American Psychoanalytic Association

Evening Presentation - Trauma and Shame: Clinical Implications
2024-02-01 20:30 - 22:00 (America/New_York) | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
In this presentation, Dr. Peter Shabad describe how shame results from traumatic ruptures in human relationships. I will describe the developmental trajectory of shame in self-pity, resentment, entitlement, and regret for missed opportunities. I will illustrate shame with a clinical example, and talk more generally of my clinical values and principles in working with people with shame.

Donnel Stern, PhD. Interpretation: “Voice of the Field”
2024-01-27 12:00 - 14:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
For patients, it’s seldom the content of the analyst’s interpretation that’s memorable but rather the feeling of being understood. Within the interpersonal field, the analyst’s interpretation gives voice to field shifts that are jointly created between analyst and patient and make way for a new freedom to think and feel.

Bisexuality to Intersexuality: Rethinking Gender Categories And the Evolving Controversies in Treating Gender Dysphoric Youth
2024-01-27 10:00 - 13:00 | UTSW, NC8.212 (Dallas Psychoanalytic Center) & Virtual, 2201 Inwood Rd, Dallas, TX, 75390, United States
Jack Drescher, MD discusses the study of human sexual identities is changing, and these changes oblige analysts to think about sexualities in ways never envisioned by their psychoanalytic forbears. These changes also require that they be aware of some of the limitations imposed upon by their own theoretical traditions. Toward that end, this presentation begins with a definition of terms related to modern conceptions of sexuality and sexual identities. This is followed by a review of historical assumptions underlying the theory of bisexuality. The next section introduces the audience to the role of categories and hierarchies in general, and to the clinical meaning of sexual hierarchies in particular. This is followed by a discussion of the meanings and uses of the “natural.” The final section concludes with a commentary on intersexuality as an example of both the social and surgical construction of gender.

Children's Defenses Against Painful Affect: The Case of Philip and an Introduction to Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children
2024-01-27 09:30 - 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Psychoanalytic interventions occur in manualized short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy through the Regulation Focused Psychotherapy approach. In this presentation, Drs. Leon Hoffman and Timothy Rice will review the history of the psychoanalytic technique of interpreting defenses against painful affect with children, demonstrate its effectiveness in the case history of Philip, a six-year-and-five-month old boy who was felt to be autistic, and introduce the Regulation Focused Psychotherapy project. A discussion on the benefits to the analytic and academic communities of incorporating psychoanalytic interventions within testable manualized approaches as well as models for formulation and intervention in children with autism spectrum disorders will follow with audience participation and conversation.

Explorations in Psychoanalytic Companioning, Narrative and Time in Psychoanalysis
2024-01-27 09:00 - 11:00 | Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center, 2460 Fairmount Blvd #312, Cleveland, OH, 44106, United States
A Workshop presented by Robert Grossmark, PhD, ABPP

The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst: Enactive Engagement and Psychoanalytic Companioning
2024-01-26 18:30 - 20:00
This Scientific Meeting will address the challenges met when working with patients who cannot “work together” with an analyst, who are not sufficiently able to symbolize and mentalize. We will address both patients who suffer disturbances in the area of self-other definition, continuity and regulation of self, as well as patients who can appear to be more related and reflective, but harbor sequestered self states that are dominated by areas of unrepresented and unsymbolized trauma and neglect.
This presentation will present the position of the unobtrusive relational analyst who companions the patient in the emergence of illusion, fragmentation and non-relatedness and privileges the inner world of the patient that becomes the signature and defining sculptor of the clinical interaction and process.
Unrepresented and unformulated trauma and neglect announce themselves in the flow of mutual enactive engagement and rather than seek to move the patient into greater relatedness and insight, the analyst companions the patient in the emergence of yet to be known and thought narratives of trauma and fragmentation. The tilt is toward an ontological position that privileges being-with the patient rather than epistemological where meaning can be symbolized and interpreted.

COWAP Film Series: Discussions on Gender
2024-01-26 17:00 - 18:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Discussants: Oren Gozlan and Willa France. Moderators: Margarita Cereijido and Anne Adelman
The discussion will focus on issues pertaining to transgender people and society’s prejudices against them. We encourage audience participation.
Participants should view the film beforehand. It is available on Netflix and Hulu.

Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (2-day program)
2024-01-26 11:30 - 20:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
This is a two-day program. Registration is only available for the full two days. Check in starts at 8 AM each day. The program presentation is from 8:30 AM to 5 PM See below for full schedule.
The New Center for Psychoanalysis and TFP New York present a two-day training in Transference-Focused Psychotherapy
NCP, in association with TFP New York, presents the two-day training “TFP for Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism” with Master TFP Clinicians Diana Diamond, PhD and Frank Yeomans, MD.
In this two-day follow up to last year’s training, day one offerings will focus on TFP method of interpretation, working with dyads and the Dominant Object relation. Day two will focus on TFP for NPD, dissolution of the “Grandiose Self.”
Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) is a manualized, evidence-based psychoanalytic therapy for patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) that has recently been adapted for patients with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and pathological narcissism (PN).
TFP is based on a contemporary object relations model of psychological functioning that incorporates findings from attachment and neurocognitive research. The treatment focuses on internalized representations of self and other that organize the patient’s interpersonal experience.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 26
Day One will focus on working with patients with personality disorders organized at the borderline level with special emphasis on TFP tactics: the Structural interview, Contract Setting, and identifying Dominant Object Relations.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 27
Day Two will focus on TFP for Narcissistic Personality Disorder with an emphasis on the Grandiose Self that separates NPD from other personality disorders and make it especially challenging to work with.
Diana Diamond, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who specializes in theory, research, and treatment of borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. She is Professor Emerita in the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at the City University of New York and Senior Fellow at the Personality Disorders Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is also a professor in the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and is on the faculty of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She is the recipient of several awards, including most recently the Aaron Stern distinguished visiting professor award from Weill Cornell Medical College for her contributions to understanding the etiology and treatment of narcissistic pathology. She is an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and heads their research committee for the Department of Psychoanalytic Education. Dr. Diamond currently teaches, lectures, and supervises TFP nationally and internationally, and is in private practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in New York City and Sag Harbor, NY.
Frank Yeomans, MD, PhD is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College, Director of Training at the Personality Disorders Institute of Weill-Cornell, and Adjunct Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons. He is president of the International Society for Transference-Focused Psychotherapy, an Honorary Member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and past Chair of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry Committee on Psychotherapy. Dr. Yeomans’ primary interests are the development, investigation, teaching, and practice of psychotherapy for personality disorders. He headed the specialized unit for patients with Borderline Personality Disorder at the Weill Cornell Medical Center for ten years and has subsequently focused on the practice and teaching of TFP nationally and internationally.
In addition to their individual published works, Dr. Diamond and Dr Yeomans have co-authored Treating Narcissistic Pathology with Transference-Focused Psychotherapy with Barry Stern and Otto Kernberg.

Couples as Parents
2024-01-24 09:45 - 11:45 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Damian McCann presents on Couples as Parents as part of our ongoing Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy Videoconference series.

Scientific Program: A Heart Shattered, the Impenetrable Self, and a Life Unlived: An Existential-Humanistic Approach to Relentless Despair
2024-01-20 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Martha Stark, MD
Highlights the primary difference between relentless hope and relentless despair, elaborate upon the patient’s intense ambivalence about entering the world of objects, explains the relevance of the concept of dreading surrender to resourceless dependence upon another, expounds upon the importance of moments of authentic meeting as offering opportunity for restoring purpose, direction, and meaning to a life otherwise unlived .

Othering Enactments in Psychoanalytic Organizations: Problems and Promises
2024-01-18 19:00 - 21:00 | Hybrid (In-Person and Virtual)
Although we might wish for them not to, racial enactments in psychoanalytic organizations can be observed to happen regularly, exposing schisms that are borne of personal, social, and structural elements. Now, in the wake of contemporary racial polarization and galvanizing instances of brutality, and in the ongoing context of widespread social division, upheaval, and international warfare, the psychoanalytic world is grappling with where we have been, where we are now, and where we are headed.
This presentation offers a framework for understanding the problems and promises of enactments involving race, culture, and other forms of divisive difference, placing awareness of safety and the need for openness at its center. It can be perpetually difficult to engage in dialogue across the borders of entrenched difference, and not infrequently, as in the case of enactment experience, communication can seem to break down when polarization overwhelms dialogic co-commitment. Through the consideration of vignettes involving racial (and other diversity-related) enactments, the obstacles to participants’ capacity for humility and receptive, “radical” openness will be explored. Attention to matters of safety and unsafety, for all those involved, will be seen as an essential component in the creation of new dialogic possibility.

Expanding Psychoanalytic Passion: A Conference In Memory Of And Inspired By Christina Emanuel
2024-01-14 11:00 - 19:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Participants will explore challenging places of analytic work from different theoretical perspectives of working in the psychoanalytic field: Autism is the Treatment: Suturing the Rupture Between Body and Mind by Leon Brenner, Ph.D; Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Substance Use and Mis-use by D. Bradley Jones, Psy.D, LCSW; Placement, Displacement, Replacement: Where the Social and the Unconscious Interpenetrate by Steven H. Knoblauch, Ph.D.; On Using Metaphors In the Analytic Conversation by Giuseppe Civitarese, M.D. Ph.D.; Metaphors and Their Storylines by Daniel Goldin, M.F.T, Psy.D.; Interpretation: Voice of the Field by Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D.
We will experience Christina’s contributions as we elaborate on areas of her passion and expand our psychoanalytic perspectives.

28 week program: Luminaries of the Interpersonal Tradition starts January 2024
2024-01-14 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
This is a course for seasoned clinicians who wish to learn about the “Luminaries of the Interpersonal Tradition”. Four senior analysts teach the psychoanalytic contributions of Ed Levenson, Donnel Stern, Philip Bromberg, and Jay Greenberg.

Saturday Morning Case Conference: On Stranger Waves: Orienting One(s) Self in the “I Don’t Know"
2024-01-13 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
The word “stranger” comes from the Latin word extraneus, meaning “one who is on the outside.” In this latest installment of our case conference series, targeted to early career clinicians and those curious to learn more about psychodynamic approaches to therapy, PCOP Psychotherapy Associate Member, Jasmine Gibson, LCSW, will present from her work with a young bisexual woman that looks at the role of the therapist as “the stranger” as a means of navigating intersectional identities, co-creating a therapeutic space, and understanding through the statement “I don’t know.” Within this “I don’t know,” does there lie “transgenerational haunting” (Apprey, 2014) waiting to be given a form and answer?
Discussant Jill McElligott, LCSW, psychoanalyst, and PCOP faculty member, will provide insight into how the patient’s evolving identit(ies) were shaped by her history and how these issues of identity manifest via the therapy relationship.
Discussion will focus on clinical interventions and case formulation, including concrete examples of “what to say, when” from a psychodynamic lens that attendees can apply to their own clinical work. In the question and answer period that follows, attendees will have an opportunity to discuss the case with Ms. Gibson and Ms. McElligott.

Film and Mind Online: The Master Gardener
2024-01-12 23:30 - 2024-01-13 01:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
The Master Gardener (2022, 2 hr, 25 minutes), directed by Academy Award® nominee Paul Schrader, continues Schrader’s long filmic exploration of the psychology of redemption. Here, a former skinhead gang enforcer lives an apparently monastic life as he tends the grounds of a beautiful estate until others’ needs impinge on his ascetic resolve.
Learning Objectives:
As a result of attending this session, participants should be able to:
Summarize three forms/stages of Eros-Thanatos dynamics as demonstrated in The Master Gardener
Describe power dynamics in opportunistic sexual relations as portrayed in this film
Describe/discuss the place of psychoanalytic treatment in social change toward eradicating racism
Discussants:
Elena Bezzubova, PhD, is a research psychoanalyst. She teaches at UCI and NCP. Dr. Bezzubova has published a wide range of chapters and articles as well as has organized and presented at numerous conferences around the world. She maintains a private practice in Newport Beach.
Gerard Sobnosky, LMFT, is a Psychoanalyst and a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in San Pedro, CA. He holds two Master’s degrees in Psychology and is an active member at the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP) in Los Angeles. He is on the Board of Directors of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA), serves on the APsA Finance Committee, and the American Psychoanalytic Foundation, and is Treasurer of the APsA Candidates Council. In addition, he is Vice President for North America for the International Psychoanalytic Studies Organization.

Anne Alvarez - Erotic Transferences in Children
2024-01-12 09:00 - 11:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Anne Alverez presents on erotic transference as part of our Master Speaker Series videoconference.

Radical Psychoanalysis
2024-01-10 20:30 - 22:30 | Hybrid (In-Person and Virtual)
Presented by Harold Braswell, PhD, MSW. The word “radical” is generally understood to mean a break from tradition. But, etymologically, the term also connotes a return to one’s roots. A “radical” psychoanalysis would, in this sense, seem paradoxical—but perhaps, in the process, faithful to the nature of the unconscious itself. This course explores this paradoxical radicality in three areas of psychoanalytic inquiry: clinical practice, political action, and the mind-body relationship. First, we read Barnaby Barratt’s rethinking of oedipality alongside Dagmar Herzog’s analysis of Felix Guattari’s relevance to the “psychoanalytic left;” then we will read Daniel Gaztambide’s account of Freud as a “proto-postcolonial theorist” alongside Lara and Stephen Sheehi’s study of psychoanalysis in occupied Palestine; finally, Jamieson Webster’s rethinking of conversion disorder will be considered alongside Michelle Stephen’s argument about the centrality of Black Lives Matter to psychoanalytic subjectivity.
CE available.

Family Reconciliation-A Case Study
2024-01-10 09:45 - 11:45 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
David Scharff, MD presents a case study on Family Reconciliation as part of our ongoing Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy Videoconference series.

Meet the Author: Shari Thurer, Sc.D.
2024-01-09 19:30 - 21:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Join Shari Thurer, Sc.D., and a panel of discussants as she discusses her new book, Beyond the Binary: Essays on Gender with Dan Jacobs, MD, and the online audience.

The Allure of Fascism: A Psychoanalytic Conversation
2024-01-06 12:30 - 15:30 | In-person & Virtual
The Allure of Fascism and the Appointment in Samarra (presented by Era A. Loewenstein, PhD with discussion by Michael J. Diamond, PhD, FIPA)
Increasingly we are observing the rise of proto-fascist parties around the world and in the American MAGA political movement. Building on the fable The Appointment in Samarra, the presentation will discuss the characteristic features of fascistic states of mind. Reflecting on her own history that began when her father was forced to escape Vienna in 1938, following the Austrian Anschluss, Dr. Loewenstein will trace the subsequent generational futile efforts to escape extreme forms of nationalism and fascism, first in Israel, where she was born, and then in United States following the election of Donald Trump. The talk will address the author’s own blindness to the fate of the Palestinians during the Nakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948. Era will address the disturbing allure of fascistic states of mind, an allure that makes it increasingly apparent that the hideous face of fascism may be a permanent by-product of modern democracies. The talk will expand on a considerably shorter version published in February 2023 in Room: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action: https://analytic-room.com/essays/fascism-the-appointment-in-samarra-by-era-loewenstein
Dialogue: Following the presentation and the discussion, Era and Michael will engage in a conversation with John DiMartini, PhD, Moderator, and with the audience.

Connections and Conversation with George Bermudez, Ph.D.: Towards a Socio-centric Psychoanalysis Contributing to Deliberative Democracy: Social Dreaming, Community Psychoanalysis, & Reflective Citizenship
2024-01-06 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Connections and Conversation is a free monthly Zoom meeting. The core thesis, threading through several publications is that if contemporary psychoanalysis aspires to contribute to addressing our socio-political and ecological challenges, we must develop an enlarged repertoire of theory and practice. The distinguished Harvard Law School Professor, Lawrence Lessig has eloquently argued that repairing our dysfunctional democratic project is the “first problem” that must be fixed if there is to be any hope in effectively addressing all the other problems. I’ve developed the conviction that unless we co-create inclusive democratic processes and structures that authentically facilitate a citizenship which is engaged, informed, imaginatively deliberating together about the existential challenges we face, and having a meaningful impact on political decision-making—we will remain stuck in systemic dysfunction. However, I do believe (aligned with Kohut’s call for psychoanalysts to reflect on their group dynamics) that psychoanalysis has in fact, over the course of its long history and multiple streams, generated both theory and practice which has great promise for a socio-political contribution. In our conversation, I will outline some of the pieces of an emergent socio-centric psychoanalysis and suggest an emergent path forward: Community Psychoanalysis; the Psycho-social Unconscious Citizenship Dream Group process; Social Dreaming integrated with Deliberative Democracy.
The “Community Psychoanalysis” paradigm proposes an integrative path forward with which psychoanalysis can contribute robustly to multidisciplinary strategies to addressing the multivalent “wicked problems”, which are challenging our institute, regional, national, and global communities.
“Wicked problems” have no definitive formulation: these are problems which in a seemingly infinite regress are symptoms of other problems; problems which involve multiple stakeholders who like the proverbial blind men and the elephant have divergent and often incommensurable perceptions of the problem and its causes; problems which generate attempted solutions which in turn generate unintended consequences and new problems; problems with no objective right or wrong, requiring reliance on human judgment, subjectivity, and collective wisdom.

Core Principles of Treating the Suicidal Adult
2024-01-05 12:30 - 14:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presenter: J. Christopher Fowler, PhD
Description: We are acutely aware of the fear and dread of losing a patient to suicide. Unlike other medical crises, there are no biologic tests to accurately determine the level of suicide risk, nor metrics for determining when a suicidal crisis may occur (Fowler, 2012; Franklin et al., 2017). It should be no surprise then, that when our patients speak of suicide, we are anxious and eager to discern if the thought is a fleeting fantasy, a declarative statement of imminent purpose, or something else. In this zone of the unknown, countertransference fears can disrupt clinician’s capacity to mentalize our patients and can lead to precipitous unilateral crisis management before we have a chance to understand our patient’s communication and the emerging dynamic. While it is always necessary to intervene in a suicidal crisis, the most impactful intervention is curiosity and interest in the individual’s inner experience. In this roundtable discussion we will focus on 3 core principles in reducing the acute and long-term risk of suicide: 1. Engaging our radical curiosity (via mentalizing) to help patients feel understood and joined, 2. Reducing emotion dysregulation by focusing on the affective experiences driving suicidal ideation, and 3. Restoring effective mentalizing in order to reduce suicidal risk. In time our mentalizing interventions aim is to build epistemic trust (Fonagy & Campbell, 2017). An extended clinical vignette will highlight specific mentalizing interventions in the treatment.

Generating Psychic Structure - 8 session course
2024-01-05 09:00 - 11:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Learn how interpersonal processes become internalized and create the structure of the conscious and unconscious mind. Through readings, discussions, and case presentations you will gain a deeper understanding of core object relations concepts including internalization, identification, mentalization, splitting, repression, projective identification, and containment.

Wisconsin Psychoanalytic Society Meeting
2023-12-09 12:00 - 14:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Donald Moss, MD. “The Traumatizing Disorder of Everyday Life”.

Otto Fenichel’s Rundbriefe for the Present Moment: Community Psychoanalysis in the United States
2023-12-09 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
From 1934 until 1945, Otto Fenichel and a small group of left-leaning psychoanalysts were forced to flee the rise of Nazism in Germany. As refugees, they furtively shared their ideas about the politics of institutional psychoanalysis through a series of private Rundbriefe (circulating letters, or circulars), and discussed in the exchange of letters the possibility of developing a Marxist, socially conscious and engaged psychoanalysis. As Russell Jacoby outlined in his 1983 book The Repression of Psychoanalysis, the efforts of Fenichel and his colleagues did not prevent the ultimate dormancy and repression of the more radical social project of psychoanalysis, at least in the United States.
This program hopes to take up the Rundbriefe experience at a sociopolitical moment that echoes that of Fenichel, with war in Europe and across the globe and the rise of authoritarianism. Between September and November 2023, a group of psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, and scholars began to exchange letters responding to Letter One, Take II that the conference organizers wrote using Fenichel’s Rundbriefe as a starting point, and which is available for review at www.rundbriefe.com. This conference will offer a live Zoom rendition of the circular exchange experience and an open conversation between a group of panelists about the future of Community Psychoanalysis in the United States.

Connections and Conversation with Miri Abramis, Ph.D.: Culture and the Texture of Experience: Multiple Systems Perspective from an Interpersonal Psychoanalytic Lens
2023-12-03 17:00 - 18:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Connections and Conversation is a free monthly Zoom meeting. From the first contact with our patients, we begin to engage the question: who is this person who has sought out our help? How do we understand their suffering? The maverick founders of interpersonal school of psychoanalysis, originally known as the cultural school, each in his/her own way, focused on the powerful impact of culture and social systems on the psyche. This work has been most cogently extended in contemporary thought by Edgar Levenson. In the work of these practitioners and thinkers, we can see how cultural forces are transmitted through family systems and other social institutions including in the relationship between therapist and patient. Today I will introduce what I am calling the cultural interpersonal lens, a careful theorizing of the human organism evolving in multiple social systems and the forces that contribute to pathology and problems of living. I will discuss the assumptions and power of this perspective in our contemporary clinical work.

2023 Stacia I. Super Memorial Ethics Conference
2023-12-03 13:00 - 16:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Conflicts and Ethics in Psychoanalytic Consultation and SupervisionPresenter: Nancy McWilliams, PhD
Discussant: Kit MacLean, PsyD
Program Description:
This ethics conference aims to be of practical value to supervisors and their supervisees. Utilizing vignettes from the presenter and participants, we will look at recurrent controversies in psychoanalytic supervision, the “vital signs” that supervisors monitor that go beyond symptom relief, ethical and gate-keeping responsibilities in supervision, and some implications of differences between supervisor and supervisee (and between supervisee and patient) in areas such as personality, identifications, culture, sexuality, and privilege.

"Note To Self: It's Time to Learn Lacan!" - An Introduction to Lacanian Clinical Theory and Practice
2023-12-02 12:00 - 18:00 | Hybrid (In-Person and Virtual)
Bruce Fink joins NCP to discuss Lacan’s Clinical Theory”Analysts on the whole imagine that to understand is an end in itself… To think, it is often better not to understand; and one can gallop along, understanding for miles and miles, without the slightest thought being produced.” – Lacan, 1958
This meeting is designed for analytically oriented therapists interested in learning how Lacan’s ideas translate into clinical practice. Lacan’s clinical theory will be spelled out in detail; attendees need not be pre-acquainted with Lacan’s work. Attendees should come away with a solid grasp of the reasoning behind the Lacanian emphasis on bringing about four specific change-producing clinical events. The goal of this program is to challenge preconceived notions about how therapy works–particularly, the belief that psychic change chiefly results from a conveyance of the analyst’s knowledge about the patient to the patient—typically in the form of interpretations. The program is structured as a dialogue between student (Richard Tuch) and teacher (Bruce Fink).
Lacan emphasized the task of creating a facilitating environment favoring the emergence of sequestered psychic content that comes forth unwittingly when free association reveals to the patient things he barely knew he knew until he heard himself say as much out loud. Lacanians also facilitate a patient’s use of symbolic (meaningful) speech and tolerance of uncertainty and states of unknowing.
A study of Lacan’s clinical theory calls for nothing less than a thoughtful reconsideration of psychoanalysis’ most basic assumptions about how therapy effects change:
Whether the unconscious can be made conscious.
Whether improving a patient’s tolerance of uncertainty and the unknown is a clinically vital goal.
Whether deconstructing (calling into question) a patient’s core assumptions and prevailing beliefs about who he is as a person is as centrally important as Lacanians claim it to be.
Whether treatment is better served when the analyst is less forthcoming and less clear about his ideas about the patient.
Whether it is important to conduct treatment in a fashion that emphasizes the patient’s responsibility for his suffering and for the lion’s share of the clinical work.

Potential Space and Organizational Trauma
2023-11-30 20:30 - 22:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by M. Gerard Fromm, PhD
In January, 2002, an annual Group Relations Conference was held as it had been for many years, and one of its large-group events began ordinarily enough. But, four months after 9/11/2001, members could not stay in the room to do the work of that session. Even though the recent disaster was never mentioned, the group acted as though the public space had become “Ground Zero”, and they fled to their small groups. The “potential space”, the space for play, for a vitalizing sense that something could happen instantly became an unconscious certainty that disaster would happen. The seven or so people left in what felt like the debris spontaneously decided to study the effects of 9/11 on the conference – clearly taking up a piece of work on behalf of everyone: the work of studying how trauma had collapsed potential space. This presentation will examine this question through three case examples.

Linking Field Theory and Systems Psychodynamics to Enhance Leadership: Perspectives on Racism, Discrimination and Othering
2023-11-30 11:00 - 13:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Addressing the challenges presented by systemic racism, discrimination, and othering in our psychoanalytic and community-based organizations is a long-term, multi-generational endeavor. As part of that effort, the Council for Leadership and Organizational Studies (CLOS) of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education (DPE), American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA), in collaboration with the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), is offering an innovative virtual course to the future international leaders of psychoanalysis: current candidates, students, and recent graduates of psychoanalytic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy programs. Enhancing their knowledge and skills in leadership and group dynamics will help them, their psychoanalytic organizations, and other community-based organizations in which they participate to more effectively address the challenges of systemic racism and othering.
This virtual seminar will explore critical concepts in systems psychodynamics and field theory, such as intersubjective processes, group relations, the social unconscious, projective identifications, splitting, and social defenses. Thinking of the individual and the group simultaneously, developing what Bion referred to as binocular vision, we will deepen our understanding of racism and othering in ourselves and in the groups in which we are embedded. In addition, we will consider applications of these concepts organizationally to enhance our individual and collective efforts to become more inclusive, more open in our thinking, and equitable in sharing power. Each session will be evenly divided between theoretical and experiential components. In the group-as-a-whole we will discuss key points in the assigned readings. Then we will break into pre-assigned small self-study groups to observe and reflect on our own group process as it relates to our learning together about racism and othering. Membership in the small groups will remain constant throughout the course. There is no charge for this course. However, we ask registrants to commit to attending all 8 sessions, if possible, in order to foster trust, cohesion, and a deeper level of engagement.
Co-Leaders: James W Barron, PhD and Paula Christian-Kliger, PhD
Guest Faculty: Anton Hart, PhD, Beverly J. Stoute, MD, Mira Erlich-Ginor, M.A., and Shmuel Erlich, Ph.D., ABPP
Candidate Faculty: Himanshu Agrawal, MD
Thursdays 11 AM–1:30 PM ET / 4–6:30 PM GMT
October 5, 12, 19, 26; November 2, 9, 16, 30
