Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D.: Psychotherapy with Attachment-Disordered Adults: Working Effectively with Narcissistic, Psychopathic and Paranoid Clients
(September 26, 2008)

CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION:
Clients with narcissistic, psychopathic, and paranoid psychologies present unique challenges to therapists. Despite powerful evidence that individual personality factors account for the preponderance of variance in treatment outcome, and despite recent empirical work on attachment patterns and their implications for therapy, there has been little systematic attention in the clinical literature to how to develop an effective therapeutic relationship with people in whom attachment is associated with shame, weakness, and humiliation. Dr. McWilliams will explore the inner experience of individuals with these dynamics and review the therapeutic implications of their specific subjectivities. Drawing on both clinical and empirical literatures, she will emphasize, with case examples, how effective work with these difficult clients differs from treatments in which the practitioner can assume more secure attachment patterns.

SMALL GROUP EXPERIENCE:
A unique part of IPI's training approach is the small group experience, in which participants integrate intellectual and emotional reaactions to the material that has been presented, and apply it to their clinical practice. in the small group, participants discuss, argue, wrestle with, experience personally, and take in the concepts that become a natural part of their way of working. For this conference, IPI is offering an optional small group for participants, from 5:15 - 6:15 p.m. To enroll, specify that you would like to participate in the small group on the registration form.

Note: Dr. McWilliams will also present in the morning of September 26, 2008, in our Master Speaker Videoconference Seminar

Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D.

ABOUT NANCY MCWILLIAMS, PH.D.:
Nancy McWilliams teaches at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology and has a private practice in Flemington, NJ. She is author of Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process (1994), Psychoanalytic Case Formulation (1999), and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner’s Guide (2004), all with Guilford Press, and is Associate Editor of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (2006). She is President of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association, and on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Psychology and the Psychoanalytic Review.

Dr. McWilliams has written on personality structure and personality disorders, diagnosis, sex and gender, trauma, intensive psychotherapy, and contemporary challenges to the humanistic tradition in psychotherapy. Her books have been translated into twelve languages, and she has lectured widely both nationally and internationally. Her book on case formulation received the Gradiva Award for best psychoanalytic clinical book of 1999; in 2004 she was given the Rosalee Weiss Award for contributions to practice by the Division of Independent Practitioners of the American Psychological Association; in 2006 she was made an Honorary Member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and in 2007 she was awarded the Robert S. Wallerstein Visiting Lectureship in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. A graduate of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, she is also affiliated with the Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy of New Jersey and the National Training Program of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City.