Shrinks and Drinks Spring!

Dates
Fridays
March 13, March 27, April 17

Time
4:30 – 6:30pm

Location
The Alamo Psychotherapy & Training
6401 Ruby Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90042

Tickets
$15 for all attendees

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.

Friday, March 13
Holly Han
Substance Use and Psychoanalysis

There is something the substance knows that the patient cannot yet say. Before there are words, there is relief, or the reaching for it, and psychoanalysis, perhaps uniquely among clinical orientations, takes seriously the question of what that reaching is about. What state of mind is being managed? What unbearable feeling is being lent a temporary home? What does the analyst's own discomfort in the room reveal about what cannot yet be spoken between two people?

Substance use remains curiously underrepresented in psychoanalytic literature, despite psychoanalysis being well-suited to its exploration. Holly Han will invite us away from the seduction of cure and toward something more honest: a sustained curiosity about what the substance is doing, what it costs, and what kind of aliveness might be possible without it.

Han will offer a clinical framework and a themed case consultation, and open the floor for dialogue and case material from the group.

Holly Han, PsyD, LMFT is a psychoanalyst and Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice. She is a Training and Supervising Analyst and the Vice President of Newport Psychoanalytic Institute. Holly is a co-founder and clinical director of The Malama Collective, a psychoanalytically informed community mental health clinic. One of her areas of interest is addictions and she has worked in several addiction treatment centers and in correctional settings. In addition to clinical work she teaches and provides consultation.

Friday, March 27
Gabrielle Taylor
An Analyst’s Take on Death

Psychoanalysis has always known that Eros and Thanatos are not opposites so much as companions, that the wish to live and the pull toward undoing are braided together in ways that resist easy untangling. Freud gave us the death drive. Winnicott gave us something stranger and more generous: the idea that destruction is not the opposite of love but one of its preconditions, that we must, in some sense, annihilate the object in order to find it real, and in finding it real, find ourselves alive.

Adam Phillips has written about psychic aliveness and psychic deadness as among the central stakes of any analysis, and perhaps of any life. In our current cultural and political moment, when so much feels dire and the future uncertain, how do we stay robustly, stubbornly, impractically alive? How does a clinician carry her own mortality into the room without it becoming a burden her patients must manage for her?

Through personal narrative, Gabrielle Taylor will speak about what it has meant to reckon with her own finitude and how that reckoning has quietly, and not so quietly, shaped her presence with patients.

Dr. Gabrielle Taylor, PhD, is a practicing psychoanalyst in Pasadena and a graduate of Fuller School of Psychology and New Center for Psychoanalysis. She has a passion for how spirituality shapes our ethical posture and impact in the clinical setting and in life. She is a Training and Supervising Analyst at Newport Psychoanalytic Institute, Core Faculty at Wright Institute Los Angeles, and a Supervisor at The Alamo Psychotherapy and Training. She has completed a certificate at the Living School through the Center for Action and Contemplation where meditation and social justice are upheld as core tenets of a spiritual life and completed Yoga teacher training. She is a lover of truth and beauty, looking to bridge the gap between the consulting room and our lived experience in the world.

Friday, April 17
Tiffaney Hale
Outside of Gender and Sexual Binaries

The consulting room has never been sealed from the world outside it, and in this political moment, the violence of that outside world arrives with particular force. Homophobia and transphobia do not wait to be invited, they seep through, carried in the culture's anxiety, in the clinician's body, in what patients fear to say aloud and what they say instead. The question is not whether these forces intrude but how we metabolize them: how we remain curious in the presence of what threatens to narrow us.

Tiffaney Hale will take up the countertransference: its textures, its disturbances, its sometimes surprising gifts, that arises in clinical work with patients outside of gender and sexual binaries. Drawing on Judith Butler, Griffin Hansbury, and Diane Elise, Hale will explore how we hold open a therapeutic space large enough to hold the ambiguities and particularities of patients' explorations that resist resolution, that ask not to be tidied into legibility, but to be accompanied toward something more like vitality. She will offer case material and welcome cases from the group.

Tiffaney Hale, LMFT is currently in private practice in Long Beach. She has worked as a clinician in various settings for 25 years. She studied at New College of California, Women’s Therapy Center in Berkeley, Houston-Galveston Trauma Institute, and is a recent graduate of Newport Psychoanalytic Institute. Her areas of interest are trauma, gender, and sexuality and how these aspects of experience impact relationships both in and out of the therapy room. Tiffaney primarily treats adults individually and in couples. She has a deep love for playing with psychoanalytic theory.

Refund policy
Participants seeking a refund for Shrinks and Drinks can email us at thealamoprograms@gmail.com at least 10 days before the event. Refunds requested 10 days or earlier will receive 100% refund. 10-5 days prior, participants are eligible for a 50% refund. No refund will be provided 4 days prior or less.

Contact Us
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