In this intriguing training, we will review some familiar concepts and expand Freudian Object Relation Theory and clinical implications for therapists. How is self-esteem formed? Why is it so difficult for one to preserve self-esteem? How is esteem built in children and adults? We will discuss how the sense of “me” versus the “not-me,” the object, is established; and how difficult, but so important, it is to tolerate the otherness of our dearest others in our lives – children, spouse, parents, and our clients as well. We will cover a lively illustration using 2 to 4 case studies.

This course will help the participants to acknowledge why we, the therapists, tend so easily to project our own familiarities. It will teach us to find ways to help our patients to disclose their hidden True Self and love relations memory traces. We will discuss how to help our clients acknowledge their need to repeat and refine familiarity and resist strangeness as a survival mechanism of the Emotional Immune System (the Healthy Narcissism). We will explore what is needed for and from each partner like patient and therapist, parent and child, as well as between spouses in order to establish a healthy relationship.

Principles of psychoanalytic-psychodynamic theory can help psychotherapists and patients to re-create a better balance between negative and positive memory traces (throughout associations, dreams, etc.), between the capacity to maintain love relations and the tendency to destroy love relations facing trauma, frustrations and narcissistic injuries. This conceptualization of self-development will be applied to the clinical setting to produce insight and self-awareness for the client.