Anger in the Consulting Room – Carol Jones
SGPC Member, Carol Jones practised in the NHS for over twenty five years working therapeutically with patients with serious psychological difficulties, and latterly with university students with mental health problems. She has a particular interest in Jungian concepts having experienced a lengthy, personal Jungian Analysis and Jungian Supervision.
She now works in private practice as a psychotherapist and supervisor in Littlehampton.
Information from Carol about the workshop:
This workshop starts from D.W. Winnicott's almost unique position of understanding the creativity involved in the (inter)play of infant/mother aggression in order to further secure emotional development in the infant. If there is no room for this in the mother/infant/child relationship I suggest that the adult has problems later in dealing with aggression and hate in interpersonal relationships, which then show themselves in often subtle ways in the therapeutic relationship. As therapists we also have to grapple with our own hate and aggression in the countertransference in order to be available to the client without resort to unconscious retaliation but towards true analytic containment and understanding of the client’s patterns of relating. Therapists have to confront what C.G. Jung called the shadow (aspect) of our own personality - that very part of ourselves we would most wish to disown and which we recognise, according to Jung, in projection i.e. in the other. The reward in achieving awareness and internal integration of the shadow enables both client and therapist to adapt and change in a helpful way towards greater wholeness.
Moving on from the basic premise of creative/loving aggression described by Winnicott, and also by Christopher Bollas, I will bring a case study to illustrate my thinking about a client whose early beginnings compromised her ability to securely attach to her mother and subsequently to express her hate and anger. This remained the position, until recently, many years into a lengthy therapy which is now drawing to a close.
I would also like to draw on the group’s experiences from their own clinical work of the often negative therapeutic consequences of unconscious and unrecognised aggression and hate, both in their clients and within themselves.
As this is a closed workshop we will be able to create a secure and confidential setting for anonymous case discussion by omitting clients’ identifying details. In this way we can think creatively together about these personal challenges in our work.