Presented by: Paul Koehler, LCSW & Michelle Pfeifer, LMHP

Whether you are an early career clinician or a seasoned analyst this course will help you create and solidify your personal-professional identity.

In recent decades there has emerged a strand of psychoanalytic theorizing and practice that distinguishes between what has been designated as the epistemological approach to psychoanalysis, which emphasizes the facilitation of the patient’s gaining a fuller understanding of himself or herself (explicated in the writings of Freud and Klein), and the ontological approach, which emphasizes the facilitation of the patient’s more fully becoming himself or herself (as explicated in the writings of Winnicott and Bion).
This course will consider how this distinction operates in the other half of the analytic dyad: i.e., how we as psychoanalytic practitioners allow for and integrate our understanding and mastery of psychoanalytic theory and technique with who we are continually becoming as human beings and evolving practitioners; or, in other words, how we internalize and hold true to established psychoanalytic knowledge and tradition while at the same time working as practitioners in our own distinctive and deeply personal ways.