Shrinks and Drinks with Darren Haber

The Alamo is growing. Come see what's taking root on the eastside.

Psychoanalysis has always known that the most interesting conversations happen in intimate rooms, between people willing to sit with uncertainty and say what they almost didn't. Shrinks and Drinks is built on that conviction — a series of Friday evening talks in which psychoanalysts open their clinical thinking to colleagues, offer a case for shared consultation, and make room for the kind of dialogue that doesn't often survive the formality of the conference setting.

Come as you are, wherever you are in your training. This is a window into analytic practice, not a test of it. The conversation is the point. We provide the shrinks and the drinks. You bring the appetizing case material.

All tickets includes drinks and snacks!
Now offering CE credits!  Earn 1 continuing education credit for qualifying professionals.

Info on the series here.

Darren Haber
Nothing but Footnotes: The Language of Obsessive Eroticism

What do we mean when we speak of a patient’s “fetish”? A process, a concretization, or an eroticization (of what)? Such multiplicity of meanings reflects the difficulty of discussing fetishism (and sexuality) itself, as illustrated in a vignette involving a defended male patient with an erotic fixation on feet: a point of contention in a volatile marriage, and his own pointedly self-critical psyche. Such fixation excited and imprisoned him, protected and isolated him from his partner’s passion—sexual yet also rageful—within an obsessive personality where affective vulnerability was warded off and “held” within a stubbornly unsymbolized fortress. Affectivity like the foot, in other words, became a footnote to his everyday vocabulary, both desirous and reproachful. Our discussion also considers how theoretical language functions in understanding this case and in clinical work more generally, by bringing intersubjective-systems and Freudian ideas into dialogue—the old and the new (or new again)—whose harmonies and dissonances echo the patient’s own alphabetic thickets, simultaneously inviting and obstructing psychic clarity.

Darren Haber, PsyD, is a psychoanalyst practicing in west Los Angeles. He specializes in treating childhood trauma, addiction, and anxiety/depression. His book, Circles Without a Center: Addiction, Accommodation and Vulnerability in Psychoanalysis was published in July 2022 by Routledge. His new book, Words Apart: Dissociation, Compulsion, and Language Games in Psychoanalysis, will be out this winter. He publishes a weekly Substack column called “Hearing the Worlds of Others” and is the winner of several analytic writing awards. He has published online at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Psyche/Aeon, Psychology Today, GoodTherapy.org, the APA blog site, and The American Psychoanalyst. He frequently teaches, and has published numerous papers in the journals Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, and Psychoanalytic Inquiry. His website is www.therapistinlosangeles.com and is on Twitter/X at @darrenhabermft.

For more information or questions contact us at thealamoprograms @ gmail.com

Refund policy: Participants seeking a refund can email us at thealamoprograms@gmail.com at least 15 days before the first meeting. Refunds requested 15 days or earlier will receive 100% refund. 14-7 days prior, participants are eligible for a 50% refund. No refund will be provided 6 days prior or less.

Course meets the qualifications for 1 hours of continuing education credit for PhDs, LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs as required by the American Psychological Association and the California Board of Behavioral Sciences.

Please note: Attendance at all class meetings is required for continuing education credits.

Course certificates awarded at the end of the course upon receipt of completed evaluation form.

The Alamo Psychotherapy and Training is a dba of Michelle Harwell Therapy. Michelle Harwell Therapy is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists and many licensed clinicians. The Alamo Psychotherapy and Training maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

No known conflict of interest or commercial support for The Alamo Psychotherapy and Training, or the instructor.

To request accommodations for special needs, obtain the grievance policy, report a grievance, request a refund, request more information about the course, or if you have general questions, please email us at thealamoprograms@gmail.com