Rupture and Repair: The Value of Working Through
A Full‑Day Seminar in Oslo
The Institute for Psychotherapy is proud to welcome Nancy McWilliams and Michael Garrett for an exceptional full‑day seminar in Oslo, bringing together two of the most influential voices in contemporary psychodynamic psychotherapy.
Nancy McWilliams, PhD, ABPP, is Visiting Professor Emerita of clinical psychology at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology and practices in Lambertville, New Jersey. She is author of Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (1994, rev. ed. 2011), Psychoanalytic Case Formulation (1999), Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (2004) and Psychoanalytic Supervision (2021) and is associate editor of all editions of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (2006, 2017, 2026). A former president of Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) of the American Psychological Association, she has been featured in three APA videos of master clinicians. She is on the Board of Trustees of the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, MA. Her books are available in more than 20 languages, and she has taught in person or remotely in more than 50 countries.
Michael Garrett, MD, is Professor Emeritus of Clinical Psychiatry at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY. He is on the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York, affiliated with the New York University Medical Center. His residency training in Psychiatry was at Bronx Municipal Hospital Center. He currently teaches and supervises clinicians doing psychotherapy for psychosis and consults regularly to several first-episode-for-psychosis teams in the United States and abroad. He has a particular interest in the integration of cognitive behavioral and psychodynamic treatment in the psychotherapy of psychosis, as detailed in his 2019 book, Psychotherapy for Psychosis: Integrating Cognitive Behavioral and Psychodynamic Treatments (Guilford Press). His most recent paper, relevant to this workshop, is “Links between trauma and psychotic symptoms: Integrating cognitive behavioral and neuropsychoanalytic models of psychosis.” Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice (open access).
This seminar offers a rare opportunity to engage deeply with leading thinkers whose work bridges theory, clinical practice, and contemporary developments in psychotherapy.
Book your tickets here, digital participation is also possible: https://ipsy.ticketco.events/no/nb/e/rupture_and_repair_the_value_of_working_through
Program:
08:00 to 08:45: Registration and coffee
08:45 to 09:00: Orientation from the institute for psychoterapy
9:00 to 9:15: Welcome and Introductions
09:15 to10:30: Dr. McWilliams will review empirical support for the vital contribution of the therapeutic alliance to therapy outcome. Although almost all such research has been done with non-psychotic clients, she will attempt to infer general principles of therapy process relevant to the rupture-repair cycle in all psychotherapy patients.
10:30 to 10:45: Coffee Break
10:45 to 12:00 noon: Dr. Garrett will present research evidence that chronic psychosis diagnosed as “schizophrenia” should be considered a bio-psycho-social stress-related disorder that requires not only medication but also psychotherapy. He will depict how in abused and neglected children, insecure attachments to caregivers lead to implicit relational models of others that are internalized as dissociated, split-off, unintegrated mental representations of self in relation to grandiose and persecutory psychological objects which, when projected into the individual’s interpersonal world, become manifest as delusions. He will outline how, in the therapy of nonpsychotic and psychotic adults, early self- and object representations may emerge in the transference.
12:00 to 12:30: Audience participation: Questions and Comments
12:30 to 2:00: Lunch Break
2:00 to 3:15: Dr. McWilliams will discuss, with ample clinical examples, ways of repairing ruptures in the clinical process and restoring the vital process of working through. She will emphasize the inevitability of crises in treatment, even that of high-functioning patients.
3:15 to 3:30: Coffee Break
3:30 to 4:45: Dr. Garrett will describe the treatment of three patients with, respectively, a non-psychotic transference, a near-psychotic transference, and a psychotic transference. He will make suggestions for how to avoid and repair disturbances in the therapeutic alliance with patients suffering from psychosis.
4:45 to 5:30: Questions, Comments, Discussion, Evaluation.