Austen Riggs Center – Friday Night Lecture available online for free: When Social Privilege Favors the Patient: Power Negotiations and Confused Subordination in Psychotherapy

Friday Night Lecture is now available online for free:

I was honoured to be the Erikson Scholar at Austen Riggs Center in Spring 2020 but came home premature due to the the pandemic. In August I had a virtual Friday Night Lecture: the Yasmin Roberts Memorial LectureThe lecture is now avaliable online for free. I am grateful to the Austen Riggs Center community for the opportunity to be an Erikson Scholar, very rewarding and inspiring!

This lecture will focus on the seldom-addressed therapeutic dyad in which social privilege favors the patient. Through her matrix of relative privilege, Fors will discuss how social power issues are inevitably negotiated in the therapeutic setting and how this process plays out in transference, countertransference, and resistance. Drawing on empirical research from other areas on how people handle sudden loss of privilege, Fors explores the implications of such disparities and explores playful (versus more narcissistically defensive) ways to handle clinical situations in which a patient is dependent on a socially less-privileged therapist.

Learning Objectives

Identify the therapeutic dynamics of the situation of “privilege favoring the patient”.

Distinguish between playful way versus malign narcissistic ways to handle confused subordination in psychotherapy.

Recognize power of Proxy.

 

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