The Frame Flooded: Reckoning with Death and Clinical Practice in Climate Crisis (Member)

Title of Workshop:
The Frame Flooded: Reckoning with Death and Clinical Practice in Climate Crisis

Format: In person
Credit: 3 CEUs approved for Psychologists, Social Workers, LPCs/LMFTs and LADCs

Cost:
$100 for Non-Members
$80 for Members - Log into the Member Area to purchase
$20 for *Students - Click here to request a student discount
$0 for current Foundation 1 Students
*(Full-Time Undergraduate, Graduate, Doctoral students, and LMFT, LADC, LPC, Social Work, Psychology, and Psychoanalytic licensure/certification candidates

Speaker: Sarah Blair Jenkins, LCSW, CST

Description:

This discussion will explore the impact of climate violence and death on clinical work, as well as the social and psychic structures that perpetuate ongoing disavowal of these topics. Grounded in Freud’s (1919) concept of the uncanny, Sarah Blair Jenkins will present a case study of urgent relevance to the phenomena of climate horror, sharing about loss in the context of a mass trauma event, Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina in the fall of 2024. With attention to the interpersonal and sociopolitical, this presentation will weave together the policy failures that led to this particular climate catastrophe with the personal impact of this event on the clinical frame. Anchored in the clinician’s lived experience as well as theoretical inquiry, this presentation will hopefully provide a space for all clinicians who have been or will be impacted by climate change to engage in the ongoing struggle to make meaning out of the destruction and rebuilding processes they witness in their lives, practices, and communities. Using Winnicott’s theory of object usage (1969), special attention will be paid to the failures of institutions and individuals alike to metabolize the growing existential reality of climate change as it quickly morphs from threat to imminent danger. With the emergent and deepening violence that climate change is wreaking on our world, resonant with political violence, war, and genocide that is escalating globally, this presentation issues a call to consider the material and psychic impacts of climate violence directly and indirectly with patients and beyond, as well as examining and metabolizing obstacles to mourning in our field.

Learning Objectives:

1. After participating in this program, participants should be able to: List three institutional failures related to the field of psychoanalytic psychotherapy that prohibit effective clinical and political action in preparing for climate violence and death, including the failure of training programs to effectively name climate change as a factor that might impact client life and wellness; denial of death in the clinical encounter; and structural erasure of “the social” in the field and wider culture that denatures the human component of natural disasters.
2. Identify at least two psychoanalytic concepts that effectively assist clinicians in integrating climate change into their clinical approach.
3. Describe an emergent ethic of disaster recovery with an emphasis on rural communities, and how this concept could assist in challenging the current set of urbane assumptions functioning in the field of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, with a focus on ethical complexity and cultural humility.

Speaker’s bio:

Sarah Blair Jenkins, LCSW, CST is a psychotherapist and clinical supervisor in private practice in Asheville, North Carolina. She is a long-time member of the American Psychological Association Division of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (39) and formerly served on their Board of Directors, as well as on the Board of Section IX: Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility. She currently is an adjunct professor at Lenoir-Rhyne University in their Masters of Arts in Counseling Program. Her clinical interests include psychoanalysis, sex therapy, queer and decolonial theories, Appalachian studies, and Buddhism.