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...dedicated to training skillful and effective psychotherapists and psychoanalysts |
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Dear Readers,
Now that November is here in all its glory it's easy to stop for a minute and notice life's beauty. It's everywhere, isn't it? Sometimes the colors are so breathtaking that I find myself fantasizing that I can flee from the responsibilities of my practice and be a kid again, jumping in piles of leaves, hiding out in a pumpkin patch. And with the changing season all around me I begin looking forward to Thanksgiving - the most wonderfully straightforward holiday of all - a time for gathering together with the people we love just for the sake of being with them, and a time for saying - and really meaning it - thank you.
Which brings me to this issue of our e-newsletter. Our two feature articles are written beautifully by Debi Roelke and Jim Garofallou. I really appreciate the fascinating profile Debi writes on Monica Carsky, one of our most prolific members. I am grateful that Jim was willing to take his pen up once again to share with us his moving and bittersweet experience of letting go. I love Eric Sherman's ability to make us laugh and cry at the same time. And I continue to admire the talents of Rose Oosting, editor, writer and marketing pro. It is her dedication and work that has made this newsletter possible - thank you, Rose.
Please continue to read our e-newsletter. As Seth Warren, our Director, mentions in his message, we'd like you to write and tell us about your concerns. We will publish your thoughts in future issues. Let's get a dialogue going! Tell your colleagues about our e-newsletter and send us their email addresses. Our goal this year is to double the size of our mailing list - with your help we will.
So here's an early wish for a bountiful holiday season filled with gratitude for what we have and what we are becoming.
Sincerely,
Mary Lantz
Editor-in-Chief
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Programs, Classes and Celebrations
March 20, 2011 - AN ALL DAY CONFERENCE
How the Attachment Patterns of Patient and Therapist Interlock: Nonverbal Experience, Mindfulness, Mentalizing and Change
Lenfell Hall, The Mansion, Fairleigh Dickinson University,
Madison, NJ, 8:30 am - 4:30 pm
 | David Wallin
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In this clinically-focused workshop, David Wallin, author of Attachment in Psychotherapy (Guilford, 2007), translates the findings of attachment theory research, as sparked by Bowlby's original insights, into an innovative framework that grounds adult psychotherapy in the facts of childhood development. Advancing a model of treatment as transformation through relationship, he integrates attachment with neuroscience, trauma studies, relational psychoanalysis, the practice of mindfulness, and a focus on the body to help clinicians become more effective facilitators of growth and healing.
Click HERE to read more
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Spring 2011 All Day Conferences
April 29, 2011 - Women Helping Women Presents
The Inaugural Joan Marie Johnson Symposium on
Women's Mental Health
Susan Gutwill, LCSW: Women, Food and the Body: Culture, Psyche and Treatment
New Brunswick -TBA
9:30 am - 4:00 pm
May 1, 2011 - Culture Conference: Attachments Broken and Repaired: Privilege and Culture in Psychotherapy
Ruth Lijtmaer, Phd: Here and There: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Immigration
Nina Thomas, PhD: Witnessing in Psychoanalytic and "Extra Analytic" Contexts: Promise and Peril Following Political Violence
Cheryl Thompson, PhD: African-American Males and Disorders of Attachment
Lenfell Hall, The Mansion, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ, 9:00 am - 4:00 pm
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Candidates' Organization Provides Practice Building Workshop to its Members
By Janet Hoffer, LCSW
 | Leslie Tsukroff
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On a Sunday morning in October, seventeen new and advanced candidates came together to learn from an expert on the topic: "Declare a Niche and Reach Your Ideal Client." Leslie Tsukroff, LCSW, who has found her own niche consulting to individuals and groups on this topic, taught us the differences between having specialties and carving out a niche in order to build a new or existing practice.
We learned that while skilled practitioners can have many areas of specialization, a niche is a marketing term which defines one's practice and distinguishes us from our competition by defining a unique aspect of our practice. In an interactive exercise, Ms. Tsukroff led brave participants from their initial notions of a desired niche and, with the creative input of the group, guided them to an innovative approach for marketing their skills and expertise. It was a great opportunity for learning, networking and comraderie.
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Director's Column
By Seth Warren, PhD
"Accountability" and Research on Psychotherapy Outcomes
I would like to continue the theme of my previous column on the future of psychoanalytic practice, but before I do, I would like to remind our members that my intention is to provoke conversation and dialogue on these matters. My belief is that our ideas develop, both in the clinical setting and in public forums such as our Newsletter, through participatory dialogue. I would like all our readers to feel encouraged to respond to what is published here by sending comments, thoughts, and replies, in whatever form, to our Editor, Mary Lantz.
The following comments are adapted from an article submitted for publication in the IARPP eNews, a digital publication of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. |
Interview with Monica Carsky, PhD
By Debi Roelke, PhD
 | Monica Carsky
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Dr. Monica Carsky was one of the initial faculty members of the former Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy of New Jersey (IPPNJ). In addition, she has had a long and fruitful association with the Personality Disorders Institute of the Weill Medical College at Cornell University, where she has been involved in training, research and the development of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy, an evidence-based psychodynamic treatment for patients with personality disorders.
One of the threads running through Dr. Carsky's early career was the intellectual excitement she found at each of the places she went to be educated and trained, first as a clinical psychologist and later as a psychoanalyst. In her early undergraduate days at Swarthmore, having arrived from a small town in upstate New York planning to study math, she happily discovered the social sciences. She switched her focus from math to psychology when an energetic new faculty member introduced the students to the real life world of clinical practice. From that point on, Dr. Carsky was hooked.
Click HERE to read more
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Our CPPNJ Blog
Condolences and contradictions - an unnecessary death
By Eric Sherman, LCSW Jumping off the gw bridge sorry
When Tyler Clementi plunged into the Hudson River hours after posting those chilling words on his Facebook page, the Rutgers University freshman became the latest in a string of suicides of gay teenagers taunted by their peers.
Forty-one years after the Stonewall Riots launched the gay rights movement, nine out of ten LGBT students report experiencing harassment and nearly two-thirds of them feel unsafe in school. The incongruities are astounding -- young people are coming out far earlier then ever, yet suicide related to homosexuality remains the second leading cause of death among youth. Five states and the District of Colombia allow same-sex marriage, yet several more outlaw gay people from adopting or becoming foster parents because of the "risk" they pose to unplaceable children. And talented young students with the rest of their lives to look forward to jump off the George Washington Bridge.
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 | Stan Tatkin
and Michelle Bauer
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The New Jersey Couples Therapy Training Program Hosts Our Fall Conference on Attachment
By Sandra Sinicropi, LCSW
On October 30th,Stan Tatkin, PhD presented the CPPNJ fall conference, "Attachment Approaches to Couples Therapy." For over twenty years, Dr. Tatkin, the founder and developer of A Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy TM has been researching the psychobiological components of how couples regulate each other. Integrating neuroscience, systems theory, psychoanalytic object relations theory, and attachment theory, Dr. Tatkin has concluded that couples pair in an effort to regulate their need for safety, recognition, and a sense of belonging and love. The partnership contract that Dr. Tatkin uses as the template for his work posits that each individual has needs that cannot be met alone, that only one's partner can satisfy.
Dr. Tatkin's theory is that people can and do have the ability to regulate each others' autonomic nervous system. He suggests that distress management is a two-person skill and that couples are in fact responsible for each other's recovery from "mutual dysregulation." Using the Strange Situation instrument pioneered by Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main to understand types of attachment, Dr. Tatkin observes his couples interacting with one another.
The chairs in his office all have wheels for ease in moving to and away from each other, and sometimes he has the couple walk about his office. He instructs them to move closer to and further from each other in an effort to gauge their unconscious visceral responses to their partner, closely watching their subtle facial and body expressions to help identify what they are feeling and experiencing. How does one member of the couple feel when she is intruded upon by her partner? How does she feel when he leaves the room? When he returns? How easily do they fold into each other when they embrace? How do her reactions to these events register on her face and in her body? And how effective is the couple's attempt at regulating their partner's affective state; that is, how effective is their attachment response system, their level of attunement to each others' signals. These are questions Dr. Tatkin explores in a typical couples session, which can sometimes last up to four hours. Based on the varied physical responses of his patients, he is able to help them articulate and better understand what they are not able to put into words.
Click HERE for full article
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 Letting Go
By James Garofallou, PhD
Some years ago, my niece Jill, who was a young mother at the time, confided that she was very fearful that her daughter Sierra, a very precocious little girl of about 4, was so frightfully bright that she may surpass her. Could she keep up with her daughter's academic questions, her voracious curiosity, her boundless exuberance? In that moment, I could have, but opted not to support Jill's obvious capabilities; she is and has proven to be a fully able mother. Instead, I told her that it is Sierra's job to surpass her -- that the task of every child is to surpass her parent. She took solace in my response, but the exchange got me to thinking about the relationship between our competitive fears of inadequacy and the gratification that comes of generativity combined with the formal surrender of our grandiosity. I say formal because this surrender is often a deliberate, conscious and adult choice that we all make when we relinquish our presumed ascendancy over the other, particularly when that other is one who we love and respect.
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The Standup Analyst
By Eric Sherman, LCSW
Advice from A (Sort of) Old Man
I was driving on the Garden State Parkway the other day when the unthinkable happened.
Without realizing it, I had left my left turn signal on, even though it had been some time since I had made a turn. A shudder went down my spine. As a 20 year old, had I not left careful instructions that if I were ever to drive with an errant turn signal, or wear knee-hi black socks with sandals and shorts, or begin eyeing the handicapped seat on buses, that I should be put out of my misery immediately?
And so it was there on the Garden State Parkway, somewhere between exit 152 and senility, that I came to a horrifying realization: I had gone from turning into my parents to suddenly becoming (dramatic music) my grandparents!
Click HERE for the rest of the article
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Legislative Alert
By Joshua Lerner, LCSW
New legislation has been introduced by Assemblyman Gary Schaer which would affect out of network mental health professionals. Among other provisions, this bill would require that out of network professionals make "good faith and timely efforts" to collect his or her patient's co-insurance, co-payment or deductible. It would also amend existing benefit assignment legislation by excluding providers from receiving direct payment if the practitioner violated the obligation of collecting patients' payments.
Under the bill, any practitioner that either directly or indirectly acts to or offers to waive, rebate, give, or pay an insured person's obligation (sic.,read "deductible/ copay") under the terms of an insurance policy can be fined up to $10,000.00, serve up to 18 months imprisonment or both." It as well proposes that out-of network practitioners be paid the same as in network providers. The intrusiveness and restraint of trade in this proposal is overwhelming.
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Thank you for joining us. Look for our next newsletter in December when the featured article by Nina Williams, PsyD will discuss how writing makes us better analysts. Upcoming: a three part series on brain research and the everyday practice of psychotherapy.
No need to print this email - for future reference, all issues are archived.
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