Workshop presented by Dr. Joseph Fernando, MDCM
Event Price: Fees include CEs. This is a free event for HP/CPC students and candidates, $40 for CPC/HP members and nonmember students, and $75 for nonmembers who are not students.
Continued Education (CEU/CME): 2.0 credits
Attendance: This is a hybrid event - in person and online attendance is available
Audience: This is a program for Mental Health Professionals
NOTE: Pre-registration is encouraged. Walk-in registration is available but only cash and check payments will be accepted.
Course Description:
In this presentation Dr. Fernando will differentiate two defenses that are important clinically but that are often confused with each other: projective identification and identification with the aggressor. He will show that differentiating these two defenses at the conceptual level can be helpful clinically.
Dr. Fernando will demonstrate that by differentiating defenses relating to different forms of the unconscious – the id versus the unconscious part of the ego, the unconscious primary process versus the unconscious secondary process – we can come to a deeper understanding of these two defenses, as well as of defensive processes more generally. These defenses, and especially projective identification, are now usually understood in terms of inner object relations.
Dr. Fernando will present a view of them which does not necessarily contradict an object relations description, but that supplements it by approaching the two defensive processes discussed from the point of view of Freud’s original distinction between the primary and secondary modes of mental functioning.
Learning Objectives:
Will be able to describe the characteristics of projective identification and identification of the aggressor, both their similarities and key differences.
Be able to intervene with helpful sequence of interpretations to analyze identification with the aggressor
Dr. Joseph Fernando, MDCM is a training and supervising analyst at the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis, and Director of the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis. He has been in private practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for over 30 years in Toronto. Dr. Fernando has published papers on guilt, narcissism, the character of the exception. His book, The Processes of Defense, won the 2010 Gradiva prize for a book on psychoanalytic theory. His second book, “A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Trauma: Post-Traumatic Mental Functioning, the Zero Process, and the Construction of Reality” was recently published by Routledge in the IPA ideas and applications series. He is presently at work on a book on the deeper links between trauma, guilt, and the the superego, which attempts to throw some light on issues of cultural transmission and group delusions. He has presented widely on his ideas in North America and abroad.