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April 2011

Note from the Director and Co-Director

Roger Segalla and Maxine Ellenberg Arnsdorf

Addiction to drugs (legal and illegal), alcohol, gambling, sex, cutting, video games, pornography, exercise, anorexia, bulimia and various risk-taking behaviors all have a common underlying aim: a behavioral attempt to alter (or cure) one's emotional state. For a number of years, the treatment of these illnesses has been dominated by cognitive-behavioral treatments and psycho-education. Though there is a role for these forms of treatment, recent advancements in neuroscience and the integration of these advancements into psychoanalytic psychotherapy, have opened up new insights into the role of neurobiology in the development and maintenance of all forms of addiction. These insights reinforce the value of psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a treatment modality for our patients who struggle with both chemical and behavioral addictions.

On May 7th, the 2011 ICP&P Annual Conference will feature Dr. Brian Johnson from the SUNY Upstate Medical University Neuropsychoanalytic Addiction Program. Dr. Johnson, one of the leading experts on treating addiction from a neuropsychoanalytic approach, will address these insights and offer a psychoanalytic model for understanding and treating addictions. Please make plans to join us on Saturday, May 7th for "The Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Approach to Addictions." Keep an eye out for the conference brochure coming out soon!

Also arriving in your mailbox in the near future is the 2011-2013 election ballot. Please review the candidate statements, complete the ballot, and return it in the enclosed stamped envelope. While all of the positions have only one nomination, the bylaws require a 50% participation rate from the membership to ratify the election, so it it important that you vote by the April 30 deadline. We would like to thank Gail Winston and Judy Marx for their capable service on the nominating committee.

Finally, ICP&P has been contacted as a potential partner by the NIH Federal Credit Union. Participating in the credit union would enable our members to access quality banking and financial services at favorable rates. (You can learn more about the credit union on their website www.nihfcu.org). The Board decided to seek input from the membership about their interest in this opportunity. Please give us your feedback to guide us in deciding this matter.


Note from the Secretary

Leslie Westbrook

In an effort to keep the membership informed about issues that are being discussed by the ICP&P Board, a brief summary of each meeting is published in the Newsletter. If there are items about which you have questions, opinions or concerns, please feel free to contact a Board member. We welcome your input. All Board members are listed in the front of the ICP&P Directory and on the website. Here are some highlights from the March meeting:

  • The Board reviewed a summary of the most recent conference (Diana Diamond). The summary was compared to responses to the previous conferences. The Board will continue to monitor participant responses in the future with the goal of continuing to offer workshops of quality and relevant content.
  • The Board discussed possible subjects for the December 2011 Conference and for Scientific Day in March 2012. Plans for the Self Psychology Institute for 2011-2012 are on schedule. The Board discussed the possibility of a training program on the subject of infant observation and development.
  • Graduation for the training programs is scheduled for June 6th.
  • In the future all participants in the training programs will be required to secure some form of license to practice. Faculty will advise students on this process.
  • The call for nominations for election to open Board positions have gone out to the membership.
  • The next Board meeting will be Monday April 25 at 7:45pm at the ICP&P office.

Note from the Coordinator of Programs

Patricia Olsen

We are fast approaching our May 7, 2011 Annual Conference, The Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Approach to Addictions. Brian Johnson, MD will speak on the neuroscience of addiction and the comorbidity with depression. He will help us look at the differences in applying psychoanalytic, motivational and cognitive behavioral treatments with addicted patients. In the afternoon Mary Brennan PhD will present a case for discussion. In addition to Brian, Roger Segalla, PhD will respond from a self psychological perspective. The conference will be held from 8:30 am - 4:15 pm at the National 4-H Youth Conference Center, 7100 Connecticut Avenue, Chevy Chase, MD. If you do not receive a brochure in the mail by next week, please refer to our website at www.icpeast.org. See you there!


Note from the Chair, Couples Training Program

Barbara Shapard

ICP&P's Couples Training Program is currently interviewing potential Members-in-Training for classes starting in the fall 2011. If you are interested or have any questions about the program, please contact Michael Wannon at menaw1@aol.com or at 301-951-9488.


Note from the Chair, Psychotherapy Training Program

Faith Lewis

The Psychotherapy Training Program will hold an Open House for anyone interested in finding out about the next training cycle, beginning in Sept. 2011. We will gather on Sunday, April 10, from 4:00 to 5:30 PM at 4511 17th Street in Washington, DC. There will be representatives there from the faculty and the current training class. To RSVP or for more information contact Monica Callahan at callahanml@erols.com or 301-587-6211, or Faith Lewis at faithglewis@gmail.com or 202-409-6835.


New Member Introductions

Margo Silberstein and Jeffrey Jay

Please join me (Margo) in welcoming Carolyn Shank, MSW as a returning member of ICP&P. Carolyn is a seasoned clinician and teacher of psychotherapy. She has taught in the Advanced Training Program and the Clinical Training Program at the Washington School of Psychiatry. One of her most cherished experiences is completing a five-year Tavistock training in Infant Observation with the International Psychotherapy Institute. Carolyn maintains a full time private practice where she specializes in anxiety and depression as well as personality disorders. She provides supervision both through the Washington School and privately. She has a continuing interest in sharpening observation skills including those taught in ISTDP, as well as in writing about her experiences and work. Welcome, Carolyn!

On behalf of ICP&P I (Jeffrey) want to welcome Doug Chavis, MD, MS, to the community. When asked why he joined ICP&P, Doug gave the best answer I have ever heard: "I wanted to show my appreciation to the organization for its scientific days and be supportive of its theoretic bent." Not only did this sound gracious, but he really is speaking from a depth of knowledge of the field: Doug is a child, adolescent, and adult analyst and child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist who knows the work of Fonage, Beebe, Lachman, Main and others, including Joe Lichtenberg, who taught Doug at the Washington Pschoanalytic Institute. Doug went to medical school at Tufts and completed the Residency Program at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. He came to DC for the Child and Adolescent Fellowship at Children's Hospital, accompanied by his wife, Paula Ellman who is also an analyst. Keeping identities clear, Doug is a Training and Supervising Analyst at The Washington Center for Psychoanalysis where he received his analytic training, while Paula is a Training Analyst at the New York Freudian Society. Doug has also co-taught at the Washington Center with Sandra Hershberg, MD. Doug and Paula have three children, all in college or graduate school (full disclosure: the Chavis children helped my own children get through middle school when they were classmates). In speaking with Doug, I was reminded that he has a wonderful, infectious laugh and I hope he brings his knowledge and laugh often to ICP&P events.


Thoughts on Being a Therapist

Lauren Brandt and Jeffrey Jay

Feelings, thoughts, reflections, moments of humor, moments of insight, moments of relief, joy, victory, or defeat in being a therapist?

We would like to introduce a new occasional column in the newsletter, "Thoughts on Being A Therapist," as a space for ICP&P members to share reflections relating to this audacious, humbling and poignant work of being a therapist. The notes should be no longer than 400 words, but can also be much shorter. In addition to small lessons learned, we welcome personal writing to complement the theory, training, and hard work of treatment. Haikus and less formal expressions are welcome, but no identifying information of clients or breaches of confidentiality, please. Submit your writing for this column to Lauren Brandt or Jeffrey Jay at LBJLS@rcn.com or jeffjayphd@aol.com.

Control and Conceit by Jeffrey Jay

Sitting across from a client, I sometimes muse about how little would have to change for me to become a healer with a frilly talisman, or a twinkle-eyed guru, or an exotic gypsy (my Mother's family was from Hungary), or a suave croupier, each dealing imperceptibly different hands of hope, instead of a therapist analyzing object relations. How much would need to change? Just a nuance in how the relationship is controlled. I like being a therapist because the control is ceded to the client and it appears to be … well…therapeutic.

But that comfortable conceit of control crashed into a wall ten years ago when I started to also conduct forensic, psychological evaluations in which determining the client's credibility became crucial to her life. For instance, the court might ask, "Can you determine whether this person claiming that she was tortured, starved and raped in some African jail should be believed and offered asylum?&q uot;If she is not "credible," she is "removed" to her home country. But, by then, if she had been telling the truth, she will be tortured again and, this time, murdered. It might all be a simple determination if we did not know that these personal stories are often fabricated and so carefully practiced to gain US citizenship that the control is really no control at all.

It is exhilarating but excruciating to be asked to reach these judgments of someone's truth, as if one can really know. As a type of self-care, to expiate the unrelieved tension of that responsibility I wrote a screenplay called Gates of Paradise. In contrast to the lonely task of examining psychological tests, in the screenplay, I can ride along with morally ambiguous, innocent, and deceptive characters playing hard against fast changing truths. They live ironically in corrupt worlds with duplicitous people, just as we see in movies all the time. That emotional hell ride is what it feels like to do some of these forensic evaluations, but here, heartbreak is really in control, and therefore a pleasure.

For me, it is simply wonderful to conjure plot and characters where everyone lives dramatically for two hours, but no one needs to really care. Here, other than art, truth has no consequences. My second screenplay, Stealing Home, explores a young trauma victim's urge to punish someone, an urge that could become revenge, or atonement, or sacrifice, or other reverberation of the human demand for justice. Indeed, I believe that many real victims of trauma live with an internal demand for justice although it often stands trial in the tormented, private courts of the soul. (Paradoxically, today, the construct of "anxiety" that guides treatment protocols for PTSD provides a convenient but false sense of control – as if everything about trauma is gaining internal control). But screenplays cannot be about the soul, so Stealing Home is really a story about brothers and baseball.


UPCOMING EVENTS

  • Wednesday, April 13, 2011 – ICP&P will hold a reading group for anyone interested in the Psychoanalytic Training Program at the home of Elizabeth Carr in Silver Spring, MD. Please contact Linda Kanefield at kaneschn@gmail.com for more information.
  • Friday, April 15, 2011 – The New York Freudian Society – DC Division presents You Had To Be There: Finding Meltzer on the Page with Pamela Berse Sorensen, PhD at the Jane Fox Reading Room, Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD from 7-9pm. For more information, contact srockwell33@aol.com
  • Friday, May 6, 2011 The George Washington University PsyD program is pleased to present Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Multiple Diversities in the New Millennium with Salman Akhtar, MD, Kimberlyn Leary, Ph.D., MPA, Dorothy E. Holmes, Ph. D., ABPP (Clinical Psychology) from 9am-5:15pm. 6 CE credits are offered.
  • Saturday, May 7, 2011 ICP&P presents its 17th Annual Conference A Focus on Treatment of Addictions in Psychotherapy with Brian Johnson, MD at the National 4-H Conference Center in Chevy Chase, MD.
  • Sunday, June 5, 2011 Graduation for ICP&P's Training Programs at the Key Bridge Marriott Hotel in Arlington, VA

BULLETIN BOARD

The Policy for Bulletin Board items is: Members can place items three months a year. Items can be up to eight lines in length. Longer items or additional months are available for a fee. Please contact the administrator for the fee schedule.

  • Trauma Consultation Group - Christine Courtois and Jeffrey Jay have space in a consultation group for therapists working with psychological trauma. The group meets on the first Wednesday of each month. Two well known books by Dr. Courtois have been recently updated and republished: Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders, An Evidence-Based Guide, and Healing the Incest Wound. Jeffrey Jay has extensive clinical and forensic experience in treating and evaluating victims of war, crime, and disaster. For further information, call Jeffrey Jay at 202-362-0063.
  • Office Space Available – located at Dupont Circle two blocks from the Metro. The office is spacious, charming, sunny, has a waiting room and is available hourly or as a part-time sublet on Fridays. If desired, two parking spaces available, 1 for renter (inside garage), 1 for renter's patients (outside garage.) Contact Sarah Pillsbury at 202-332-9473.
  • Office Space Available - Very nice furnished office in Foggy Bottom conveniently located near GWU and The World Bank available Thursday and Friday as well as hourly. Contact Zsuzsanna Gyorky at 202-785-0207 or at zgyorky@comcast.net
  • Office Space Available – located in Falls Church convenient to I-66 and the beltway. Large, light filled consulting room with a shared (1 colleague) waiting room in a townhouse with 5 other mental health professionals. Mailroom, filing cabinets and Wi-Fi. Pleasant and collegial surroundings. Contact Allan Melmed at 703-356-5888 ext 1 or amelmed01@yahoo.com
  • Office Space Wanted - Looking to sublet a consulting room in Kensington, MD for 15-20 hours per week. Both evening and daytime hours. Sublet to begin in August 2011 and could include Saturdays. Contact Leslie Westbrook at lesliewestbrook@verizon.net or call 301-946-7576.
  • Office Space Available - Cozy, window office in attractive suite with waiting room, private kitchen and bathroom. Collegial atmosphere with two social workers and one psychologist. Professional building in convenient Vienna, VA. location with plentiful, free parking and handicap access. $650/mo. Contact Alexandra Kaghan at askaghan@yahoo.com 703-319-1436 or Barbara Caceres bzcaceres@gmail.com 703-242-8223.
  • Office Space Available – in downtown Washington, DC, 17th & K Streets, 2 – 2.5 days a week (days of week negotiable). Great location, 1 block from both Red and Blue Metro lines; easy walk to Yellow line. Large sunny, one side fully-windowed and beautifully furnished office in suite with 2 psychiatrists and a psychologist. Shared waiting room. Large utility room with kitchenette. Free use of fax, copy machine, and 4–drawer file cabinet. Contact Yu Ling Han at 202-213-1876 or ylhan@starpower.net

The deadline for submitting items for the May 2011 Newsletter is April 27, 2011