Philip Bromberg’s ideas regarding shame, dissociation and trauma, grounded in interpersonal thinking, have helped us understand the self in innovative ways. The implications for treatment and the analytic relationship are manifold. Within the safe but not too safe therapeutic relationship, the patient has the opportunity to perceive alternative versions of reality as therapist and patient co-construct a negotiated reality. Drawing on clinical material from a treatment of many years, Dr. Aronson will illustrate some of Bromberg’s ideas as to how one helps the patient develop an increased capacity to sustain the experience of internal conflict as well as see one’s mind as an analytic object in its own right.

Seth Aronson, Psy.D. is Training and Supervising Analyst, Director of Training, Fellow at the William Alanson White Institute (WAWI) where he has also served as Director of Curriculum, and Faculty of the Psychoanalytic and Child Psychotherapy Training Programs. Dr. Aronson is Faculty and Supervisor at Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis. He teaches child and adolescent psychopathology and psychotherapy at Long Island University’s doctoral program, and has facilitated process groups for rabbinical students at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah for 18 years. Dr. Aronson serves as co-chair of the Special Interest Group for children and adolescents of the American Group Psychotherapy Association where he is also a Fellow. He is co-editor with Craig Haen of the Handbook of Child and Adolescent Group Therapy (Routledge, 2017). He has presented and taught in many venues including Israel, London, and notably at PAS Institute in Tokyo, Japan, where he has also supervised at their annual conferences for almost 20 years. Dr. Aronson is author of nearly 40 articles and chapters, on topics such as play and supervision, wearing a yarmulke while working as a psychoanalyst, the analyst’s mourning, the mutuality of attachment, and group work with children and adolescents. He is in private practice in New York City.