Master Series in Clinical Practice

The Master Series affords the chance to spend a complete day with leaders in our field to consider the unique perspective each speaker brings to the challenging dilemmas in both theory and practice. We hope that you will consider joining us for the entire series at a reduced tuition or choose the programs most relevant to your own practice.

Martha Stark, MD, instructor

This program presents a comprehensive theory of therapeutic action that integrates the interpretive perspective of classical psychoanalysis (which involves the generation of cognitive dissonance); the deficiency-compensation perspective of self psychology and other deficit theories (which involve grieving disillusionment); and the contemporary relational perspective (which involves the therapist’s use of self to detoxify unmastered experience).  Dr. Stark’s focus will be on the interface between theory and practice and she will demonstrate, by way of numerous clinical vignettes, the ways in which the three modes of therapeutic action (knowledge, experience, and relationship) can be used to promote the transformation of defense into adaptation and need into capacity.

Upon completion of the program, the student will be able to:

·         explore the use of dissonance, disillusionment, and detoxification to promote change

·         demonstrate how resistance becomes transformed into awareness, refusal to grief into acceptance and re-enactment into accountability

·         examine the therapist’s “use of self” to process and integrate unmastered psychic content

Program Code: MS61
6 CE/CME Credits
Location: at MSPP, Newton

Martha Stark, M.D., is Clinical Instruc­tor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a Teaching/Supervising Analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. In addition, she is Adjunct Faculty at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies at the Mas­sachusetts General Hospital (Harvard Medical School), serves on the Faculty of the Continuing Education Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Harvard Medical School), and is Adjunct Faculty at the Smith College School for Social Work. She is the author of three award-winning books on psychoanalytic theory and technique: Working with Resistance; A Primer on Working with Resistance; and Modes of Therapeutic Action.

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*Only for Master Series attendees who register for multiple dates at the same time.