Overview

Most clinicians can feel when a client is stuck. This workshop gives you a psychodynamic map to understand why, and what to do next.

This two-part online workshop offers mental health professionals a structured psychodynamic formulation framework applicable across a wide range of clinical presentations.

In Australian clinical settings, practitioners are frequently required to work within session-limited models while managing complex presentations. This workshop provides a clear psychodynamic map to support moment-to-moment clinical decision-making from initial formulation through to intervention selection.

Participants will develop skills in:

• Formulating personality organisation (neurotic, borderline, and psychotic levels) and understanding its implications for risk, identity, and relational capacity
• Identifying personality styles and syndromes across diagnostic categories
• Recognising defense mechanisms as adaptive and maladaptive responses to affective threat
• Working with resistance as meaningful clinical information
• Selecting interventions along the supportive–expressive continuum based on patient capacity and treatment phase
• Using the therapeutic relationship, including transference and countertransference, as a core source of clinical data

The workshop is clinically grounded and skills-oriented, incorporating case vignettes and interactive activities.

Presenter: Dr. Alex Rowell, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist registered in Oregon, Illinois, and the United Kingdom. He has extensive experience across inpatient and outpatient hospital settings, community mental health, university counselling, and the NHS. Dr. Rowell has lectured in supervision, personality assessment, and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and has presented at conferences across Europe and the United States. He is RAPPS certified through the British Psychological Society.

Format: Online via Google Meet. A recording will be made available to registered participants for six months following the event.

This event represents 7 CPD hours.

Session dates (Sydney):

• Session 1: Friday 16 May 2026, 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM (Sydney)
• Session 2: Friday 23 May 2026, 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM (Sydney)

Registration: $375 per person. Early bird price $325 available until 15 April 2025.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Define psychodynamic psychotherapy and describe its essential features in contemporary practice — including affect focus, developmental context, therapeutic relationship, and unconscious processes.
2. Differentiate levels of personality organisation (neurotic, borderline, psychotic) using key markers such as reality testing, identity integration, and defensive functioning.
3. Describe personality styles and syndromes — including depressive, anxious/avoidant, obsessive-compulsive, narcissistic, paranoid, and borderline styles — and identify how they shape clinical presentations and relational patterns.
4. Identify higher-level and primitive defense mechanisms, explain their functions, and generate clinical examples of at least two defenses in action.
5. Recognise common forms of resistance and articulate what resistance may signal about affect, threat, and the therapeutic relationship.
6. Select and justify interventions across the supportive–expressive continuum — including empathic validation, clarification, confrontation, observation, and interpretation — based on patient capacity, safety, and treatment phase.

 

Presenter(s)

Dr. Alex Rowell

About the presenter(s)

Dr. Alex Rowell, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist registered in Oregon, Illinois, and the United Kingdom. He has extensive experience across inpatient and outpatient hospital settings, community mental health, university counselling, and the NHS. Dr. Rowell has lectured in supervision, personality assessment, and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and has presented at conferences across Europe and the United States. He is RAPPS certified through the British Psychological Society.

Website/s

https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/psychodynamic-intervention-in-practice-with-dr-alex-rowell-tickets-1985409530351