Study Groups
The members of the Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas represent a variety of interests and ideas on theory and practice. Study Groups bring a psychoanalytic perspective to a topic of each group’s own choosing (e.g., eating disorders, bereavement, fatherhood, inter-ethnic conflict, etc.).
PCC Study Groups are open to all PCC members and generally run from September to June. If you are interested in participating in a Study Group but are not currently a member, please join now!
Study Groups fill up quickly, so we encourage new groups and topics. We welcome interested participants from all fields. If you would like to propose a topic for a Study Group, please contact us by phone at 919-490-3212 or email Kayla Schilke.
PCC members may earn CE credits for meetings attended.
Non-members who wish for a Letter Attendance or CEs will be charged $100 per academic year.
Description: This Study Group will discuss contemporary psychoanalytic writing including those of Lombardi, Lachmann, Fonagy, Lichtenberg, Fosshage, and Bion. This topic was chosen after the leader and participants were polled and reported a need for improved competence and understanding of these authors and other object relations teachers in treating couples and individuals in their practices. The articles by the above authors and other object relations theorists will be discussed by the leader and participants in this seminar with participants also bringing clinical material into the seminars for discussions related to the writings. In this way, the participants will gain a greater understanding and competence in the application of these object relations theorists to their patients’ difficulties.
Contact: Scott Warren, PhD, LCMHC
Description: This Study Group will focus on various Experiential Dynamic Therapy (EDT) models, including Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) and Affect Phobia Therapy (APT), as discussed, the work of Allan Abbass, Jon Frederickson, Habib Davanloo, Leigh McCullough Vaillant, and Patricia Coughlin. This topic was selected by the facilitators to address a need for increased competence and understanding of these models in the psychoanalytic community. The articles by the above authors and other similar theorists will be discussed in this seminar with participants also bringing clinical material into the seminars for discussions related to the writings. In this way, the participants will gain greater understanding and competence in the application of both theory and technique to their patients’ difficulties.
Note: New members should have some experience with EDT, Davinoo, Fosha, etc.
Contacts: Tyler Beach, MSW, and Scott Warren, PhD, LCMHC
Description: This Study Group is designed to improve the participant’s competence in observing patients’ inner critic and the role the inner critic has in psychopathology. The inner critic is of particular importance when working with clients who have been traumatized or have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Another vulnerable population of individuals who have problems of narcissism, of the insecure or deficit type, who have developed patterns of self-hatred and self-criticism common to those who have an inner critic. This Study Group will identify primary source materials during the course of the academic year to use as a basis for discussion. The group will also provide an environment for clinicians to present and discuss clinical materials.
Contact: Sharon Merrill, LCMHC
This year we will study Lacan’s seminar III, “The Psychoses.” We will also study Lacan’s “The Names of the Father,” since that relates to Seminar III. Lacan’s doctoral thesis of 1932 was entitled Paranoid Psychosis and its Relation to the Personality. Central to this study was the phenomenon of paranoid delusion. In the seminar III, of 1955-56, Lacan continues to develop analyses of paranoid delusional thinking in relation to the three orders of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. Among the many topics Lacan covers are hysteria, the ‘name of the father’, the function of the signifier, and the Other. Seminar III builds on the prior two seminars on Lacan’s fundamental paradigm of the I, the Me, and the Other.
Contacts: Angelika Rapaport, PhD, and Herman Rapaport, PhD
Description: This study group will be concerned with the formation of psychosexuality which is not to be confused with genital sexuality. For Jean Laplanche (1924-2012) the genesis of infantile sexuality lies in the child’s mental construction of a “fantasmatic object” to “translate” what he terms the “enigmatic message of the Other.” In this view, the child is not only aware of others as “Other,” but also senses an enigmatic aspect in them that conveys a sexual message detectable through physical excitement. This “enigmatic message” acts like a foreign entity, prompting the child to wonder and fantasize. Thus, the Other is not merely a source of tenderness but also a bearer of unconscious signifiers of passion—a language of desire that is both enigmatic and later subjected to prohibitions that evoke guilt, rejection, envy, and hatred. The absence of the mother or father as sexual objects for the child establishes boundaries that, while enigmatic to the child, are formative of subjectivity. This dynamic illustrates how otherness, both problematic and exciting, shapes the infant’s emerging sense of self. At its core, psychosexuality involves an awareness, conscious or unconscious, of this enigmatic otherness, which fantasy attempts to translate into meaning, however incomplete that translation may be. It is psychosexuality that later influences adult choices in partners, creative pursuits, careers, interpersonal styles and ways of being as life forms that enact or sublimate unconscious infantile polymorphous sexuality. Laplanche teaches us that the emergence of infantile sexuality is “leaning on” (that is what is meant by “anaclitic) on the self-preservative instincts such as attachment and the satisfaction of needs.
In this study group, we will explore key concepts in Laplanche’s work, including:
- The anthropological situation (the adult-child relationship in its asymmetry)
- Laplanche’s “General Seduction Theory”
- The enigmatic message of the Other
- The sexual unconscious
- Psychosexual fantasies as the source of sexuality
- Why Laplanche distinguishes the “drive” from instinctual behavior
- Laplanche’s Hegelian underpinnings
- Lacan’s “What does the Other want of me?” as central to Laplanche’s framework
- The self’s constitution through the ongoing translation of enigmatic messages
- The dominance of the Other in the formation of the self
- How chosen careers, social or political activities, hobbies, and interpersonal styles might subliminally enact or sublimate infantile polymorphous psychosexuality
Description: This Study Group is designed to improve professional collaboration and staff communication between understanding children’s ways of dealing with and communicating about emotional problems. The seminar attempts to improve competence in communication and interacting with children in a therapeutic situation to help the child improve effective interactions with others outside of this setting.
Contact: Sara Rosenblatt, MSW
Description: In our diverse society, clinicians must be aware of issues related to gender, race, ethnicity, class, caste, sexuality, ability, etc., in psychoanalytic practice. This awareness includes a cognitive understanding of changing ideas and terminology but does not end there. We also need to prepare ourselves more deeply to be open to how these factors have shaped us and our patients, often outside of conscious awareness.
This seminar, through a series of analytic articles, book chapters, and videos will study how individual and societal differences in identity, as well as the intersection of multiple identities, impact our work. This year, we will again draw from a broad range of topics and will also focus on cultural and political ruptures and repairs in clinical work and supervision.
Contact: Terri Onstad, MA Ed, LCMHC
Description: This Study Group involves readings, discussions, and case presentations to improve basic knowledge, technique, understanding, and competence with applications of psychoanalytic theory and technique in the practice of ethical patient care. Participants are expected to integrate their improved competence and knowledge in their practices.
As practicing clinicians, participants in this Study Group self-reported a limited understanding of the basic psychoanalytic psychotherapy theory, technique, and ethics. Participants recognized that the theory, technique, and ethics of psychoanalytic psychotherapy were not given adequate attention in their graduate education and/or residencies. The Study Group was therefore designed to aid clinicians in their competence in this area of clinical treatment and understanding.
Contact: Steve Bennett, PhD
Description: The Race and Othering Study Group, co-coordinated by Kia Davis and Elissa Baldwin, is for early- to mid-career psychodynamic therapists in active practice. Candidates and psychotherapy students are welcome to join! Members will commit to attending monthly meetings for at least one full semester. Readings will be discussed and applied to dilemmas concerning race in clinical practice. Members will reflect on their racialized experiences in society, in their practices, and within the group. PCC members may earn CE credits for meetings attended.
Contact: Kia Davis, MSW
Description: This Study Group identifies emerging issues of interest in psychoanalysis. The participants were polled, revealing interest in exploring aspects of mind-body therapy as adjunctive to traditional “talk” therapy typical to psychoanalytically informed treatments. A current literature review focused on issues on treating traumatic stress and attachment disorders, which lend themselves well to an integration of mind-body awareness. This is of particular importance for the treatment of traumatic stress because most of the impairment resides in the body and presents itself in somatic or dissociative symptoms that impair traumatized individuals.
Contact: Carolyn Lee, MSW
Description: Relational approaches emphasize the ways in which early relationships shape the human mind and how the personalities of therapist and patient influence each other. Relational approaches shift our understanding and the ways we work with resistance, transference, countertransference, and therapeutic impasses. The relational literature is vast; therefore, by consensus, the group will choose from a rich list of seminal articles by major contributors on attachment, mentalization, intersubjectivity, and self-states. Phenomena including “the analytic third,” enactment, dissociation, attachment style, pathological accommodation, and the role of self-disclosure are topics that are likely to become focal topics for the group. There are currently four Study Groups on this topic.
Contact: Phuongloan Vo, PhD
Description: Relational approaches emphasize the ways in which early relationships shape the human mind and how the personalities of therapist and patient influence each other. Relational approaches shift our understanding and the ways we work with resistance, transference, countertransference, and therapeutic impasses. The relational literature is vast; therefore, by consensus, the group will choose from a rich list of seminal articles by major contributors on attachment, mentalization, intersubjectivity, and self-states. Phenomena including “the analytic third,” enactment, dissociation, attachment style, pathological accommodation, and the role of self-disclosure are topics that are likely to become focal topics for the group. There are currently four Study Groups on this topic.
Contact: Heather Patterson Meyer, PsyD