Sunday March 11th, 2012
11:30-1:30 (Coffee and Conversation
11:00-11:30)
Providence
Hospital, Fisher Auditorium,
16001
West Nine Mile Rd., Southfield Michigan
Psychoanalysis
and Symptoms: A Conundrum?
Robert E. Hooberman, Ph.D
ABSTRACT: In
the continuing controversy over the benefits of long-term
psychoanalytic treatment,
one criticism is that
psychoanalysis favors self-awareness over symptom relief.
This paper argues that attention to long-standing
personality issues does not preclude symptom relief, which
is furthered by
self-awareness. Symptoms, like transference reactions,
offer useful data to deepen the treatment.
Whether they predate
therapy or emerge during analytic work, they are best
viewed and handled like
dreams -- as
repositories of long-forgotten memories, as indications of
not yet identified intensities within
the therapeutic
relationship, as windows into fantasies, and as compromise
formations that ward off more dreaded thoughts and
affects.
BIOGRAPHICAL
STATEMENT: Robert
E. Hooberman, Ph.D. practices psychotherapy and
psychoanalysis in Ann
Arbor where he works with adolescents, couples and
adults. He is a former
President and former
Director of Training for the Michigan Psychoanalytic
Council. He supervises
candidates, graduate and
post-graduate students and other mental health
professionals. Dr. Hooberman
is the author of four
books, the most recent being Forgiving, Forgetting
and Moving On; On
Living a Less
Conflicted Life. He is on the Visiting Faculty of
the Southeast Florida Institute for Psychotherapy and
Psychoanalysis.
