_2024-25 Spring Seminar Series

Course Description and Overview: Like Dorothy, we are no longer in the safe predictable environment that for her was Kansas.  Whether it be climate change, increasing inequality, potential economic collapse, unresponsive and corrupt government, pandemics and their mandates, AI, loss of privacy, fascism, contradictory narratives around violent events, concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few, confiscation of rights, the increasing risk of world war, ongoing genocides or the election of Trump, we all seem to agree that something is rapidly changing in ways that defy our capacity to make sense of the world we now find ourselves in. Much like in the phantasmagoric world of Oz where the one believed to be the protector is also the untrustworthy one, we are all finding ourselves more and more confused about what is true and how we might find the courage and resilience to face our fears when so many uncertainties abound.

In this three-part seminar we will discuss how to help clients be with uncertainty when cultural beliefs and narratives fall short, and when what we have taken for granted as true fails to help us navigate, be with and understand “the real” that our previously held beliefs and socially constructed narratives have obfuscated. We will discuss the value of holding our beliefs loosely, of facing our fears and of engaging with others through loving-kindness and compassion. We will take an epistemological perspective on how it is we come to “know” what we take to be true, and how non-attachment to those beliefs can help us and our patients in moments of great uncertainty.

Learning Objectives:

1. Participants will explore the value of non-attachment, curiosity, gratitude and courage in helping clients live in a world with increasing uncertainty

2. Participants will see how compassion rather than empathy can help patients move towards greater connection, resilience and allow the real to inform their sense of meaning in a world where previous beliefs and narratives may no longer hold true

3. Participants will have a better idea of how political beliefs both inform and confine what we believe is possible in and outside of the consulting room

Fanny Chalfin holds an M.A. from the University of Chicago in comparative Literature and an MSW from Smith College.  She is trained in Psychodynamic, CBT, DBT, EMDR, Somatic Experiencing and hypnosis which she uses along with sound therapy to help clients get beyond the narrative to a deeper sense of pre-linguistic body centered knowing.  She is a member of AAPCS and NASW, has been an editor for the European Journal of Body Psychotherapy, a reader for AAPCSW, and is on the symposium committee of the NASW Massachusetts chapter.  She has written two articles published in 2014 and 2022 in the Journal of Psychoanalytic Social Work and a commentary in NASW MA Social Work Voice in 2022.  She has presented on issues regarding disability, diversity and inclusion at the 2013 AAPCSW conference and in 2022 at the NASW Massachusetts Symposium.  She presented again on the topic of disability for NASW Massachusetts in October 2022.  She is also a member of the Ethics and Disability special interest groups of her NASW chapter. More recently she has presented at the 2023 AAPCSW conference on Moving Beyond Polarization as well as at PPSC and the 2024 NASWMA symposium.  She is particularly interested in the narrowing of what it is to be human and the corresponding trajectory in the movement from psychoanalysis and the soul to a behavioral health model.  She is also interested in how we come to believe the things we believe, how socio-political norms define and confine what we think is possible, and how non-attachment to preconceived narratives and outcomes, loving kindness compassionate wisdom and an acceptance of the imperfect and temporal nature of all things including our own lifetimes can help us hold the real differently.  She has a private practice in Northampton, Massachusetts.