Common Problems in Conducting Supportive Psychotherapy: Helping the Clinician Survive
Sunday, 16 September 2007 - 9:00 am - 5:00 pm
presented by Jimmie Holland MD and Marguerite Lederberg MD

Workshop Objectives:

1) Attendees will be familiar with the forms of psychotherapy used in oncology.

2) Attendees will become familiar with common psychotherapeutic issues in supportive care.

3) Attendees will have knowledge of common transference and countertransference problems.

Workshop Description:

Psychodynamic supportive therapy runs the risk of becoming an orphan as more specialized therapies are manualized, tested and refined. These are valuable treatment modalities and crucial to the development of clinical trials. But supportive therapy is the glue that holds the treatment enterprise together. We do it as we bring patients in and out of special treatments and protocols. But we also do it when there is no manual and no special resource other than our own skills and empathy. Modular therapies are often time-limited, but our time scale can vary from weeks to years and depends on our being flexibly available across wide spans of time.

The oncology setting, in particular, immerses us in bedrock human tragedies where we must follow our instincts in a constantly shifting reality. It can demand all our analytic skills or our accumulated experience while requiring extra deftness in dealing with boundaries.

In this interactive workshop, we would like to discuss a range of common problems that make complex demands on the therapist. We have listed a few of them here, but the workshop will be much richer if you bring us some of yours. If you send them in ahead of time, we will add them to the list and will collect relevant papers or references. Send us a case vignette (preferably), or a description of a generic problem.