🔵 F.R.E.E. Psychoanalytic & Psychodynamic WEBINAR –
🔴 THE “RELENTLESS HOPE” OF PATIENTS WITH BORDERLINE DYNAMICS:
🌀 Integrating Memory, Mentalizing & Mourning

🧩 Transforming Clinical Challenge into Therapeutic Opportunity

⏰ Thu, Oct 23, 2025 | 8 to 10 pm (ET)
📌 LIVE & RECORDED for Later Viewing

🎤 Presented by Martha Stark MD | Harvard Medical School

⚫️ Hosted by Dr Bill Kirwan | Asia Graduate School of Theology, Philippines


All young children, as a normal phase of their development, hold the idealized fantasy of “perfect caregiving” – of perfect attunement, perfect mirroring, perfect responsiveness. If development proceeds as it should, over time they will relinquish their need for the external provision of such perfection as they gradually develop the capacity to provide “good-enough caregiving” for themselves.

But patients with unresolved narcissistic issues have never fully outgrown their need for perfect attunement, mirroring, and responsiveness. They remain trapped in their pursuit of the idealized fantasy that such perfect caregiving might yet be forthcoming – “relentless hope.” But their unwavering search is for something that never truly existed.

And then there are patients organized around borderline dynamics – patients who carry an additional layer of poignancy and complexity. They too have never relinquished their fantasy of perfect (idealized) caregiving, but the quality of their yearning is different. Whereas the patient with narcissistic issues yearns for the provision of something never known, the patient with borderline dynamics longs to recapture something that might once have been – even if only fleetingly and perhaps only in fantasy – but has since been lost. Theirs is an intense yearning to reclaim an idealized past that is now irretrievable – a paradise lost, never to be recovered.

The development of self-structure depends on a prolonged process of working through “optimally frustrated” narcissistic need (“optimal disillusionment”) in relation to an idealized selfobject therapist. But for patients with borderline dynamics – whose fragile evocative memory and tenuously established capacity for mentalizing seriously compromise their ability to grieve – self-structure formation (such that “good-enough caregiving” can ultimately be provided from within rather than “pursued relentlessly” from without) requires not merely “optimal frustration” but something altogether different . . .

🆓 Tune in to find out!

⭐️ Martha Stark MD | Creator & Developer of THE ST★RK METHOD
💡 Psychoanalyst | ✍️ Author | 🎤 Speaker | 🧩 Consultant | 🔑 Mentor
⚕️Harvard-Educated | Harvard-Trained | Harvard-Affiliated | 60 Years
🌐 Bringing PSYCHODYNAMIC SYNERGY to a Global Community of Healers
🌿 52 Years of Integrative Clinical Practice | Dedicated Scholar & Educator