We are pleased to announce a workshop on Understanding and Resolving Conflicts regarding Emotional Closeness in Davanloo’s Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP).

One of the key innovations Dr. Davanloo made in the development of ISTDP is his discovery of a set of patient defenses designed to ward off intimacy with the therapist. He called this defensive system ‘resistance against emotional closeness’ (RAEC). As RAEC prevents the patient from meaningfully engaging in the therapeutic endeavor, an understanding of this resistance coupled with the knowledge of how to manage it is essential to our work.

In this 1-day webinar, Patricia Coughlin, PhD, and Jonathan Entis, PhD, will review the concept of RAEC and the factors involved in its origin and maintenance. They will demonstrate how to assess whether the RAEC is part of a larger character resistance or a resistance to feelings in the transference.

Drs. Coughlin and Entis will use didactic and audiovisual presentations of actual therapy sessions to demonstrate how to work effectively with this resistance while strengthening the conscious and unconscious therapeutic alliance.

This event is only open to licensed mental health workers.

Schedule

The morning session presented by Patricia Coughlin

10:00am – 10:45am Didactic presentation on concept of resistances against emotional closeness

10:45am – 11:00am Question and answers

11:00am – 11:15am Break

11:15am – 12:45pm Audio-visual presentation of treatment with a patient with RAEC

12:45pm – 1:15pm Question and answers

1:15pm – 2:15pm Lunch break

The afternoon session presented by Jonathan Entis

2:15pm – 3:00pm Didactic presentation on advanced techniques for working with RAEC

3:00pm – 3:15pm Question and answers

3:15pm – 3:30pm Break

3:30pm – 5:00pm Audio-visual presentation of treatment with a patient with RAEC

5:00pm – 5:30pm Question and answers

About Dr. Coughlin:

Patricia Coughlin (Della Selva), Ph.D., is a licensed Clinical Psychologist with over 35 years of clinical experience. She has held faculty positions at Northwestern University Medical School, Albany Medical College, and the Thomas Jefferson School of Medicine.

Currently she is Clinical Faculty at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. Over the past 20 years she has written professionally, given presentations at professional conferences and conducted workshops for mental health professionals internationally. Currently, she is conducting training groups in New York, Australia, Denmark, and Poland and maintains a private practice in Colorado.

Her first book, Intensive Short term Dynamic Psychotherapy: Theory and Technique, is considered a classic in the field. Dr. Coughlin’s book Lives Transformed was written in collaboration with Dr. David Malan, and published in 2006 by Karnac Books. Her newest book, Maximizing Therapeutic Effectiveness in Dynamic Psychotherapy, was published in July 2016 by Routledge.

About Dr. Entis

Jonathan Entis, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, where for the past four years he has taught and supervised in ISTDP. He is an IEDTA-certified teacher, and has been invited to present both nationally and internationally as an expert on ISTDP. Since 2021, he has co-presented an annual seminar on working with syntonic defenses in Davanloo's ISTDP with John Rathauser, PhD. Jonathan leads multiple monthly training groups and will be leading a core training based in Tel Aviv, Israel, and co-leading one in Boston, MA, in 2022.

For questions and comments, please email drjonathanentis@gmail.com