Working with Adolescents and their Technology

 

Faculty: Robert Tyminski, DMH

 

This course will explore many of the intense psychological states often appearing with various uses of technology among late adolescents. We will examine compulsive Internet use and video gaming, each of young men. Two cases will be presented for discussion of the psychic distortions around thinking and feeling, as these occurred in the analysis of a mid-adolescent boy and of another in later adolescence.

 

Facets of technology are now directly brought into our offices through smartphones and tablet computer. How do we handle these when they appear? We will discuss how they can be forms of communication, as well as resistance or refusal to relate to us as a potentially helfpful psychotherapist. Some of the ideas to explore in dialogue with one another will be the effects on relationships-including the therapeutic one-of these technologies. Examples might include magical thinking , an avoidant attitude toward relating, excessive projective identification, and a lack of psychic containment. Immersive use, perhaps even with addictive parts, of cell phones, social media, and the Internet may be bringing into our psychotherapy and analytic practices new kinds of challenges about the therapeutic frame, alliance, and interpersonal communication. Our discussion will also touch upon obvious ways in which using the Internet, social media, and video gaming can be beneficial for connecting with others, for creating new platforms of expression, and for education.

 

ROBERT TYMINSKI, DMH is an adult and child analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and its current President; he also teaches in the Institute’s analytic training program. He is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco. His recent book is The Psychology of Theft and Loss: Stolen and Fleeced, and was published in 2014 by Routledge

 

Faculty: Patricia Speier, MD

 

Being able to text has become a major rite of passage into adolescence in our culture today, and for most teens, cell phones seem like necessary extensions of themselves. The electronically enhanced world, though, is changing our brains, and how we relate. 

 

We are all participants in the largest brain-changing experiment since the printing press. In this seminar, two cases will be presented in which discussing texts became a major space for reflection and enhanced interpersonal understanding. Other vignettes will examine texting's destructive capabilities, breaking down the development of meaning and how screens effect mood, anxiety, and learning.