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SFPRG Newsletter July 2020
By George Silberschatz
Posted: 2020-07-14T21:36:00Z
During the Flu pandemic following the First World War Freud wrote in a letter to a friend, “The undisguised brutality of our time weighs heavily upon us”. Sadly, our own time has been filled with far too much “undisguised brutality” that has been difficult to bear.
 
Although we did not have these difficult times in mind, I don’t think it’s simply coincidental that we have a conference on Moral Injury coming up later this month! Moral Injury has been conceptualized as a serious rupture in “an individual’s confidence and expectations about one’s own or others’ motivation or capacity to behave in a just and ethical manner” (Drescher). Moral injuries frequently give rise to shame, guilt, self-loathing, depression, and a variety of negative emotional states. Our upcoming on-line conference features Josh Mantz, a decorated Army major and widely acclaimed speaker, and Jim McCollum, chair of SFPRG Education Committee. This promises to be an exceptional and very timely conference and I strongly encourage you to sign up. More details and registration information here.
 
Our Master Clinician Case Conference this month includes Michael Bader discussing a case presented by Denise Lew. Click here for further information. In the August conference, Marshall Bush will discuss a case presented by David Kealy. Click here for further information. These Master Clinician conferences were designed to illustrate how some of our most experienced clinicians and teachers think clinically and help therapists optimize treatment for the patient presented.  Early career and seasoned therapists alike will find these conferences useful in their thinking about psychotherapy and in their work with patients.

There are several recent publications that have been added to our publications page on the SFPRG website. Some of these address topics that have not previously been covered in the CMT literature such as termination and working with personality disorders. I encourage you to read these as well as many of the other excellent publications on trauma, dreams, attachment disorganization, worry and rumination, to name but a few. If you have thoughts, comments, questions, reactions we’d love to hear from you!

Finally, our research program is in high gear and bustling! We recently finished a study on how pathogenic beliefs mediate the relationship between early adverse experiences and later psychopathology and the paper was just accepted for publication. We are refining the pathogenic belief scale, working on a new measure of childhood worries, carrying out a study on how patients coach their therapists, doing more research on attunement and the working alliance in therapy, and much, much more. We are collaborating with various colleagues locally, on the east coast, and internationally, which have proven to be very productive. SFPRG recently launched the John Snyder Memorial Research Fund to help support some of our research efforts. If you would like to make a tax deductible contribution to the fund, you can do so here.

The Covid pandemic has had an enormous impact on our clinical work as well as on our educational programs. The one silver lining I’ve noticed is that it is now much easier to participate in classes and conferences since we can do from the comfort of home – no matter where home is! If you haven’t yet tried it, I strongly encourage you to join us online.

Stay safe and stay healthy.

George
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