patient, who had been referred because his therapy with another ISTDP colleague had been stuck. A few months before our initial interview the patient has had a medical investigation because of his longstanding intestinal problems. However no pathology was found and the patient ‘s Irritable Bowel syndrome was diagnosed as of psychosomatic origin.