Helping Patients Gain Understanding and Healing
Psychiatrist specialising in addiction, trauma and treatment-resistance
- Our Location
Malvern Private Hospital, Malvern East
- Contact
My Approach to Mental Health
Dr. Eli Kotler
As a psychiatrist, I specialise in addictions and trauma. Working primarily as a clinician, I learn best through experiences with my patients. I use a neuro-psychoanalytic frame to assist my patients gain healing through insights, the therapeutic relationship and connecting their head and heart.
XX Years of Experience
Officia officiis vitae hendrerit interdum pretium.
Defining Success
Officia officiis vitae hendrerit interdum pretium.
Areas of expertise
Speaking Engagements
I have had the opportunity to speak with many different people and groups. I speak regularly at conferences, have given a number of keynote talks, and have helped organise national conferences.
Clinical Assessments
Whilst I do not have time available to see new patients on an ongoing basis, I am happy and interested to perform assessments on people suffering with addictions or treatment resistant mood, anxiety and ‘personality’ disorders.
Medico-legal Work
As an appointed Panellist for the Medical Panels of Victoria, and a regular independent examiner for WorkSafe Victoria, I have extensive experience with medico-legal assessments for a range of clients.
Trauma
Difficult experiences occur all the time. Some difficult experiences can be fully processed and integrated by our minds, while some difficult experiences cannot. In these cases, the brain creates splits between our conscious minds, with aspects of the experience removed or altered from our consciousness. These split off aspects of our psyches can create unhealthy patterns within the personality. These patterns are not stored in the conscious parts of our minds, rather the nondeclarative memory systems, hence why they are difficult to spot and quantify. Moreso, rationalisations keep them hidden. The patterns created by trauma are the categorical diagnoses we have in the DSM/ICD, such as ‘personality disorders’ and addictions.
Emotions
Eli uses affective neuroscience as a model to understand emotions and feelings within the framework of our emotional systems. Emotional systems are our brain’s need and survival systems, and inform us whether our needs are being met through positive or negative feelings. Every feeling can be defined by a certain quality – i.e. what the need is, is it positive or negative, or the degree that need is, or isn’t being met.
Every human and mammal has 7 basic emotional needs, and we learn how to meet these needs automatically through feelings, which is a process called conditioning. However, if our needs are not met, there’s a chance of developing unresolved negative feelings as well as emotional and behavioural conflicts which will need to be resolved eventually. Addictions hijack the brain’s emotional circuits, and ‘short-circuit’, or ‘trick’ us into feeling that a need has been met, when in reality it has not, leaving us empty and longing for more once the ‘high’ is over.
‘Hungry Ghosts’ (Gabor Mate) are an example of this.
Addiction
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A basic outline is as follows;
- Brief overview of the history of the science of addictions (pleasure circuits, dopamine, medical model, learning model, trauma model)
- Addictions are the minds way of dealing with unresolved emotional issues and conflicts, including trauma.
- Substance and alcohol addictions hijack the brains emotional circuits
- A solution to a forgotten problem
Psychedelics
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Basic outline…
- What are psychedelics
- Why they may help heal addictions
- Current state of research
- Current legal status in Australia
Neuropsychoanalysis
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Basic outline;
- Limitations of traditional scientific approaches (behavioural and cognitive)
- Benefits of combining neuroscience with depth-psychology
- Outline of
- Panksepp’s affective neuroscience
- Friston’s Free Energy Principle
- Psychoanalysis
Insights
Emotions & Feelings
"It was no less a scientist than Charles Darwin who demonstrated the consequences and the human tragedy of a purely scientific, alienated intellect. He writes... 'My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact... the loss... is a loss of happiness... by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature'". To have or to be?1976.
— Erich Fromm
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is "...both an intellectual and an emotional experience... it means gaining information about ourselves which we feel in our 'guts'". Self-analysis, 1968.
— Karen Horney
Trauma
“...everything that touches this complex, however slightly, excites a vehement reaction, a regular emotional explosion. Hence one could easily represent the trauma as a complex with a high emotional charge.”
1966, page 130, paragraph 262. The therapeutic value of abreaction. Original 1921.
— Carl Jung
Addiction
“Addiction… is a substitute and replacement not only for general mastery of the object world, but specifically for the attainment of a secure love-object”
— Panksepp, Solms, Pantelis
Treatment-Resistance
"Depression consists of a denial of one's own emotional reactions. This denial begins in the service of an absolutely essential adaptation during childhood...". The Drama of the Gifted Child. The Search for the True Sel, 1981.
— Alice Miller
Psychedelics
"Psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy" LSD Psychotherapy. 1980/2001.
— Stan Groff
Neuropsychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is "is in essence a cure through love... it is transference that provides the strongest proof, the only unassailable one, for the relationship of neuroses to love." (Sigmund Freud Life and Work. Vol 2. 1955. E. Jones. In a letter to Carl Jung).
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Unparalleled Client Service
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Excellent Track Record
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Professional And Experienced Psychiatrist
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Excellent Track Record
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Transparent Fees
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Unparalleled Client Service
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2000+
Client Consutations
99%
Successful Recoveries
40+
Professional Psychiatrist
20mlns
Recovered Cost
We Look At The Law Differently
What Our Client's Say
