Existential Issues in Therapy
The Workshop: A number of people have requested a workshop on Betty Cannon’s book, Sartre and Psychoanalysis: An Existentialist Challenge to Clinical Metatheory. This workshop addresses her book and existential therapy in general. The significance for therapy of existential issues such as freedom, aloneness, death, and meaning and meaninglessness will be addressed. Moments in therapy when escape from freedom becomes a central block to change are particularly important for therapists to recognize and work with. We will discuss therapeutic strategies for dealing with such moments.
Prior to attending the workshop, students are asked to read either Betty’s book, Sartre and Psychoanalysis, or a fairly good summary which appears as the first chapter of Roger Frie’s book, Understanding Experience. Frie’s book also contains essays by a number of other well-known existential therapists, including Eugene Gendlin, Maurice Friedman, William Richardson and M. Guy Thompson.
Two “existential” videotapes will also be shown to further the discussion. One is a video of R.D. Laing interviewing a homeless paranoid schizophrenic woman at a conference (This interview is mentioned in Betty’s chapter in Understanding Experience). The other is Erving Polster working with a woman therapist who is particularly adept at avoiding significant issues. Ways in which Gestalt therapy is an existential approach will be addressed.
Where: 1140 Lehigh Street, Boulder, Colorado 80305
When: Date to be announced (one day workshop)
Time: 10:00 A.M. – 5:30 P.M. with hour and a half lunch break
Cost: $120
Eiligibility: Mental Health Professionals and Psychology graduate students
(Exceptions may be made on an individual basis following an interview.)
The Workshop Leader: Betty Cannon, Ph.D., is is a licensed psychologist and certified Gestalt therapist who has worked with individuals, couples and groups in Boulder for thirty years. She holds doctorates in both literature and psychology. She is the author of numerous journal articles, book chapters, and an internationally recognized book on existentialist therapy, Sartre and Psychoanalysis: An Existentialist Challenge to Clinical Metatheory (University Press of Kansas, 1991; French translation, Presses Universitaires de France, 1993). She is a member of the editorial boards of three professional journals, Sartre Studies International, The (British) Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, and The Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, and an internationally known lecturer and workshop presenter. She is a senior adjunct faculty member in the Transpersonal Counseling Psychology Master’s Program at Naropa University, an adjunct faculty member at Regis University, an Emerita Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines, and president, co-founder and co-director of the Boulder Psychotherapy Institute. She is an executive committee member and former president of the Colorado Group Psychotherapy Society, which is a branch of the American Group Psychotherapy Association, and a former chair of the North American Sartre Society. Her work combines Gestalt, existential, psychodynamic and body oriented approaches with a special emphasis on interpersonal work and group therapy. She offers individual and group psychotherapy as well as individual and group supervision for mental health professionals.
Registration: To register for this or another workshop or to receive further information about our training program, call us at 303-494 0393, or e-mail our managing director, Reed Lindberg, M.A., L.P.C., at bpi.training (at) boulderpsych.com. A $40 deposit holds your place in the group.
Call us at 303-494-0393 or e-mail us at bpi.training (at) boulderpsych.com.
Sartre & Psychoanalysis Understanding Experience
(Click blue links to order Betty Cannon's or Roger Frie's books at Amazon.com)