Working Through: Neuropsychoanalytic Reflections on Prompting Clinical Change

Please note: This event is not hosted by the Neuropsychoanalysis Association. For any questions regarding registration please contact Susan Carnes at: info@acapnj.org

Maggie Zellner, PhD, LP
Moderator: Patricia Bratt, PhD

ACAP/ICPS Friday Night Series

7pm – 8:45pm (Eastern US)

 

Seminar is no charge – $20 donation suggested.

$17 administrative fee for each CE certificate.

Please click here for further information and to register.

While “aha” moments and dramatic breakthroughs are often a part of good-enough therapy, we all have the experience that real change can take a while. It can take a long while, at times! There is likely a complex interplay between conscious and unconscious processes: recognizing patterns; understanding historical origins; allowing feelings and ideas into awareness; mentalizing; taking risks within the psychotherapy dyad and outside; identifying with the warm, curious, non-judgmental stance of the therapist; and more. In this talk, Dr Zellner will offer neuropsychoanalytically-informed ideas about some processes involved with working through difficult moments, bringing together ideas from affective neuroscience, predictive coding, and more. She will discuss ways to consider cases from a neuropsychoanalytic perspective and how it can impact both the clinician and the course of therapy. You will be able to walk away from this talk with new ideas to immediately apply in your work, and in understanding more about relationships.

Bios
Margaret R. Zellner is a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice in New York. She is also a behavioral neuroscientist and teaches neuroscience to psychotherapists. After receiving a B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from New York University, Maggie entered analytic training at NPAP (the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, in New York City), where she is now a member. She then became interested in how early experience affects the emotional infrastructure in the brain and began to study neuroscience. Maggie received her Ph.D. in neuropsychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2008, doing research on the dopamine system in reward learning, and completed her postdoctoral work with Donald Pfaff at The Rockefeller University. Maggie has been active with the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society since its founding in 2000, and is now the Executive Director of the Neuropsychoanalysis Foundation in New York City. She is also the co-editor of Neuropsychoanalysis, an interdisciplinary journal for psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. She has developed a specialty in teaching neuroscience to psychotherapists, and has a reputation for being able to describe complex and foreign information about the brain in terms that therapists can understand and relate to. She now takes every opportunity to link complex intrapsychic processes to underlying brain mechanisms, so she gets to use terms like “object relations” and “orbitofrontal cortex” in the same sentence.

Patricia Bratt is a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, practicing in Livingston, NJ and NYC. She is a Director of ACAP, its Trauma and Resilience Programs, and ICPS. Dr Bratt is President of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP), and of the NJ State Advisory Committee for Psychoanalysis. Her publications include, Consulting the Patient: The Art of Being Together and Mutual Growth in the Psychotherapeutic Relationship: Emotional Resilience, published by Routledge.