Unique Clinical Supervision Opportunity

I am pleased to offer the opportunity for new participants to join my ongoing clinical supervision group that meets on Wednesdays, from 7 - 8:30 PM in my conveniently located midtown Manhattan office. This group consists of a variety of clinicians, including creative art therapists, psychoanalysts and other clinical professionals interested in integrating creative processing into their work.

In this unique group, participants bring in one piece of artwork each week that they have created at home, to begin a creative exploration of supervisory issues, often focusing on countertransference and resistance. A variety of expressive techniques modalities are explored and demonstrated, including the therapeutic uses of photography, (Phototherapy) and the creative processing of dreams. I welcome this opportunity to offer my clinical skill and experience, having spent the past many years in private practice, teaching graduate art therapy students in a variety of settings and pursuing my own artwork as a photographer and sculptor, as I explored and defined the further integration of creative art therapy, fine art and psychoanalysis.

Please pass this information along to interested colleagues.

For further information please contact me directly at:

rwolfnyc@aol.com

Object Relations and Education

In a recent article in the New York Times, The author describes the importance of contact between teachers and students as being the central factor contributing to the success of any learning experience. 

We often forget the importance of interpersonal contact within the educational process. Newborn infants require extensive human contact or regress into anaclytic ( an often deadly 'failure to thrive syndrome) depression. According to research and theories developed by pioneers in the field of child development, like Margaret Mahler and D.W. Winnicott, mother/child interaction continues to be an essential factor in healthy emotional development, throughout the progressive stages of object relationships and ego development.

Why then is it so surprising that many of the newer educational designs, which are inspired by a business model that focuses only on content delivery, rather than a psychological model that stresses the importance of student/teacher interaction, are doomed to failure?

There are also interesting parallels in psychotherapeutic models for treatment of emotional dysfunction. We are learning that the treatment modalities that focus exclusively on medication or behavioral techniques are less effective, long term, than models that include an element of personal therapeutic contact. Interactive psychotherapies that embrace an understanding of ‘therapeutic alliance’ and ‘positive transference’ have been proven to be more effective in achieving long term, positive results. Clients are more likely to grow within this interactive format than those who simply take medication (often for the rest of their lives without an adequate understanding of long term consequences) or learn a few ‘techniques’ (through CBT or DBT) and are then considered ‘cured’ by their insurance companies!

Back Online: An Adventure in the Destructive World of Hacking

After several months of hectic work to reestablish my Website and Blog, I have finally arrived at a new format, one which hopefully will not get hacked and destroyed like my first Website and Blog that had on it over three years of carefully written postings and photographs. My unpleasant experience was with Hostingcheck.com, a hosting company originally called "Nomonthlyfees.com" (I should have trusted my instinct when it became clear that they charged an annual fee, not monthly, and therefore embraced deception as their corporate branding mantra)! I strongly recommend avoiding this hosting company.

Well, they were hacked by who knows who and all of their data, since it was poorly backed up, was destroyed. At some other time I will discuss the world of destruction looming out in cyber space by those individuals who clearly spend their lives dreaming up scams and ways to destroy other peoples lives; sometimes for their personal gain, and other times for simply the sadistic gratification they experience from feeling powerful through the destruction of others. But today it's suffice to say that I am pleased to be back online, with a new Website and Blog that I now hope to be able to use in an unobstructed manner to post my thoughts as seen "through the eyes of a psychoanalyst" (and of course artist). As the current President of the Institute for Expressive Analysis, and being a fully licensed creative art therapist and psychoanalyst with over 35 years of teaching and private practice experience, as well as being an internationally known fine art photographer and sculptor, I feel well qualified to offer this unique view.

My goal is to offer to those interested in my unique perspective, a way to see, process and understand the psychological and psychoanalytic, i.e. the unconscious component of many current events and cultural trends. In an ever changing world it is somehow reassuring to have a fundamental structure upon which you may understand cultural trends and world politics and events from a deeper, more consistent and solid vantage point.

Professor Robert Irwin Wolf, New York City, August, 2014