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Presenter: Brin Grenyer, PhD The Sheila Hafter Gray Memorial Lecture is underwritten by ACPEinc and honors Dr. Gray's role in advancing the importance of psychoanalytic education. The mechanisms of patient change have been described in detail by prominent psychoanalytic thinkers over the last 130 years. These descriptions form the basis for analytic training and are […]

The working alliance or the therapeutic alliance is the strongest predictor for the success of psychotherapy. The presentation explores the origins of these concepts and raises the question whether the working alliance can be applied to teaching and learning. Academics educators have already begun to do this. Their findings are presented which also inform us […]

Stacia I. Super Memorial Ethics Conference Please join us for a panel discussion on Analyst Losses: Illness and Life-Changing Events and Their Effects on Treatment Presented by: Paula L. Ellman, PhD, Marc S. Levine, MD, and Harvey J. Schwartz, MD Moderated by: Sandra S. Lashley, PsyD Sunday, December 7, 2025 1:00 – 4:00 pm Presentation and Discussion […]

What is a baby trying to say when it is crying? For British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, cries are more than a call for food or assistance. They are expressions of an all-consuming fear: of dying. Understanding this fear, and responding to it empathically was, for him, essential to the work of parenting—and analysis. But what […]

Presented by: Christian Roesler, PhD Dreams have been used in psychotherapy since Freud’s publication, The Interpretation of Dreams. First, the prominent dream interpretation theories of Freud and Jung are presented in comparison, as well as the resulting therapeutic approach. These concepts are then compared with the results of empirical dream research, which has developed since […]

The Coen Brothers 1998 film THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998) is a post-modern fever-dream, now a classic. As a comic retelling of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, the film wiggles through multiple genres with an underlying message that narrative spins as communication is distorted by desire and expectation. Discussants: Seth Alt, PhD is an independent cultural […]

Presenter: Stephen E. Finn, PhD Psychological assessment is typically viewed as something one does to diagnose psychological disorders or to plan for or evaluate an intervention. In this Grand Rounds, Dr. Finn will discuss Therapeutic Assessment, a brief intervention during which psychological testing is used collaboratively with clients to help them develop new self-narratives that […]

Spreaker: Volney Gay, PhD. We explore American slave owners who embodied the existential contradiction of American values (individual liberty) with human bondage. We focus on their struggles to defend themselves against that contradiction. We locate those struggles within the biographies of famous persons, such as President Washington, and unknown persons who claimed to be both […]

Presented by: Jon Allen, PhD Decades of research shows that factors common to various therapies contribute more to their effectiveness than the differences among them. These common factors pertain largely to the quality of the patient-therapist relationship. Prototypical are the Rogerian triad (empathy, positive regard, and genuineness) and the extensively researched therapeutic alliance. These factors […]

Middle School Latency

Presenter: Dagmar Herzog, PhD These days, the topic of intellectual disability seems frequently to function as a conversation stopper, and yet studying its history can teach us much we need to know about the seductive appeal of fascisms both past and present. The Question of Unworthy Life resituates the hundredthousandfold Nazi coercive “eugenic” sterilizations and […]

Tarsem Singh's THE FALL (2006) explores themes of trauma, healing, storytelling as therapy, and the complex relationship between a hospitalized stuntman and a young immigrant girl in 1920s Los Angeles. The movie is an illuminating example of transference and countertransference within a dyad, and that it illustrates the interesting effect of the immutable presence of […]

“Addressing Defenses: A Core Mechanism of Change in Psychodynamic Treatments “

*** Film must be viewed prior to event. *** Discussion of the film “Me Before You” Friday, January 30, 2026 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm Via Zoom 2016 (120 min) Director: Thea Sharrock Discussant: Katherine Marshall Woods, Psy.D. A girl in a small town forms an unlikely bond with a recently-paralyzed man she’s taking care […]

Speaker: John Lucas, LPC. Many clinicians are hesitant to begin working with adolescents, although there is a significant need for adolescent therapists. This course will serve as a primer on working with adolescents and their parents/caregivers from a psychodynamic framework. We will cover both theoretical and clinical perspectives. The course will highlight the contributions of […]

Speaker: Nikki Karalekas, PhD, LCSW. Love is both mysterious and a psychoanalytic term of art. Despite worrying that love was beyond the scope of scientific inquiry, Freud developed several different theories of love. Perhaps most famously, in the Three Essays on Sexuality, he writes, “The prototype of every love relationship is the child sucking at […]

Charlie and his Maps

This program will introduce Jean Laplanche’s contributions to psychoanalytic theory and practice in accessible terms. Topics will include the historical context of and influences on Laplanche’s life and thought, Laplanche’s research method of “reading Freud (with) Freud”, and Laplanche’s paradigmatic renovation of psychoanalytic theory, the General Theory of Seduction, a framework that offers a new […]

Speaker: Robert Grossmark, PhD, ABPP. Unrepresented and yet-to-be-suffered trauma and neglect announce themselves in the language of symptoms, absence and emergent enactments in the treatment field. This lecture will address the challenges when working with patients whose trauma does not avail itself to symbolization and mentalization. In this lecture I will outline how the analyst […]

When Machines Care

Presented by: Karen Hopenwasser, MD While moments of attunement with individuals manifesting dissociated self-states are often confusing, dissociative attunement can be used as a valuable tool in therapeutic process. Attunement is a synchronized awareness of implicit knowing that is nonlinear and bidirectional. It is an embodied rhythmic encounter that can be understood, in part, through […]

“When We Are Undone: Exploring Moments of Vulnerability, Surrender, and Creative Transformation Within the Analyst”

Presenter: Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD This presentation begins with a summary of the theory of overwhelm, a way of conceptualizing working with intensity and excitation that is not about guarding the self (not about emotional regulation, not about protecting the ego from the drives) but which explores what becomes possible when one reaches the limit of […]

Speaker: Alicia Naveas, LPC, MEd. This course will explore foundational concepts of cultural competency within psychodynamic frameworks. Emphasizing the work of authors such as Tummala-Narra, Salman Akhtar, and Patricia Gherovici will integrate multicultural awareness into psychoanalytic thinking. For instance, Tummala-Narra (2025) conceptualizes multicultural competence as a reflective capacity to shift perspectives and understand the patient’s […]

Presented by: Donnel Stern, PhD In the interest of integrating the social and the individual in psychoanalysis, Dr. Stern examines the relation of Althusser’s concept of interpellation and the psychoanalytic idea of dissociative enactment. Interpellation is a way of conceptualizing the creation of subjectivity via individual participation in the ideological tropes of power. Dissociative enactment […]

Resolving Rapprochement

Presenter: Dionne R. Powell, MD Yasmin Roberts Memorial Lecture Racism, and otherness, continues to be contentious for psychoanalysts to consider as a psychic phenomenon. Unlike aggression and sexuality, racism is held in silence and resistance, inhibiting exploration of this aspect of mind. By closely examining how and where the analyst/psychotherapist locates themselves racially and working […]

“Unconscious Communication Between Therapist and Patient: The Ordinary Uncanniness of Everyday Psychoanalytic Life-Back to the Future of Psychoanalysis”

Working with Shame

Presented by: Shir Shanun, PhD Civitarese (2024) writes we have a need to exist in the eyes of others, it is what makes relationships meaningful. Such loving connections and freedom in complex analytic system and the positive relationship between them are at the center of this paper. I will argue that restriction or expansion of […]