Psychotherapy as a Search and Rescue Operation: Taking Attachment and Acceptance Seriously with Paul Wachtel, Ph.D.

Based on his most recent book, Making Room for the Disavowed: Reclaiming the Self in Psychotherapy, this presentation by Paul Wachtel will explore how therapy can be deeper and more effective when the focus shifts from uncovering what the patient has been hiding to making room for the thoughts, feelings, and wishes that he has feared and disavowed. Building on and integrating important alternative voices in psychoanalytic thought, both old and new, Wachtel offers a version of therapeutic practice that is more humane and deeply experiential and that intersects in productive ways with humanistic and experiential approaches and with acceptance-centered cognitive-behavioral approaches. The approach builds as well on important and insufficiently appreciated implications of attachment theory. Central to Wachtel’s approach is the view that psychotherapy is essentially a search and rescue operation but that its practice has been dominated by the element of search (discovery, uncovering, unmasking, verbalizing) and has been insufficiently attentive to the rescue element, which is represented by the relational experience with the therapist, by helping the patient accept what he has pushed away out of fear, guilt, or shame, and by helping him develop ways to express his cast off wishes and feelings in his daily life that meet with acceptance rather than retraumatization. When the patient can make room for those aspects of the self that were sidetracked in the course of development, he is enabled to live life with greater authenticity and vitality and to regain access to critical adaptive resources for meeting life’s challenges.

Learning Objectives

At the end of the presentation, participants will be able to:

I. Describe the difference between attachment as a set of categories and attachment as a lifelong process of adaptation that can point the person toward self-acceptance or toward self-rejection.

II. Discuss the differing contributions to therapeutic gain of self-knowledge and self-acceptance.

III. Describe important overlaps between the methods of psychodynamic therapists and those of humanistic-experiential and acceptance-centered cognitive-behavioral therapists.

Paul L. Wachtel, Ph.D. is Distinguished Professor in the doctoral program in clinical psychology at the City College of New York. He did his undergraduate studies at Columbia, received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Yale, and is a graduate of the NYU postdoctoral program in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. He was a cofounder of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration (SEPI) and is a past president of that organization. Among his books are The Poverty of Affluence; Family Dynamics in Individual Psychotherapy (with Ellen F. Wachtel); Psychoanalysis, Behavior Therapy, and the Relational World; Race in the Mind of America; Relational Theory and the Practice of Psychotherapy; Inside the Session: What Really Happens in Psychotherapy; Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self; and, most recently, Making Room for the Disavowed: Reclaiming the Self in Psychotherapy. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and was the winner of the Hans H. Strupp Award for Psychoanalytic Writing, Teaching, and Research, the Distinguished Psychologist Award by Division 29 (Psychotherapy) of APA, the Scholarship and Research Award by Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) of APA, and the Sidney J. Blatt Award for Outstanding Contributions to Psychotherapy, Scholarship, Education and Practice.