Traumatic Experience, EMDR and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Sandra Shapiro, Ph.D.

Please click here to view the video of this event.

See you at another upcoming event!

Start times in selected time zones

It is a clinical truism that traumatic experience has to be accessed in order to be resolved. The clinical challenge is to do so effectively and without retraumatizing the patient. Several advantages to integrating an extra-analytic therapy such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) into psychoanalytic psychotherapy in treating trauma, include its facility to penetrate dissociation to access traumatic memory and affect, its capacity to deal with fragmented and sensory memories, and the speed at which both access to trauma and its resolution may take place. 

In this clinically focused presentation, Dr Sandra Shapiro will discuss fundamentals about trauma and the brain, explain the EMDR procedure, its possible mechanism of action and limitations, and illustrate the principle that trauma is what the patient makes of the experience. In these examples, three people deeply affected by their immediate experiences in the wake of the World Trade Center catastrophe are traumatized by different aspects of this complex event. In each case childhood experience determined what became personally traumatizing in their WTC experience.

Bio
Sandra Shapiro, Ph.D. in Comparative Psychology, Bryn Mawr, 1964, is an integrative psychoanalytic psychologist with a clinical practice and a specialty in trauma treatment. Retired from clinical practice, June, 2018.  She served on the Board of Directors, National Institute for the Psychotherapies, NYC, 1977-2018.  Founder and Director Emerita, Integrative Trauma Program, National Institute for the Psychotherapies. Associate Professor Emerita, Psychology Dept. Queens College, CUNY (1966-1999).

CPD credits: 2