eiseEducation

Is psychodynamic addiction treatment an oxymoron?  Does a patient’s active addiction undermine therapeutic process—if yes, how to proceed?  Is it true that until a patient sobers up, “nothing can happen” in their therapy?  What do we do, if addiction is not a specialty, when substance abuse unexpectedly rears its head as a treatment issue?  Join addiction expert Darren Haber, PsyD, as he discusses the psychodynamic treatment of addictive processes and their impact on the intersubjective field.  Haber, speaking from many years of experience as a former rehab counselor and addiction specialist, outlines different ways of thinking and working with entrenched compulsivity, as patients’ aversion of affectivity can provoke analysts’ feelings of inadequacy, frustration, or even abandonment.  Two vignettes will be presented to illustrate cases where addictive processes foreclosed emotional intimacy or reflection, typical of rigidly concrete or strictly antidotal self-organizations.  One vignette features a patient whose child was addicted, where the therapist was enlisted to help “get” the child to stop, the patient a chronic caregiver whose selfhood is chronically de-centered or collapsed.  Our clinical creativity, including revisiting our notions of empathy, becomes necessary to get a foothold in facing headwinds of chaos, self-destruction, or the emptiness that comes with those enslaved in addictive systems, as we too may be tempted to “rescue” or save a patient barely treading water.