Rebecca Twersky

Easier To Get Mad Than Feel Sad

Congratulations to NYPSI member Leon Hoffman and his RFP-C group on their first data driven publication from their RCT,

Why Is It Easier to Get Mad Than It Is to Feel Sad? Pilot Study of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children

This article reports results of a pilot study of three participants receiving regulation-focused psychotherapy for children (RFP-C), a manualized, short-term, psychodynamic treatment for children with oppositional defiant disorder and other externalizing problems. RFP-C targets implicit emotion regulation while using an intensive, psychodynamic, play therapy approach to decrease the child’s need for disruptive behaviors.
Results suggest that RFP-C has the potential to produce significant improvements in emotion regulation capacity and in symptoms of oppositional defiant disorder. This pilot study provides initial support for RFP-C as an efficacious and cost-effective intervention, with high treatment compliance rates, and lays the groundwork for a randomized controlled trial of the intervention.

Click HERE to link to the article.

 

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Rebecca Twersky

Child and Adolescent Anxiety Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: A Treatment Manual

Congratulations to NYPSI members, Sabina Preter, Theodore Shapiro, and Barbara Milrod on the publication of,

Child and Adolescent Anxiety Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: A Treatment Manual

Child and Adolescent Anxiety Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, CAPP, is a new, manualized, tested, 24-session psychotherapeutic approach to working psychodynamically with youth with anxiety disorders. This book describes how clinicians intervene by collaboratively identifying the meanings of anxiety symptoms and maladaptive behaviors and to communicate the emotional meaning of these symptoms to the child. The treatment is conducted from a developmental perspective and the book contains clinical examples of how to approach youth of varying ages.

The authors demonstrate that CAPP can help youth:

· Reduce anxiety symptoms by developing an understanding of the emotional meaning of symptoms
· Enhance children’s skill of reflection and self-observation of one’s own and others’ motivations (improvement in symptom-specific reflective functioning)
· Diminish use of avoidance, dependence and rigidity by showing that underlying emotions (e.g. guilt, shame, anger), as well as conflicted wishes and desires can be tolerated and understood
· Understand fantasies and personal emotional significance surrounding the anxiety symptoms to reduce symptoms’ magical qualities and impact on the child

The manual provides a description of psychodynamic treatment principles and technique and offers a guide to opening, middle, and termination phases of this psychotherapy. It contains chapters on the historical background of psychodynamic child psychotherapy, on developmental aspects of child psychotherapy, and on the nature of parent involvement in the treatment. It will be useful for clinicians from diverse therapy backgrounds and it will appeal to the student reader, as well as to the experienced clinician.

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Rebecca Twersky

New Book by NYPSI Member Lois Oppenheim

Congratulations to Lois Oppenheim and Ludovica Lumer on the publication of their new book,

For Want of Ambiguity: Order and Chaos in Art, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience

In For Want of Ambiguity, Lumer and Oppenheim seek to uncover the dialogue between psychoanalysis and neuroscience that sheds light on the transformational capacity of contemporary art. New questions arise in the context of such a dialogue as to the uniquely transgressive and often provocative arena in which aesthetic meaning is made and patterns of making sense are revealed. From a neuroscientific and psychoanalytic exchange on the work of Diamante Faraldo, Ai Weiwei, Ida Barbarigo, Xavier Le Roy, Bill T. Jones, Cindy Sherman, Francis Bacon, Agnes Martin, and others, the authors find new ways of thinking about how insight is achieved. In lifting the veil of certainty, they show how together these disciplines impel us to experience the world from new perspectives.

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