IN-PERSON: Learning. Life. Work
Abstract
Self-inquiry is an under-discussed tool in clinical psychology, especially as the field moves towards behavioral and manualized forms to treatment modalities. In contrast, psychodynamic psychology sees the use of self-reflection and inquiry as a central mode of clinical communication and therapeutic change. This includes viewing the therapist’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions, conscious and unconscious, as a central component towards understanding what is occurring between therapist and client. The use of self-inquiry can lead towards meaning-making within the therapeutic space, and has increased importance when the topic comes to issues around socio-cultural issues, such as race, class, and other forms of othering and marginalization. The CIIS PsyD program holds self-inquiry as a fundamental aspect of the training of psychologists, and as crucial to its focus on depth-oriented psychology. The panelists, all core faculty members at CIIS PsyD, will discuss their own uses of self-inquiry and how it leads to increased awareness and meaning-making in their clinical work. Through three narratives the presenters will weave the affective experiences of shame and anger, and of race, whiteness and sense of belonging. They will highlight the importance of self-inquiry in their own growth as practitioner-scholars, especially as it relates to issues involving the socio-cultural. The presenters will prompt the audience on how their own self-inquiry, both within the therapeutic field and in other disciplines, can create movement towards increased meaning-making, awareness, and flexibility towards self and other, and as liberatory practices that work to push against systemic systems of control and domination.
David Cushman, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist. He is a core faculty of the Clinical Psychology (PsyD) Department at the CIIS. He has written and published on community mental health from a psychoanalytic perspective. His involvement in psychoanalytic organizations has centered on integrating psychoanalytic thinking with community mental health. Dr. Cushman trained and worked for several years at RAMS Inc., a community mental health clinic in SF, where he was a clinician, supervisor, and program manager. He has a private practice in Oakland , where he sees children, teens, &adults
Margaret Boucher, PsyD is a licensed clinical psychologist and an Associate Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies where she teaches, supervises, and chairs student dissertation research. Over the course of her career, she has worked in community mental health, private practice, and academic settings. Margaret works within a depth-oriented perspective that acknowledges the power of the unconscious as well as the transpersonal, is deeply humanistic, and recognizes the multiplicity of one’s intersecting identities and accompanying positionalities.
Stephanie Z. Chen, PhD. is a 1.5 generation Chinese American, immigrant and cisgender-female licensed clinical psychologist and associate professor who practices, teaches, and writes from a depth-oriented, multicultural, and liberatory lens. Stephanie has clinical experience in providing direct clinical services to children, youth, adults and families in outpatient, hospital, school-based and private practice settings. Stephanie has particular passion with exploring identity formation, sense of belonging, and acculturation, and issues related to transgenerational, familial, and cultural roots of trauma, and growth.
11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Tuesday 11th June, 2024