Discover Your 2026 APsA National Meeting Program Track
Every winter, the APsA National Meeting gathers clinicians, scholars, candidates, students, and curious thinkers into one conversational space. It’s a place where psychoanalysis is not only studied but celebrated through papers, case discussions, panels, and chance hallway debates. This year’s Meeting continues that tradition with programming designed to support attendees’ psychoanalytic thought and practice interests.
To make the Meeting navigable, we’ve organized sessions, workshops, and discussion groups into several program tracks. Think of these tracks as a tailored plan for your interests. Whether you’re training, deep in clinical work, pursuing academic inquiry, studying human development, or just beginning your professional journey, each track offers a way for you to make the most out of the Meeting.
Below, you’ll find an overview of the tracks available this year: Candidates, Psychotherapists, Academics & Scholars, Researchers, and Students & Residents. Consider this content a guided map through a Meeting built for many kinds of minds.
Candidates Track: Immersed in Clinical Growth
The Candidates Program Track is designed for psychoanalysts-in-training, psychotherapists-in-training, and academic trainees, combining clinical depth, contemporary theory, and professional community-building. Offerings include senior analyst presentations, interactive workshops, discussion groups, research sessions, and award presentations. Core clinical themes span difficult-to-detect personality dynamics such as the pseudo-self, analytic listening through Bionian Field Theory, insight in the curative process, case formulation and treatment impasses, addiction, tele-analysis versus in-person work, and the evolving analytic frame. Special attention is given to supervision, research, ethics, risk management, and the integration of technology—including AI—into psychoanalytic training and education.
Equally central are sessions addressing the social, cultural, and institutional realities shaping contemporary psychoanalysis. These include international perspectives on supervision, distance and hybrid training models, the psychological impact of social media and digital devices, LGBTQ+ clinical and professional issues, racial equity and leadership in polarized contexts, and DEIBA challenges faced by candidates and trainees. The program also emphasizes connection and professional identity through social events, council meetings, forums, poster sessions, and informal gatherings with distinguished analysts. Together, these sessions aim to deepen clinical skill, critical reflection, and community engagement while supporting trainees as they navigate both the intellectual and lived complexities of psychoanalytic work today. See all the sessions offered in the Candidate track here.
Psychotherapists Track: Deepening Clinical Practice
The Psychotherapist Program Track offers a mix of clinical depth, theoretical exploration, and practical engagement for psychoanalytic psychotherapists and psychotherapy trainees working across diverse settings. Sessions range from close clinical discussions on child analysis, parent–infant work, trauma, and countertransference to explorations of contemporary challenges such as distance treatment, hybrid education, social media, artificial intelligence, and the evolving analytic frame. Across formats (discussion groups, workshops, and immersive seminars), presenters draw on clinical material, research, and theory to illuminate how psychoanalytic thinking adapts across developmental stages, cultures, technologies, and institutional contexts.
This track also emphasizes community, advocacy, and professional sustainability. Attendees will find opportunities to engage with empirical research linking psychoanalytic technique to treatment outcomes, workshops focused on insurance advocacy and practice-building, and conversations addressing LGBTQ+ clinical work, hospital-based treatment, and socio-political pressures shaping mental health care today. Social events, networking gatherings, and collaborative spaces foster connection among clinicians at different career stages. Together, these offerings position the Psychotherapist Track as a place to refine clinical listening, strengthen technique, and join a community committed to depth-oriented psychotherapy in a changing world. See all the sessions offered in the Psychotherapist Track here.
Academics & Scholars Track: Theory in Dialogue with the Humanities
The Academics & Scholars Track makes cross-pollination across interests intentional. Sessions explore the richness of psychoanalytic theory in dialogue with the humanities, asking how the unconscious shapes meaning in culture, art, politics, and social life. On this track, you might find yourself inside a discussion of “The Political Clinic”, Carolyn Laubender’s award-winning study of psychoanalysis and social justice, which reconsiders how political life enters the consulting room and how early analytic traditions across Europe and the Global South continue to shape today’s debates. You may also encounter cultural analyses rooted in contemporary literature, explorations of how social bonds fray and reform across civilizations, or philosophical inquiries into subjectivity, narrative, ethics, and the symbolic life of the psyche. These are sessions in which psychoanalytic thought becomes not only a clinical lens but also a way of understanding the world’s deeper structures.
At the Meeting, scholars find a rare community in which theoretical inquiry is central to the field. Conversations regularly bridge clinical experience with cultural critique, creating exchanges that neither clinicians nor academics could access on their own. These moments remind us that psychoanalytic theory remains alive and nourished by the humanities. This Track invites you into that intellectual ferment—a space where analytic concepts travel, shift, and take on new shapes. It’s an opportunity to join a community that values rigorous, imaginative thinking and to explore psychoanalysis as both a method of interpretation and a cultural force. See all Academic & Scholars sessions here.
Researchers Track: Advancing the Science of Mind and Treatment
The Research Track foregrounds psychoanalysis as a living, testable discipline grounded in empirical inquiry, theoretical innovation, and interdisciplinary dialogue. At its core is the Research Training Program (RTP), a two-day, in-person intensive designed to equip clinicians and scholars with rigorous tools for conducting psychoanalytically informed research. The program reflects a broader commitment to cultivating a culture of scientific inquiry within psychoanalysis—addressing its historical gaps in research training while demonstrating how qualitative and quantitative methods can deepen theory, assessment, and treatment. Across panels and discussions, the track makes a sustained case for psychoanalysis’s continued vitality by demonstrating how and why it works.
Running throughout the National Meeting, Research Track sessions bridge clinical practice with neuroscience, complexity theory, developmental psychology, and consciousness studies. Highlights include a three-session sequence on neuropsychoanalysis that translates contemporary brain science into psychoanalytic theory and technique; symposia examining existential maturation, therapeutic action as a complex system, and the empirical study of motives across development; and a landmark meta-analysis linking psychoanalytic interpretations to treatment outcomes. Poster sessions, interdisciplinary interviews, and neuroscience-focused presentations further animate the exchange between data and depth. Together, the Research Track invites attendees into a rigorous, expansive conversation about the future of psychoanalysis as both a clinical and scientific endeavor.
The Research Training Program is accepting proposals through December 31. To see all sessions available in the Research Track, click here.
Students & Residents Track: Opening the Door to Psychoanalytic Thinking
The Students and Residents Track centers on clinical depth, developmental thinking, and the lived realities of training in today’s social and institutional contexts. Through two Fellows-led clinical conferences, trainees engage closely with cases that link individual suffering to broader developmental, cultural, and systemic forces. One explores rest as a clinical and political act in the face of internalized oppression, tracing how chronic stress and embodied defenses shape illness and psychic life. The other examines integrity versus despair in later adulthood, using Eriksonian, Winnicottian, and Kohutian frameworks to illuminate obsessionality, somatic symptoms, and the slow emergence of authenticity in treatment.
Complementing these case-based conversations, the track offers opportunities for scholarly exchange and practical skill-building. Trainees are invited to the annual research poster session, fostering dialogue across theory, practice, and interdisciplinary research. A dedicated workshop on medical student education introduces the Y Model, an integrated, evidence-based framework for teaching core psychotherapy competencies across modalities. Together, these programs support students and residents in developing clinical imagination, research curiosity, and foundational skills—while affirming their place in a psychoanalytic community committed to thoughtful, humane training.
Students and residents will leave the National Meeting with a sense of possibility: a glimpse of the many professional futures that open up when psychoanalysis becomes part of one’s toolkit. See all available sessions in the Students & Residents track here.
Continuing the Conversation
The APsA National Meeting thrives because it brings together minds at different stages, in various roles, working within different professional traditions. These tracks aren’t intended as rigid lanes; their meant to show the variety of ways attendees can enter a shared conversation about how humans think, feel, relate, imagine, defend, and grow. As you explore the sessions, workshops, and discussion groups available at the 2026 National Meeting, we encourage you to use the tracks as guides rather than boundaries. You can also always view the full schedule in the preliminary program.
Whether you come as an analyst, a candidate, a psychotherapist, a scholar, a researcher, or a student stepping into the field for the first time, the National Meeting offers a place to expand your thinking in community. These tracks help ensure you’ll find the conversations and people who will shape your analytical point of view. If you haven’t already registered, we invite you to do so today!
