[CANCELLED] Jon Frederickson workshop on character resistance in Göteborg, October 18th, 2020

[CANCELLED]: This workshop has been cancelled because of the current CoVid-19 situation. In October, Jon Frederickson invites you to a workshop in Göteborg on how to use ISTDP in the treatment of “character resistance”. Character resistance refers to patients who are heavily identified with self-negligent and self-destructive behaviors.

Jon Frederickson portrait
Jon Frederickson

Imagine you meet a patient who has defeated every therapist he has seen for thirty years. He’s not sure he has a problem. He’s not sure anyone can help him. He has given up. He thinks his previous therapist was “bullshit.” He has come only because someone sent him. Then he asks: “What should I do here?”

How do we begin therapy if no problem is declared? Can we explore anything if it is not the patient’s will to do therapy? What’s a good way to handle projection? What do we do when the patient devalues the therapist? In this presentation of a videotaped initial session, Jon Frederickson will show how to work with treatment destructive defenses that would prevent any therapeutic alliance from forming. The case will also show how to mobilize an unconscious therapeutic alliance when there is no conscious therapeutic alliance.

In this workshop, you will learn how to:

  • Maintain a therapeutic focus in the face of provocation and acting out.
  • Deactivate projections.
  • Mobilize the patient’s will to the task.
  • Turn the patient against his treatment destructive defenses

We will go through the videotape moment by moment to show how to assess and intervene on a microscopic level. The emphasis will be not just on learning theory, but on developing intervention skills.

For more information, see this flyer. Welcome to Göteborg!