Bridging Mind and Brain: Using Neuroscience to Enhance Clinical Work with Complex Development Trauma (Hybrid Event)
***Hybrid Event*** In-Person at the Hitchcock Presbyterian Church, 6 Greenacres Avenue, Scarsdale, NY or Live on Zoom!
2 CE Hours available for:
NY Practitioners – LCSWs, LMSWs, LPs, LMFTs, LMHCs, LCATs, PHDs, PSYDs
The Psychoanalytic Association of WCSPP Presents
Bridging Mind and Brain: Using Neuroscience to Enhance Clinical Work with Complex Development Trauma
Presenter:
Janet Bachant, PhD
Complex developmental trauma is not simply the result of adverse events. It develops through the ways children organize emotionally significant experiences using the biological and psychological capacities available to them at particular moments in development. These early organizations may become embedded in patterns of feeling, expectation, defense, relatedness, and behavior that continue to shape mental life long after the experiences themselves can be consciously remembered.
This presentation explores how findings from developmental neuroscience can deepen psychodynamic understanding of these processes without reducing psychological experience to brain function. Particular attention will be given to early brain development, implicit memory, fear systems, sensitive periods, and neural plasticity as they illuminate why some early experiences acquire disproportionate organizing power. The clinical question then becomes: How do we recognize early organization when the experience itself cannot be remembered? Clinical material will illustrate how emotional intensity, repetitive patterns, enactments, language, fantasy, dreams, and transference can provide access to enduring organizations established early in development.
Through clinical examples, the presentation will examine how understanding the developmental roots of automatic patterns can help patients recognize the ways early solutions continue to organize present experience. The therapeutic aim is not to undo history, but to increase the patient’s capacity to recognize, understand, and respond differently to patterns that once operated automatically. We cannot change what happened, but we can change how what happened continues to organize the mind.
Registration link to attend IN-PERSONRegistration link to attend on ZOOM
Janet Bachant, PhD, is a psychologist, psychoanalyst, author, and educator who has taught and supervised in New York City and China for over 50 years. After September 11, she founded and led the New York Disaster Counseling Coalition. She has authored numerous journal articles and two books: Exploring the Landscape of the Mind: An Introduction to Psychodynamic Therapy (2019) and (with Elliot Adler) Working in Depth: Framework and Flexibility in the Analytic Relationship (1998). She is writing another book on complex developmental trauma.