Vision
Mental health, as I see it, is not about absence of anxiety or depression, inner conflicts or turmoil. These mental states are signs of “aliveness” of which everyone is familiar with. It is when nothing seems to matter anymore, when the love of those around you has lost all personal significance, that mental illness comes in.
When being stuck in an isolated state of mind all the personal capacities for intimacy, sense of direction and purpose get lost. As a psychotherapist, trained in psychoanalysis, I consider it a privilege to share and understand in my patients what keeps them away from feeling worthy and capable of constructing a meaningful life for themselves. Knowing that no single person has ever lived this life before and therefore there is no authority to rely upon. No matter how much training, clinical experience or theoretical information I have gathered, there, in the privacy of the consulting room, on a daily basis I get confronted with these issues in my patients and, they confront me with my issues as well.
Sometimes I can understand and explain some important insight by which they feel understood and understand themselves much better and a healing process starts. But most of the times I have to be patient in the uncomfortable state of not-knowing, waiting for some significant self-disclosure from where the patient realizes that he/she knows, feels that there actually is a person inside of him/her that can create, or, re-create, or, restore, the relationship with the world around him/her and feel the significance of his/her own mental, physical and emotional actions. Which does not necessarily produce comfort. Most of the time it produces a lot of anxiety. The difference from before is that the anxiety has no undifferentiated, paralyzing quality.
And there, in my opinion, mental health comes in.
This is the work I am dedicated to.
Curriculum vitae
Dr. Rini Kerver (1955) is BIG registered psychotherapist and from 1996- 2014 Candidate psychoanalyst at the Psychoanalytic Society. From 2009 – 2011 he was a board member of the Psychoanalytic Society.
He studied philosophy and clinical psychology (cum laude) in Utrecht and graduated in 1991 with a multicenter study on risk factors in the development of Depression. Since 1987 he has been a regular expert for justice, from 1992 to 1996 teacher and supervisor Interpersonal Psychotherapy at the training of psychiatrists and teacher Psychopathology and psychodynamic diagnostics at the training for clinical psychologists.
Since 1992 he has been associated with various outpatient clinics, and he was founder of the Veldwijk Research Institute. From that time on, he also works in his own practice.
He is co-author of the Interpersonal Psychotherapy Handbook and author of several scientific articles on the influence of early traumatization on psycho-biological development. Until 1 May 2011, in addition to his private practice, he was part-time as a psychotherapist at Scelta The Hague, an expertise center for the treatment of personality disorders. From 2016 he is part-time affiliated with GGZ-Reflection in The Hague, a specialist center for traumatized refugees, where he is also a P-trainer.
He is married and the father of 2 daughters.
