March 25 Online (Mar. 24 in the USA) – Australia and New Zealand Association of Psychotherapy (ANZAP) –

Shame and Self-Alienation

6pm EST, March 24th; 9am in Sydney, AU, March 25th

Assumptions therapists make about the value of life are challenged when a patient proclaims the wish or the intention to be dead, or expresses bitter resentment for not having had a choice about being born. Some patients are less overtly suicidal, going on living against underlying currents of apathy, self-denigration, and despair. Very persistent parts of these patients hold traumatic experiences of having felt negated: unrecognized, annihilated, hated, made to feel overwhelmed and powerless; in response, these patients have become afflicted with shame. The concept of self-alienation, especially as elaborated by Janina Fisher, is inextricably linked to shame but is less familiar to analysts, because it is connected not to Freud and his lineage, but to trauma research and the clinical approaches of traumatologists, many of whom find a theoretical forbear not in Freud but in the re-discovered work of Pierre Janet, the early pioneer in dissociation studies. Shaw will explain the symbiotic relationship between shame and self-alienation, and will give clinical examples of his work with clients struggling with self-alienation that demonstrate his way of integrating trauma theories and a relational psychoanalytic perspective.