| dc.description | Let me tell you a tale of (academic) excitement, great P.R. for AU as an institution, and how I ended up having dinner with one of the foremost scholars in my field, as well as the widow of one of Canada’s best-known psychoanalysts, who herself, turned out to be one of the first art therapists to ever practice in a medical setting in this country.
The abstract you have here was revised again by the conference committee to reflect its original scope, which was three 30 minute theory/clinical presentations – one on Winnicott, one on Malan, and one on the treatment of depression. The fourth, Northern supervision, was a separate talk and went over very well. (And perhaps I can sum this one up in passing. U Manitoba runs the only rural/Northern clinical psychology program in Canada. The fact that we (me and my colleague) were doing active, distance clinical supervision in the North, and had managed to have this approved by regulatory bodies was amazing to them – “them” being the CPA section executive for the Rural/Northern Section, almost all of whom come from UM. I was able to showcase AU and its reputation for distance delivery of education as a key feature of why I was selected for this project, and we provided some novel ideas on how clinical work can be done in the North. My colleague made valuable connections with some of the roughly 10 people who attended.)
Okay, back to the main story.
To understand this year, we need a short flashback to last year (also generously funded by APDF) and some brief explanation of CPA’s structure.
CPA is divided into Sections, which rarely intermingle. (Imagine CADE with people divided into ed tech and instructional design and professors and none of them going to each other’s talks.) I am a member of the Psychoanalysis section and the Rural/Northern section. I attended the Psychoanalysis section business meeting last year and volunteered to do their newsletter, since it involved the web, ed tech tools, and was an easy thing for an AU prof to pick up and run with, since we’re so used to distance communications. It was good PR for AU, for me, and helped the section a great deal.
Flash forward to this year.
Because of this service over the last year, the section Chair decided that he would include me as a member of the executive of this section, and invited me to attend the various functions – executive meeting, award winners’ dinner and the business meeting – all great places to talk up AU, hand out AU business cards and generally schmooze. (You know how it goes… “Who are you with?” I ask. “Columbia in New York” he says, “and you?” “Athabasca University” I say. Brief pause. Wrinkled brow… unasked question of who/what is AU… I then smoothly say, “Canada’s Open University” then make some international comparisons, like “British Open”, Hong Kong Open”, make a bad joke about it sounding like I was on the golf tour, and then dive right into some hard core clinical conversation to prove that I can swim with the big dogs, or run with the sharks, or however that metaphor is supposed to go. Which I can, by the way, as I have been doing clinical work and writing for nearly 20 years.)
I gave my talks at their scheduled time, which was Friday afternoon from 3:30 to 5 pm. Everyone knows that at conferences, late afternoons on Fridays are only second worst to late afternoons on the last day of the conference. The rooms at the Westin Ottawa face west onto a glass hallway and Friday in Ottawa was sunny and hot. The Westin Ottawa is also doing renos right now (so stay elsewhere if you can) and the air conditioning was not running properly all afternoon. People left this bank of rooms looking tired, hot and wilted. When I got into my room, it was stifling and I would put money down that it was close to 30 degrees.
25 – 30 people showed up (roughly the capacity of this room) and in spite of explaining that my talks were 30 minutes each, and people were free to leave at each break, but that the talks did blend together and if people stuck it out for the full 90 minutes, they would walk away with a good integration of the material I was presenting. Only 1 person left after the 30 minute mark, and when we finished at 5 pm, to loud applause (I’m not kidding, it was more than I’ve gotten in the past), I then had 3 or 4 people who remained in the sauna with me until nearly 6 pm, discussing my presentations with me (yes, yes, more chance to highlight my work, AU as an institution, and hand out business cards.)
In this crowd, I had a young graduate student approach me and ask if I had any spaces in my doctoral internship program, because she really wanted to have me as her internship supervisor. To which I had to apologize, and tell her that we were at least 5 years away from being able to offer her one. Without digressing to an explanation of the Darwinian viciousness of finding internships in psychology in Canada, the fact that she thought I had one based on the caliber of my talks, suggests something about the quality of the AU professors you are funding to go to conferences these days, but enough about me, and back to my story.
I then got cleaned up (since I had lost about 10 pounds sweating in the sauna they called the Newfoundland Room) and went over to the properly air conditioned Chateau Laurier for the award winners’ dinner. This turned out to be a small affair hosted by Sylvia Singer Weininger, widow of Otto Weininger, the namesake of our section’s annual award. She and I talked about art therapy (she was the first to do art in the Toronto Sick Kids Hospital in the early 1960s), I talked up our program’s connection to the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute and how it connected to AU’s counselling program, and she asked me to consider developing a memorial website for our section, in memory of her husband, to which I agreed (all because we AU people are so comfortable with the web and tech.)
I then spoke at length to our award winner, Dr. Nancy McWilliams, who is considered one of today’s foremost clinicians and academics in applied psychoanalysis (out of Rutgers) about everything from kids and parenting, lifestyles, politics, culture and clinical wisdom. In all, an amazing evening. She even asked me (!) what kind of emphasis she should put into her talk the next day, when she received her award. I suggested something from one of her recent papers that I made sure to note was one of the required readings in my counselling skills class (I know… I know… sounds kind of smarmy, but really, it was all very genuinely given and received.)
The next day, when she got to that part of her talk, she said “and when I was talking to Paul last night about what I was going to say to you today…” which created another small flood of interest in me, AU and our program at the end of what wasn’t even my talk. What was more telling to me, and not lost on the audience who attended both sessions, was that much of the theory and practice that Nancy referred to in her talk was nearly identical to the content I covered the day before, thus cementing for me the sense that I continue to find my work well within the current state of the art and that I haven’t lost my ability to remain on the cutting edge in my discipline.
On the way home, I figured that I had experienced one of the most successful conferences thus far in my career. I have attached the basic PowerPoint outlines for my three talks, and the supervision talk given with my colleague. I have to say I am in the “hate PowerPoint” camp now, because it seems to limit discussion and face it… everyone reads the darned things and drives the audience nuts with that. So, for the Northern supervision talk, we didn’t run the PowerPoint slides at all, but used them as notes for our reference. What we did instead, is ran a slide show of rural and Northern scenes in the background while we engaged in a talk/discussion.
The PowerPoints for my other three talks were similar in their use. I didn’t project a thing, but used them as a guide for my own preferred teaching style, which is more dynamic and active and interactive. This also fits the style of this section where presenters tend to either read formal papers word for word, or speak in an apparent (but organized) ex tempore style, not unlike clinical lectures and rounds in the psychoanalytic institutes, which is what I did here. In the Malan theory presentation, I used a flip chart to demonstrate the dynamic movement of the concepts in clinical practice.
If my Centre finds funds for a research assistant for me this year while on sabbatical, I’ll take the last paper, the one on depression, and turn it into a proper manuscript. | en |
| dc.description.abstract | This presentation is a three-part examination of theory and technique in psychodynamic psychotherapy. Part one examines Winnicott’s therapeutic consultation (Winnicott, 1971). He would meet with children and their parents in a long session that was a combination of assessment and intervention. Based on previous published work (e.g., Jerry, 1994) and on-going clinical practice, the presenter poses the question, “if Winnicott’s therapeutic consultation was distilled into a method or technique, what might this look like?” Part two
examines the clinical approach initiated by David Malan (1979), extended by Gustafson (1986), and which is experiencing a revival in Canadian clinical practice. Malan makes use of the triangles of person and conflict as a means of structuring his approach to clinical problems. The triangle of conflict is used to examine clinical problems based on the presenting anxiety, the defences used to manage that anxiety, and the underlying unconscious dynamics driving the surface presentation. The triangle of person situates the conflicts in terms of current relationships, past significant relationships, and their
manifestation in the transference. Based on previous published work (Jerry, 1997, 1998) and on-going clinical practice, the presenter reviews Malan’s model and describes clinical material based on this method. The third part of this presentation takes the case material used in parts one and two and examines other aspects of the treatment process including
transference/countertransference, dream material, and other issues such as finances, scheduling, and the real vs. therapeutic relationship. This series of presentations will be of interest to graduate students, clinicians new to psychodynamic treatment, and practising clinicians. A basic understanding of psychodynamic concepts will be presumed.
Rural and Northern abstract:
Distance Supervision in the North
Increasingly in recent years, the issues of education and supervision across
geographical distances are making their way to the forefront of discussions in
professional psychology. This presentation describes a distance supervision
relationship between a provisional registered psychologist located in the Yukon
and a registered psychologist located in south-eastern Alberta. Topics that may
be covered include details of the nature of the supervisory contract, methods
and techniques for dealing with distance, negotiation with a regulatory body
regarding supervision arrangements, the use of face-to-face time, and ethical
concerns. | en |
