This seminar will seek to bridge psychoanalytic insights and neuroscientific perspectives to deepen our understanding of neurodiversity and consider implications for clinical practice. From a predictive processing perspective, we will explore how we all develop and continuously update a predictive model of the world as we learn to optimally meet our bodily and emotional needs. However, when there are significant differences in the predictive models between two people — therapist and patient, parent and child, or romantic partners, for example — and those differences are not recognized, there is a high risk for cumulative, dialectical misattunement (Bolis, 2017) and an increasing gap in understanding between individuals. This dynamic has direct relevance to psychoanalytic and psychodynamic work: clinicians of all neurotypes meet clients of all neurotypes, yet those individual differences are not typically part of our clinical thinking. We will explore how openness to examining, updating, and expanding the predictive models that shape our clinical thinking creates space for the emergence of True Self experience (Winnicott, 1965) for all neurotypes, but especially for those whom our traditional theories and practice have overlooked.
After participating in this seminar, participants will be able to…
Articulate at least one example of integrating a psychoanalytic and a neuroscientific idea to better understand an aspect of neurodiversity experience.