Transference/Countertransference: Eros And Psyche

Catalog description

The emotionally intimate relationship between therapist and client can provide rich opportunities for psychological initiation, healing, and growth, but also challenges the ability of each person in the encounter to tolerate the heat of closeness. In this ten-week course, we will work together to explore the full gamut of feelings and fantasies that arise between therapist and client, with special attention to erotic desires that often develop in the therapy room. When handled carefully with respect to legal and ethical boundaries, transference and countertransference experiences often create an essential alchemical dynamic driving the success of the therapeutic process. Emphasis will be placed on learning how to tolerate and work with countertransference in order to contain our own issues as well as a way to understand the client’s inner emotional world. The course will combine reading, discussion, exercises, clinical demonstrations, theoretical learning, creative projects, and the option for research to explore various dynamics for clients and clinicians of all genders and sexual orientations as well as diverse cultural and racial backgrounds. Ideas about transference, eros, relatedness, and projective identification found in existentialism, Jungian psychology, object relations, and relational psychoanalysis will help around the experience. This is a core course for the Specialization in Spiritual and Depth Psychology, and is open to all Antioch MAP students who have taken Personality I as an elective. A sincere interest in or at least openness to the particular qualities of introspective, feeling-oriented psychoanalytic theory and practice will be assumed, and the class is designed for those who have some enthusiasm for delving deeper into the unconscious psyche. We will often be working with painful and/or embarrassing feelings, but hopefully we can cultivate a playful, nonjudgmental environment where it can feel safe to open up and take some risks.