Josette ten Have-de Labije Travels to the Unconscious: ISTDP Workshop

Josette ten Have-de Labije Travels to the Unconscious: ISTDP Workshop

Dear colleague

You are invited to become a crew member of the ISTDP Manchester Workshop-Vessel. We

will then explore and understand the destructive influences of past and present storms,

tempests, tornados and hurricanes on our patient´s lives and functioning. We - unlike other

sailors - will not be afraid to meet the ghostly captain and crew of the Flying Dutchman. We

will decipher their Save Our Soul messages. Subsequently we will board our ISTDP-Pilot-

Schooner and we will steer the Flying Dutchman safely round the Cape of Good Hope

towards Sunshine.

The Cape of Good Hope

The Cape of Good Hope (Kaap de Goede Hoop), a rocky headland on the Atlantic Coast of

the Cape Peninsula, has long been of special significance to sailors. It marks the point where the ships from Western countries begin to travel more eastward than southward.

The Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias, on March 12th, 1488, was the first European who successfully rounded the Cape of Good Hope and therewith he opened a sea route to India and the East. Because of the stormy and foul weather that is reigning over these parts of the oceans he called the Cape: Cabo das Tormentas (Cape of Storms). Later, King John II of Portugal renamed the Cape into Cabo da Boa Esperance (Cape of Good Hope).

Throughout the Golden Age, the Dutch East India Company (the VOC), an Amsterdam based enterprise sent ships to Asia to bring back spices, woods and other valuables.

Over the years, the VOC had a trading monopoly in all countries, east of the Cape of Good Hope.

The speed of the VOC´s vessels amazed the company´s competitors. One of the fastest

VOC captains was Captain Hendrik van der Decke and the rumor was spread that he could

only achieve such fast-sailing times from the Netherlands to Java and back again because of his League with the Devil. This Dutchman, on one of his travels to the East, came to the

Cape in distress of weather and wanted to get into harbor but was lost. And ever since in

very stormy weather the vision of the Flying Dutchman appears.

The Flying Dutchman

The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship that can never make port and is doomed to

sail the oceans forever. The captain and crew of this vessel are supposed to have been

guilty of some dreadful crime in the infancy of navigation and are ordained still to traverse the ocean on which they perished, till the period of their Penance expires. The crew of ships that are assailed by violent tempest, sometimes encounter this phantom–ship with its ghostly crew and they consider this a Bad Omen, meaning that no one of them should ever see land again.

ISTDP with patients, suffering from high superego pathology

In ISTDP as in all psychotherapy, an important focus is on the patient´s world within. Many of our patients´ verbal reports of introspection reflect a certain degree of failure to move their attention in the direction of an internal or external stimulus. Mostly, these patients are located on the right side of Davanloo´s spectrum of structural neurosis, and they often use projection,idealization, denial, ignoring, neglecting, speaking in general, looking away, passivity, compliance, helplessness/hopelessness as front door defenses. All of these front door defenses attest to the patient having ceased to orient him/herself towards what exactly happens in his or her realistic interactions with another person. The result is that they have put themselves in a kind of unvarying situation, where there is an unvarying input and an unvarying repetition of trauma.

The bitter reality is that in this way, while operating on the remote control of their

Unconscious, they are more or less hijacked into a repetitive, vicious mental cycle and they

often miss the possible positive experiences of the moment. In the process of their present

interactions with themselves and other persons they frequently dismiss an invitation for

reciprocal love and understanding only to replace it with the characteristics of their former

traumatic interactions with important others.

Like the captain and crew of The Flying Dutchman, the legendary ghost ship, they will never be able to round the Cape of Good Hope; to make port and they are doomed forever to sail their tormented souls through stormy weather over endless black oceans.

As we, crew members of the ISTDP Manchester Workshop-Vessel, are highly motivated to

explore and to understand the destructive influences of past and present storms, tempests, tornados and hurricanes on our patient´s lives and functioning, we - unlike other sailors - will not be afraid to meet the ghostly captain and crew of the Flying Dutchman. We will decipher their Save Our Soul messages. Subsequently we will board our ISTDP-Pilot-Schooner and we will steer the Flying Dutchman safely round the Cape of Good Hope towards Sunshine.

The focus of the workshop will be on

- Assessment of front door and cellar door defenses

- Assessment of a patients’ particular front door defenses and his/her particular

array of cellar door defenses can be of help as a first step to unmask perpetrators

of the past, to form hypotheses about what kind of traumatic attachment

experiences the patient had, about the patient´s internalized pathological dictates

how to look at him/her self and how to look at persons in the outer world, and to

establish a conscious and unconscious working alliance. It may be clear that as

long as a front door defense is put into operation by the patient, the patient is not

in touch with the realistic therapist and will prevent the therapist being of help.

Therefore, when a patient presents him/herself with front door and cellar door

defenses, it is important that the therapist understands that focus on front door

defenses has priority.

- Undoing front door and cellar door defenses

- Front door and cellar door defenses serve amongst others the function to

maintain low self-image, to maintain pre-existing unhealthy inner representations

of self and others, to prevent a realistic healthy attitude towards oneself and to

others. It goes without saying that the first gap in the circular causality between

the patient´s pathological perception of him/her self, will arise as soon as the

patient has firmly decided to look at him/herself as important enough to

understand his/her longings, feelings, opinions, norms, values, problems. The

moment the patient changes his attitude towards him/herself, his perception of

him/herself, his/her attitude towards others, perception towards others will be

automatically influenced to change in a more realistic one.

The therapist functioning as an external constructive superego, helping the patient to

separate constructive ego from destructive superego parts.

It will not be difficult to understand that the ISTDP-Pilot-Schooner travels of patient and

therapist through time and memory, towards the stormy/tempest/arcane/hurricane - traumatic experiences in the past and back again to the present and the future require a patient, who changes his/her attitude towards him/herself, who wants to see him/herself as important enough to understand him/her self with love, care, precision and honesty, who allows the therapist to be of help, who recognizes and understands the self-defeating processes he/she puts into operation, who firmly decides to stop these processes for his/her own benefit, andmost important, is strong enough to bear his painful feelings, and who is confident and curious enough to go for new and healthy challenges. The therapist can be of help to the patient by functioning as an external constructive superego

Active participation, supervision, observers, roleplay

Next to some theoretical introductions, video vignettes will illustrate theory and technique.

Participants have the possibility to have some supervision. In those cases, they have to bring

their audio visually recorded material (USB stick or DVD) of the part they wish to be

supervised. Please subtitle your material. If that is not possible, take care that you have a

transcript on paper.

Also check out other Workshops in Manchester, Business events in Manchester.