PhD Event: Interpersonal Defense, Situated Agency, and Psychotherapy
1 Washington Square North, 1st Floor Parlor
Thursday, October 29, 2009
6:45 pm - 8:15 pm
Guest Speaker:
Michael A. Westerman, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology, New York University
In this presentation, Dr. Westerman will: (1) present the philosophical underpinnings of the theory of interpersonal defense, an interpersonal reconceptualization of defense processes, and (2) show how tenets of the theory contribute to our understanding of psychotherapy process.
The theory is based on a hermeneutic philosophical perspective that takes the person’s involvement in practical activities as its basic starting point (Dewey, 1896; Heidegger, 1962; Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Wittgenstein, 1958). According to this viewpoint, the person is a situated agent, that is, always already in medias res. When we consider defense processes along these lines, we see that patterns of defensive behavior are fascinating from philosophical and clinical standpoints: these patterns represent a fundamental struggle against situated agency.
Dr. Westerman will illustrate this phenomenon with clinical material (video clips and excerpts of transcripts) from a set of case studies on treatments from the Brief Psychotherapy Project at Beth Israel Medical Center. He will focus on one case and employ discourse-analytic methods to illustrate how defensive patterns involve recurring problems in the ways interaction bids fit together over time. Dr. Westerman will show how these failures of coordination often function to avoid clear-cut occurrences of feared relationship events, but will also illustrate how defensive behavior feeds forward to affect what happens in interpersonal interactions in other ways which demonstrate that, ultimately, the struggle against situated agency cannot be successful. Lastly his remarks will also point out how the tenets of interpersonal defense theory regarding the feed-forward effects of defensive behavior offer a new approach to countertransference phenomena.
To RSVP for this event please send and e-mail to ssw.phd@nyu.edu or contact Tandayi Jones at 212-998-5941.