A Scientific Meeting presented by Robert Grossmark, PhD, ABPP

Event Price: Event is free.CE fee is $10 for CPC/HP members and non HP/CPC students, $25 for nonmembers who are not students. HP and CPC students and candidates receive CEs for free.

Light cocktail reception 6 - 6:30 p.m. at the Center before the presentation.

Continued Education (CEU/CME): 1.5 credits

Attendance: This is a hybrid event - in person and online attendance is available

Course Description:

This Scientific Meeting will address the challenges met when working with patients who cannot “work together” with an analyst, who are not sufficiently able to symbolize and mentalize. We will address both patients who suffer disturbances in the area of self-other definition, continuity and regulation of self, as well as patients who can appear to be more related and reflective, but harbor sequestered self states that are dominated by areas of unrepresented and unsymbolized trauma and neglect.

This presentation will present the position of the unobtrusive relational analyst who companions the patient in the emergence of illusion, fragmentation and non-relatedness and privileges the inner world of the patient that becomes the signature and defining sculptor of the clinical interaction and process.

Unrepresented and unformulated trauma and neglect announce themselves in the flow of mutual enactive engagement and rather than seek to move the patient into greater relatedness and insight, the analyst companions the patient in the emergence of yet to be known and thought narratives of trauma and fragmentation. The tilt is toward an ontological position that privileges being-with the patient rather than epistemological where meaning can be symbolized and interpreted.

Learning Objectives:

1. Participants will be able to distinguish between a classical position of neutrality and abstinence and the unobtrusive relational position. 

2. Participants will be able to recognize enactments and orient to their full expression. 

ROBERT GROSSMARK, PH.D, ABPP, is a psychoanalyst in New York City. He works with individuals, groups and couples. 

He is on the teaching and supervising faculty at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, The National Institute for the Psychotherapies Program in Adult Psychoanalysis, The National Training Program in Psychoanalysis, National Faculty Member, the Florida Psychoanalytic Center and lectures at other psychoanalytic institutes and clinical psychology training programs nationally and internationally. He is an Associate Editor for Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 

He is the author of The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Companioning and co-edited The One and the Many: Relational Approaches to Group Psychotherapy and Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory.