I am an advanced candidate and faculty at the Minnesota Institute. Your deepening the treatment book was foundational in my journey of doing “analytic work”. I read and was supervised on your book in 1998 in grad school. In times where other candidates have had trouble getting people to come in more often, I have had such a full practice of 4 and 5 times a week folk that I have a hard time doing other things. In trying to understand what made such a difference my thoughts always came to ways that your book was deeply in the foundation of how I am as an “analyst”. So, I have begun to teach from your book with both our current candidates and with other groups because I believe what you share in that book is so very important and so practical. After spending the fall working from your book, one of the candidates sent me a text a week ago…”Hall is all in my head now! I have a patient asking to come in more often and to use the couch and I don’t even have a couch in my office!” All of that is to say I am deeply grateful for you and your book.
With profound gratitude,
Shawn
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老师这节讲了幻想的作用和功能，激起了我很多的联想和感受（觉得脑中的神经突触星星点点的亮了并活跃起来，忆起自己的幻想，还有听来访者们讲他们的幻想时的感觉），以至于被这些感觉笼罩着都错过了课后调查的时间 ，很喜欢hall老师课上的讲解以及对幻想这一现象的理解，觉得很温厚（温暖和深厚的情感）与接纳，并对人的幻想现象有了新的理解和容纳空间。老师讲关于文化以及政治背景对人心理影响的这部分，令我觉得老师不是刻板的老学究，而是充满着对新鲜事物以及现象保持思考的先锋✌ ）
The teacher talked about the function and role of the fantasy, and it triggered lots of my own free association and feeling( felt my nerve cynapse was lightened up and became active , I recalled my own fantasy and my patients’ ), I was so deeply in those feelings as to miss the quesion window in the end of the lecture. I liked very much Jane’s lecture on this topic and her understanding for this mental phenomnon, and I felt warmed up and deeply touched, also accepted. I have more rooms to understand and contain other people’s fantasy life now. Jane also taked about social cuture and political impact on people’s mental state, and I felt that Jane was more than a rigid acdemic person, rather she was a thinking pioneer who always kept interest in new things.
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I really believe that the lecture you did on Sunday was very touching and the students are very pleased.
One student said “I have attended other trainings before. But today’s experience is very different from the one I had before. The teacher (means you) is talking in a very human way, using very simple but touching languge. She ‘s delivering the lecture not in a rigid, purely academic way, like other teachers I came across in other trainings. And I even had a somatic reation, I felt that when I was listening to the lecture, there was a warming stream flowing inside of my chest. I felt warmed by this lecture.
When the student said that, I saw from the screen that many other students were nodding their heads, seemed agreed with her.
As your translator, I felt the same way. I really really love your style being so sturdy and so accepting at the same time. I felt touched by Mr.S’s story and the way you described your other patients. (Actually I don’t see patients here, I only see human beings struggling in similar pains).
邹涵
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I wanted to thank you very much for writing such a thoughtful and helpful book. I have throughly enjoyed it. I found your insights to be grounding and served as great overview of the frame, method and transference. Your writing was super clear and very detailed. I loved that you thought of the many steps that happen along the way to an analysis. The case examples were excellent examples of the challenges to helping patients develop symbolic language, become curious, and sustaining long term work. An analysis of process notes provided many examples of holding and how to address what gets in the way for therapist and patient. Your words give me language and ways to think about the many challenges in a therapy that come up along way.
I have already put into practice something that you mentioned. I have found your thoughts on considering the patient’s pace and needs to be particularly helpful. Recently, I met a patient who was in quite a panic after an affair was discovered. I invited her back a couple days later with the hope that she would feel supported and also have a better sense of what it might be like to come more often. Rather than feel like a burden, this has been helpful and may hopefully develop into an analysis.
This is hard work. Your book honors that and provides support and hope (especially in what feels like the dog days of training) that this work is possible and supports my conviction that analytic work is life changing.
Thank you again. My copy is dog-eared and a bit worn from being carried around. I look forward to rereading it. I hope I have the occasion to learn from you in person and thank you personally.
Randi Berdon
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“Having read Jane Hall’s helpful book, Deepening the Treatment, a few years ago, I sought out supervision with her. Because I live in a rural area many hours from NYC, it was weekly supervision by phone, for which I wrote up two sessions for an in-depth discussion. This was a very comfortable modality for both of us. It seemed like I was in the room with her. Drawing on her wealth of experience, Jane gave honest, direct, and insightful feedback. While holding an intellectually serious way of thinking about psychoanalytic psychotherapy, her good-humored accessible style contributed to an enriching, as well as fun consultation.” – Michele Reed
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I have been in supervision with Jane for seven years, and I cannot recommend her highly enough as a supervisor. Jane has helped me learn to listen beyond the surface content more closely to what patients are communicating about their internal world and relationships, including the transferential relationship between patient and therapist. Her years of experience allow her to see root dynamics at play that I may not have yet considered and which, more often than not, bear out over time. Even with her foresight, Jane does not communicate her experienced conceptualizations as a matter of fact; rather, her priority is to help me to draw upon and expand my own intuitive clinical sense. Not only has Jane helped me in my work with patients, she has also provided me immense support in developing my clinical identity as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. My work with patients has deepened, and I am undoubtedly a better, more confident clinician because of our work together. – Aimee Radom, PhD, Clinical
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Jane is a passionate supervisor and teacher whose enthusiasm for the work is impossible to ignore. In responding to the clinical material I presented to her, Jane couples that passion with her many decades of experience as both a practicing psychoanalyst and scholar. Her feedback on my work was always deeply informed by her knowledge of analytic literature but was never overly intellectualized; on the contrary, Jane takes great care to provide guidance in patient-friendly language in a way that’s straightforward to implement. More than anything, Jane helped my confidence grow as a clinician. She’s helped me see that my mind and internal world hold answers to many of the clinical quagmires I’ve presented to her, which is a lesson that has sustained my practice over time. – Samuel Guzzardi
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Jane Hall was my teacher during my last year of training at the New York School for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. I continued to meet with her as my supervisor after graduation because I was so taken with her exceptional ability to not only listen acutely and deeply but the way in which she functioned as a midwife of professional development.
Jane never imposes dogma. She encourages curiosity, space to muse and think and above all the promotion of finding ones own voice as an analytic practitioner. She models what she teaches.
Her books are a joy to read and can serve as an erudite primer for private practice.
I am still learning from her even after 30 years.
– Sheila Felberbaum, LCSW, BCD
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My Experience of Long-Distance Supervision with Jane Hall
I was working with a patient who was very difficult for me, and I consulted a local analyst from our small analytic community several times during the treatment. Despite the help, I often felt the patient and I were stuck in quicksand. Then, I decided to consult someone outside of our community, who would not know me, and most certainly would not know the patient. I was referred to Jane Hall.
Immediately, after the first contact, an important issue in the countertransference became apparent. Working with Jane Hall, I was able to begin to understand both the patient and myself on a deeper level. As I worked through the countertransference issues, it became clear to me that because of our small community, the in-town supervisor, who is a very skilled analyst, knew me and my reputation in a way that interfered with his recognition of the problem. Getting an outside opinion, from somebody who did not know my work, was like a breath of fresh air. Continuing work, including focus on technique, has been fruitful as well.
Because of my experience, I highly recommend obtaining consultation out-of-town, and specifically recommend Jane Hall.
– Judith Kane
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From: Deborah Fried
Subject: teaching psychoanalysis
Dear Ms. Hall,
Your beautifully worded note to the APsaA discussion group today hits a perfect note that alters the cacophony of theory-laden voices! Would it be alright with you if I read it aloud to our incoming class of candidates at Western New England Psychoanalytic?
Many thanks,
Deborah Fried Faculty, Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis
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Insights from Jane Hall, LCSW
This past Saturday (10/15/16), psychoanalyst and author Jane Hall explored with the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society the concept of “attachment to abuse,” specifically the incredible bind in which many patients abused as children find themselves as adults when seeking to live a freer, more constructive life. Hall posed both psychological and physiological factors that continue to “haunt” abused children across their lifespan. Psychologically, these children have internalized within both the abuse and the abuser, coloring how they will experience themselves, others, and themselves in relationship with others. Physiologically, the sustained dis-ease of home life triggers high levels of cortisol, now shown to negatively affect the developing brains of children. Each of these factors alone, let alone the interactive effect of both together, shape the way in which these individuals think, feel, and behave in the world. Hall noted that such individuals will respond somewhere on a continuum: from mild self-punishment all the way to psychopathy. Put more succinctly, the sustained childhood abuse eventually will leave somebody dead. This death may manifest in extreme cases as either suicide or homicide, including acts of terrorism. Other types of death include the loss of the self (an absence of self-esteem) and the loss of the object (an inability to form intimate relationships).
Hall postulated that as psychoanalysts, our role is to listen – with benign curiosity, and this type of listening will, over time, enable the early childhood wound to form a scar, and with continued listening, that scar will eventually shrink. Our consistent frame and benignly curious listening can ultimately allow not only the mind to change as noted above, but, Hall citing recent neurological research, posits that the very brain itself can change because of its inherent neuroplasticity.
The challenge for a patient to move from such a wound to a diminishing scar is significant. Because of the painful parental treatment (e.g., controlling, neglecting, cold), these abused children fashion ways to protect themselves from such harm. These defenses, however, keep out not only that which is harmful, but that which is necessary and good. As adults, these children are unable to absorb love, though they are desperate for it. The challenge of treatment is to invite these children-turned-adults to “loosen ties to their original object,” as Hall explained. This is the only path forward to prevent them from finding ways of repeating their abuse – as abuser/abused or both. This way of safety and protection learned in childhood has become a character trait that prevents a fulfilling adult life.
Contrasted with Winnicott’s “good enough mother,” Hall described the “bad enough mother,” who for a host of reasons may not have been able to meet the normal developmental needs of her child. This mother, herself, may have had a “bad enough mother,” passing onto the next generation the familiar and familial trauma. Hall noted that we as therapists may find ourselves sucked into the role of the bad enough mother and, as a result, dealing with the patient punishing us in a variety of ways. One of the most effective punishments, she illustrated, is the patient’s refusal to get better, thereby torturing the analyst.
Hall cautioned us that this move from the attachment to abuse to a more secure attachment with the analyst and others in the patient’s life is not easily achieved. The patient will fight to hold onto that which is familiar while at the same time desperately longing for something healthier. She suggested that we must find ways to survive the onslaught of the patient’s hopelessness, rage, and helplessness likely with the help of a support system ourselves. Hall concluded the morning presentation with two case studies with patients she had seen in analysis over many years, both of whom have found ways of living meaningful lives after living through significant traumata as children. – Steven D. Graham, PhD, DMin
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“Jane was my supervisor while I was in the Contemporary Freudian Society’s Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program. Jane went above and beyond during our work together; she provided relevant articles to help me understand patients and clinical concepts better, she sent back process recordings with her detailed thoughts on them and she offered extra support when needed. Jane genuinely wanted me to grow as a therapist and put in the work to help make that happen. At the end of our year together, I found that my clinical skills had grown tremendously, and I owe that in large part to Jane. Not to mention, I read two of her books during this year, and those in and of themselves are HUGE assets while working with Jane in the flesh! With a title like Deepening the Treatment, it was a real gift to work with Jane who truly helped me deepen my work with my patients, a skill that I am forever grateful for!” – Jennie Friedman
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Jane Hall was my very first supervisor on entering the world of serious training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. She has also been a teacher of mine on two different occasions. Her acute intelligence and dedication to deepening treatment and to teaching others how to deepen treatment is an inspiration and real directional beacon in the current multi-model psychoanalytic world. One always learns in important ways from having the benefit of her perspective. – Charles Rosen, LCSW