February Grand Rounds- There is more to talking than we talk about: implications for clinical application

Join us on Friday, February 7 at 1pm. No cost and open to all.
FREE ON-LINE WEBINAR: There is more to talking than we talk about: implications for clinical application

By: Allen A. Surkis, Ph.D., C.Psych., FCGPA. Senior Consultant, Personality Disorders Program, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University Health Centre

Overview:

The most amazing thing is that … we talk. Talking requires a language. Language is composed of sounds that represent aspects of our experience. When we write we use a set of squiggles that represent sounds, that represent aspects of our experience. We’re going to look briefly at this and talk about developing listening skills, processing skills, and verbalizing skills. We’ll start this process and see how far we get. We’ll keep going until we stop.

To register:

Click here.

About our speaker:

Allen was awarded his PhD from the Université de Montréal way back in 1969, before some of you were born.

Some of you might be curious about why he became a clinical psychologist. The backstory is this:  For his 16th birthday an uncle and aunt gifted him with a book. It wasn’t an ordinary book. When he read the first few pages, he was introduced to a strange new world. It read like a mystery novel. Except it wasn’t a novel. It was Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. It was a WOW experience. He was hooked, and thought “this is what I want to do”, and so his journey began. For him all other options were closed. In 1969 his dream was realized.

In the years that followed, he deepened his studies of psychoanalytic theory, developed an interest in and practised psychodrama, and client centred therapy. His teachers and mentors were people like Zerka and Jacob Moreno, Jim Ennis, Hannah Wiener and Doris Twitchell Allen. He learned hypnosis with Herbert Spiegel who was at Columbia University. When working on his doctoral dissertation, he spent time in Arkansas with Truax and Carkhuff who wrote Toward Effective Counselling and Psychotherapy. He was always fascinated by words and their usage. They were a focus in his Masters thesis as well as his Doctoral dissertation. He learned group therapy with Stone and Ruttan amongst many others.

Allen began working at the Montreal General Hospital in 1961 as a summer student. He applied for a job that didn’t exist and was hired. He obtained his Masters and Doctorate degrees while working at the hospital as a junior staff member. He evolved into a clinical teacher and mentor. In 1969 when the former chief psychologist retired, he applied for the position of chief psychologist and was awarded the post. He was chief psychologist until he resigned in 2008. He then was invited to join the fledgling Borderline Personality Disorder team that was in formation. He has been working with the team pro bono for almost 20 years. He is a Past Present of the now defunct Canadian Group Psychotherapy Association and was awarded the title of Fellow. He has presented locally, nationally and internationally over the years. He is still having fun doing what he loves and has no intention of ever retiring. Over the years he has been an influence in the lives of many many students and colleagues.

Some of the titles of of his presentations are:

• The world in words
• Content and Process
• Psychotherapy and language: working with words
• Language based Psychotherapy
• Daring to talk: overcoming inhibitions in the therapeutic situation
• Team process and treatment success with severe BPD
• Strategies for Psychotherapy in a Psychodynamic Frame
• The Group Therapist’s Dilema: To Lead or To Treat
• The conflict is not the issue
• The Initial assessment interview as trial therapy
• The psychotherapist as mythmaker