Clinical Formulation, Part 2

From the Presenting Problem to the Whole Person

 

A Two-Hour Live Online Training
Friday, February 12, 2027, 12:00 to 2:00 pm Eastern, Live Online
or
Saturday, February 13, 2027, 10:00 am to 12:00 pm Eastern, Live Online
Two offerings of the same training. Tuition: $50 (No continuing education credits are offered for this program)

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A useful formulation can begin with something relatively simple: identifying what appears to be producing and maintaining the problem that brought a client to therapy.

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But people are more complex than their presenting problems.

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A client's anxiety, withdrawal, over-accommodation, anger, indecision, or repeated relationship difficulty exists within a larger psychological organization: one shaped by developmental history, relationships, characteristic meanings, defenses, capacities, vulnerabilities, identity, and the realities of the person's current life.

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In Part 1, we focused on the reasoning required to move from clinical information to a provisional explanation of a presenting problem.

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Part 2 goes further.

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We will examine how to develop that initial formulation into a more comprehensive understanding of the person as a whole, without turning formulation into an exhaustive history, a theoretical template, or an elegant story that cannot be tested.

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We will work with questions such as:

• Which aspects of a client's history actually matter to the formulation?

• How do we distinguish relevant developmental information from material that is merely interesting?

• How does a current psychological pattern connect to broader relational, emotional, and defensive organization?

• What do we do when different parts of the client appear contradictory?

• How do we integrate multiple levels of understanding without losing the central clinical problem?

• How do we keep a rich formulation provisional, testable, and useful to the work?

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The goal is not to create the most sophisticated description of the client.

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It is to develop an increasingly coherent account of what organizes this person psychologically, how the presenting difficulty fits within that organization, and what would have to change for a different way of functioning to become possible.

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Part 2 builds directly on the disciplined inquiry introduced in Part 1 and extends it from formulation of the problem toward formulation of the person.