Kramer-Mahler Lecture

The Thinking Heart: Three Levels of Analytic Work and of Pathology --Three Types of Meaning-Making

Date: Saturday, January 28, 2023
Time: 9:30 am - 11:30 am
Presenter: Anne Alvarez, PhD, M.A.C.P 
Discussant: William Singletary, MD
Place: via Zoom (Zoom information will be included in your registration confirmation email)
2 CE/CME's Available
Program Flyer
Register Here!

This talk emphasizes the meaning-making element in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Dr. Alvarez shall suggest that attention to development – particularly the development of feelingful thinking helps us to see that the dichotomy between cure and relationship is a false one. It is possible to identify damage or for that matter, deficit, without denying the healing power of relationship. Dr. Alvarez shall identify three points on a continuum of levels of analytic work and levels of meaning. The thinking arose out of many years of work with autistic or borderline children, who were not able, for reasons of profound ego impairment, to respond to the more traditional two-tracked explanatory interpretation as a method of ascribing meaning. The author suggests that a prior level - lending meaning via a one- tracked description or amplification - is more effective in helping them to think. The paper argues that this method, where appropriate to the developmental and psychopathological level at which the patient is functioning, need not be seen as inferior to or less complete than the former type. A third- more intensified- level of work - an urgent insistence on meaning - is illustrated with a patient where the deficit was not only in the ego, but in the self and the internal object. The suggestion is that the issue at this third level concerns, not thinking about feeling, nor even identifying feeling, but gaining access to feeling itself. This foundational level of personality and the mind stands at the base of all development and its existence is both essential to a `cure’ and borne out of relational change in the psychotherapy.

CONTINUING MEDICAL EDUCATION/CONTINUING EDUCATION

Continuing Medical Education (CME):

This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of American Psychoanalytic Association and the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this Live Activity for a maximum of 2 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)TM. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE INFORMATION FOR ALL LEARNERS: None of the planners and presenters for this educational activity have relevant financial relationship(s)* to disclose with ineligible companies whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling, or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients.

*Financial relationships are relevant if the educational content an individual can control is related to the business lines or products of the ineligible company.

- Updated July 2021