Resolving Therapeutic Impasses

A half-century of psychotherapy research has shown that the quality of the therapeutic alliance is the most robust predictor of treatment success. This workshop provides a systematic framework for negotiating therapeutic impasses and ruptures in the therapeutic alliance and transforming them into therapeutic breakthroughs.

Cutting-edge developments from relational psychoanalysis and other modalities are synthesized with findings gleaned from Dr. Safran's own empirical research program on therapeutic impasses to provide valuable therapeutic guidelines.

The therapeutic alliance is reconceptualized from a relational perspective as a process of intersubjective negotiation and the implications of this perspective are spelled out in detail. Different types of ruptures in the alliance are described and relevant intervention strategies are outlined. Detailed guidelines are provided to facilitate the use of self-disclosure and therapeutic metacommunication as tools for collaboratively exploring and working through vicious cycles that are being enacted in the therapeutic relationship.

Particular attention is devoted to ways that therapists can harness and work constructively with the intense, conflictual and often painful feelings that emerge for patients and within themselves, during difficult therapeutic moment. Special emphasis will be placed on the cultivation of the type of "inner skills" that therapists require in order to work through difficult therapeutic impasses.