Analysis Now invited Anthony Bass, Ph.D., to share the workshop approach he has been practicing and developing over the past twenty-five years as a way of teaching key relational theoretical ideas and their therapeutic applications. Tony describes how his workshops function to illuminate fascinating discoveries about analytic work and ourselves.

The Dialogue of Unconsciouses: Mutuality of Psychoanalytic Relations and the Uses of the Self in Contemporary Relational Psychotherapies

By Anthony Bass, Ph.D.

I conducted a workshop this past February for the Manhattan Institute Seminar Series, and here is the title and description of the workshop that was sent out as a flyer for the event:

Imagining Psychoanalysis, a Clinical Workshop: Therapeutic Creativity and Dialogues of the Unconscious: Anthony Bass, Ph.D.

In this seminar we will explore the fundamental role of imagination in the psychotherapy relationship, using Ferenczi’s concept of a “dialogue of unconsciouses” as a point of departure for the experience. We will deepen our grasp of unconscious dimensions of therapeutic relating, and our use of our imaginations in finding our way to the patient, through our engagement with difficult treatment moments.

Along with Dr. Bass, participants in the workshop may present material themselves or work with others’ clinical vignettes. They will gain experience using emotional responses to patients in order to identify and work through enactments, impasses, and other challenging countertransference obstacles at the heart of psychotherapy. Implications for how we make use of ourselves, the way we respond to our patients, and how this contributes to our therapeutic intentions and sense of “technique” will be explored.

We will focus on patients with whom we have felt especially emotionally affected, i.e., those who evoke intense, disturbing, or arousing reactions: patients we dream about at night or become preoccupied with by day; patients who make us anxious or to whom we respond with counter-resistance, such as fighting sleep, falling asleep, or becoming bored; patients who arouse us to anger, disgust, shame, or sexual or other body experiences.

Such experiences, often at the heart of enactments in psychotherapy, provide access to the ways in which the unconscious life of patient and therapist emerge and interact, creating special challenges and special opportunities for deepening and furthering the work.

Please come prepared to share some clinical moments and your imaginative musings on your work or that of others if possible.

The structure and process of my workshops grew out of my interest in creating and making use of an experiential field in which to demonstrate a number of the central therapeutic theoretical principles and their applications in a relational way of working. These include, among others, the intersubjective nature of the therapeutic endeavor, the bi-personal field in which it emerges, and the bi-directionality of unconscious communication between therapist and patient: the Dialogue of Unconsciouses, for short, as Ferenczi put it, that constitute a central dimension of psychoanalytic work. The application of each of these principles, given the uniqueness of each therapist, each patient and each therapeutic dyad is unique to each therapy couple. The workshop is meant to explore the uniqueness of each therapist’s method, a function of the unique therapeutic instrument that each therapist develops and embodies.

In the course of these workshops, participants learn more about their own therapeutic voices, gain access to unconscious dimensions of the kinds of therapeutic engagement they co-establish with their patients, and consider obstacles to its emergent awareness. Enactment, and enactment’s contribution to both impasse and creative breakthroughs in the intersubjective field from which they emerge, are all explored as part of the workshop experience. 

My workshop format involves each presenter presenting some work with a patient who evokes strong countertransference currents. The presented patient might evoke any one of an infinite number of countertransference responses—in the therapist, and in those participating in the seminar who are tasked with imagining that the patient is their own—including anger, sadness, envy, hate, love, sexual feelings, numbness, guilt, etc. As the workshop proceeds, each member of the group is asked to listen and respond to the ‘material’ from the inside out, rather than the outside in. In other words, rather than the more typical case seminar orientation in which each participant engages from a supervisory position, inquiring of the presenter as to her state of mind, clinical choices and so on, the workshop participant speaks from the first personal singular voice, implicitly or explicitly speaking from the position—if this were my patient, or as I imagine myself with this patient as her therapist. 

What quickly becomes evident during each of these workshops is that every therapist in the room has a different patient, and each patient has a different therapist, highlighting the intersubjective nature of the therapy project. Typically, each person’s response to the imagined patient and its translation into one or another form of therapeutic engagement captures some aspect of the presenting therapist’s experience, more or less conscious, but recognizable in the foreground or background of her experience. The goal of the workshop is for each participant to learn something more about her or his own voice, countertransference dispositions, and the ways in which those kinds of psychic experiences can be creatively transformed into different kinds of psychotherapeutic engagement. It is as though the presenting therapist has offered a script of a therapy moment that each one of us can work on improvisationally to discover more about our own therapeutic instrument at work and play with patients who have much to teach us about ourselves and the work of analytic therapy.

Anthony Bass, Ph.D., is associate professor and clinical consultant at the NYU Postdoctoral Program, and faculty, training and supervising analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He is on the faculty of the NIP National Training Program, and he is on our own faculty at the Manhattan Institute. He was a founding editor, joint editor-in-chief and now editor emeritus at Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Bass was a founder and is current president of the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center, a founding director of IARPP and also sits on the board of the Sandor Ferenczi Center of New York. He leads clinical seminars and workshops focusing on the therapeutic relationship all across North America, as well as in South America, Europe and Israel.

 

If you are interested in joining a workshop with Tony Bass in the upcoming academic year, be on the lookout for those offered by the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in Washington DC, December 4th; one sponsored by the Houston Psychoanalytic Society, March 26th, 2022; and one at the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies, March 8th, 15th and 22nd, 2022. Each of these workshops will be conducted over the Zoom format. Smaller workshops and seminars may be arranged privately.

 

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