APsA Candidates' Council Seminar: Fashion & the Psychoanalytic Frame
2025-09-20 12:00 - 14:00 (America/New_York) | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
APsA’s Candidates’ Council Online Seminar:
Instructor: Bonnie J. Buchele, Ph.D., ABBP, DFAGPA

This seminar will focus on the relationship between fashion and the frame as it relates to the analysand, the analyst and the process. Dr. Buchele will give a brief review of the literature and speak of her relationship with fashion as well as the role it has played in her work with patients. These remarks will be followed by a group discussion where participants can share thoughts and ideas about their relationships with fashion in the psychoanalytic world. Registration is required and limited (there is a wait list). Sessions will not be recorded.
————————
The Candidates Seminar Series events are a benefit of APsA Membership for its In-Training Members.
Not yet an APsA member? To learn more & join, visit apsa.org/in-training

Click to view the Flyer | Click to Register

The Unfinished Copernican Revolution: An Introduction to the Work of Jean Laplanche
2025-09-20 12:00 - 16:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Join Dr. Lawrence Hedges, Ph.D., Psy.D., ABPP for The Unfinished Copernican Revolution: An Introduction to the Work of Jean Laplanche, a thought-provoking salon exploring how Freud’s “four insults to human narcissism” continue to shape our understanding of the human psyche. Drawing on Laplanche’s revolutionary ideas about the unconscious, seduction, and the influence of “otherness,” Dr. Hedges will illuminate how these concepts deepen clinical practice and our sense of identity. This engaging online event offers rich theoretical insights and practical applications for therapists, students, and anyone curious about the evolving landscape of psychoanalysis.
CE.

Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic, Borderline, and Psychotic Personality Organizations.
2025-09-27 10:00 - 13:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
The conference will be divided between exploring four different psychoanalytic models and their relevance to the treatment of major primitive psychopathologies. Dr. Panajian will discuss Freud’s understanding of two principles of mental functioning, thinking, negation, disavowal, and delusions as an attempt to recover psychic functioning. Klien’s paranoid schizoid position, depressive position, manic and obsessive defenses will be discussed. Depressive position and capacity to tolerate paradoxes will be viewed by clinical examples. Winnicott’s psych-soma and the relation to the mind, transitional phenomena, and fear of breakdown will be explored. Bion’s model of complexity, theory of thinking, and various types of transformations and disturbance of time and space will be discussed. Dr.Panajian will discuss Piaget’s model of cognitive development of concrete operation and their significance in understanding schizoid, borderline, and psychotic functioning. The significance of space centered interpretations will be illustrated in primitive pathological functioning. Dr. Panajian will demonstrate clinical examples of the treatment of narcissistic, borderline, schizoid, psychotic personality, bipolar psychotic and a schizophrenic patient. Such concepts as negation, the work of the negative, negative hallucination, infinity and emotional experience, the emergence of the body in time and space will be discussed. Furthermore, infantile psychic withdrawal, chaotic analytic field, vertical and horizontal splitting will be discussed clinically. The notion of time and space continuum, sensory-motor schemas and their role in developing internal and external space will be demonstrated in borderline and psychotic patients.

INTRODUCTION TO THEORY AND TECHNIQUE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
2025-09-27 11:45
This seminar will present basic tenets of theory and practice in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, including a consideration of the differences between the two. The first half of the seminar will include fundamental psychoanalytic and psychodynamic concepts, as well as psychoanalytic models of the mind, of development, and of technique. The second half of the seminar will consist of the presentation of analytic case material illustrating these models and concepts, and their practical application.

Conflict Statements with Martha Stark, M.D.
2025-09-27 12:00 - 14:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Dr. Stark’s therapeutic approach to working through neurotic conflictedness, “Conflict Statements: Leveraging the Patient’s Anxiety to Incentivize Transformation and Growth”

The Parent-Child Relationship, Applications to Adult Treatment, Part I
2025-10-03 11:00 - 15:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
This conference will feature Peter Fonagy, PhD, and Ed Tronick, PhD — distinguished researchers and scholars who have had long academic careers studying and theorizing about the clinical processes that contribute to human growth and therapeutic change. The clinical processes in the psychoanalytic treatment of adult patients have long been viewed as sharing similarities with the parent-child relationship. While psychoanalysis began with a focus on the patient’s drives and conflicts, the emphasis shifted to intersubjective processes with the emergence of object relations theory, self-psychology, and interpersonal psychoanalysis. With the relational turn in psychoanalysis, we have expanded our interest in infant observations and empirical studies of the parent-child relationship to illuminate the dyadic processes that shape therapeutic change.
In his presentation Epistemic Trust and Trauma: Pernicious Impact and Therapeutic Solutions, Professor Fonagy introduces the concept of epistemic trust—the fundamental human capacity enabling us to learn from others who are trustworthy and collectively establish shared beliefs and ideas, which we recognize as ‘culture’. The talk will highlight emerging evidence underscoring the critical role of epistemic trust in social learning and examine research demonstrating its vulnerability to adversity, particularly during childhood.
Dr. Ed Tronick’s presentation is titled How the Qualities of Infant-Parent Interaction and Meaning-Making Shed Light on the Analytic Relationship. Tronick asserts that the processes driving development of the child, primarily those embedded in the parent-child relationship, are the most striking mechanism of human change. Therapy, too, works to change the meanings individuals make of themself in the world. The suggestion is advanced that the qualities of the parent-child relationship that promote change and growth can aid our understanding of the success or failure of the analytic relationship to create change.
CE.

Reading and Process Group: Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation
2025-10-03 13:30 - 15:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Join Dr. Holly Han and Dr. Shirley Liao for a five-week, psychoanalytically-informed group exploring the text Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation by David L Eng and Shinhee Han (2019). Together, we will reflect on the social and psychic dimensions of racial identity and belonging in the lives of Asian Americans.

The Parent-Child Relationship, Applications to Adult Treatment, Part II
2025-10-04 11:00 - 15:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Selma Fraiberg and colleagues’ seminal article, “Ghosts in the Nursery,” brought our attention to the infant-parent relationship and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Since the publication of the article in 1975, infant observations and empirical studies have continued to elucidate the developmental consequences of the parent-child relationship and implications for adult treatment. In Part II of this conference, we will have the opportunity to learn more about these issues from two renowned scholars, Beatrice Beebe, PhD and Arietta Slade, PhD. Both of them have researched, theorized, and written about these topics over the course of their distinguished careers.
In her presentation, How Can We See What We Don’t See: Face-to-Face Communication in Infant Research and Adult Treatment, Dr. Beebe asserts that face-to-face communication is essential to intimacy across the life-span. In infancy, face-to-face communication predicts social and cognitive development. Subtle nonverbal behavior during face-to-face communication is rapidly moving, multi-modal, and too fast to fully capture with the naked eye – in both adult-adult and infant-adult interaction. Because it is so rapid, much of our nonverbal communication is largely out of awareness – but it has tremendous communicative power.
Dr. Slade will present The Relational Foundations of Reflection: Enhancing Attachment and Reflective Parenting. She describes a framework for clinical work that grew out of her decades of work directing Minding the Baby, an interdisciplinary home visiting program. The program is aimed at enhancing attachment and mentalizing in parents with histories of complex trauma, adversity, and extreme stress. A history of severely disrupted attachments poses unique challenges to mentalizing and thus to parenting, insofar as threat and dysregulation preclude intimacy and attunement.
CE.

Secrets in Psychotherapy: Clinical, Somatic, and Ethical Perspectives
2025-10-04 12:00 - 14:00 | Hybrid (In-person at New Orleans-Birmingham Psychoanalytic Center & Virtual)
Kathryn Zerbe, MD will discuss how hearing secrets is an often-overlooked yet critical aspect of clinical practice, necessitating that therapists understand the ethical complications and potential for powerful, unanticipated reactions that can arise from these disclosures in order to better assist their patients and themselves.
CE

Morris Eagle Psychoanalytic Research Award & Lecture: Introducing the Revised Standard Edition of Freud’s Psychological Works
2025-10-04 12:00 - 15:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
The Morris Eagle Psychoanalytic Research Lecture is an annual NCP Lecture in honor of the career and contributions of Morris Eagle.
Introducing the Revised Standard Edition of Freud’s Psychological Works:
Can the existing English translation by James Strachey of Freud’s Psychological Works be salvaged and updated, or is a completely fresh start called for?
This is the question that confronted Mark Solms, the editor of the Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, when he began his massive task thirty years ago. In this presentation, Solms will provide the answers that he came to and explain why. This will entail an interesting consideration of the widespread accusation that Strachey ‘falsely scientized’ Freud.
Solms clarifies Freud’s concepts, updating them and putting them into perspective with his revisions, offering nuanced meanings of core psychoanalytic concepts and terms through clarification of the multiple languages (German, Latin, Greek) the text went through to arrive at Strachey’s English, as well as examination of the cultural and national roots of the author and his contemporaries. The revisions include previously untranslated or omitted works by Freud, such as new letters, lectures, essays, and case studies, some of which shed new light on Freud’s views on women, homosexuality, and his early neuroscience research. The talk will entail a birds-eye overview of the many ways in which the Revised Standard Edition differs from the old one, focusing on Solms’ experience, insights, reflections, and the potential implications for psychoanalytic education, treatment and research.
Second Annual NCP Eagle Award for Outstanding Contribution to Psychoanalytic Research 2025 Honored Awardee: Mark Solms
With this award, we honor Mark Solms’ reframing Freud’s Legacy: Newly included works and corrected translations by Solms reveal Sigmund Freud as more progressive and complex than previously recognized. Solms’ integration of Freud’s neuroscientific writings and psychoanalytic theory in the new edition fosters fresh interdisciplinary dialogue between neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and the humanities.
Presenter
Mark Solms, PhD,?is Director of Neuropsychology at the Neuroscience Institute of the University of Cape Town.?He is also Honorary Lecturer in Neurosurgery at the St Bartholomew’s Royal London Hospital School of Medicine and an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists. He is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and the American and South African Psychoanalytic Associations. He is director of training, as well a training analyst, of the South African Psychoanalytical Association and director of the Science Department American Psychoanalytic Association. He is co-chair of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society, and was founding editor of its journal, Neuropsychoanalysis. He was previously research chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He has received numerous honors and awards, including the Sigourney Prize and the Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award of the IPA. He has published?350 scientific papers, and?eight?books, the latest being The Hidden Spring (Norton, 2021). He is the authorized editor and translator of the Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24 volumes) and the forthcoming Complete Neuroscientific Works of Sigmund Freud (4 volumes). In early 2026, he will publish The Only Cure – a neuroscientific defense of psychoanalysis in this era of biological psychiatry. His research interests have spanned the brain mechanisms of dreaming and those of consciousness and emotion (which prove to be deeply entwined). The major focus of his current research is the quest for an artificial consciousness.
Discussants
Lois Oppenheim, PhD, is University Distinguished Scholar, Professor of French, and Chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Montclair State University where she also teaches Medical Humanities. Dr. Oppenheim is Scholar Associate Member, on the faculty, and Chair of the Program Committee of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and Honorary Member of the Psychoanalytic Society of the William Alanson White Institute. She has authored or edited fifteen books, including Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion – awarded the Courage to Dream Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association – and co-authored For Want of Ambiguity: Order and Chaos in Art, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience. Other titles include Psychoanalysis and the Artistic Endeavor; A Curious Intimacy: Art and Neuro-Psychoanalysis; and The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art. Dr. Oppenheim is currently completing a book on neuroaesthetics and the intersection of art and science under contract with Routledge. In addition, she has published over 100 book chapters and papers, is the co-creator of two documentary films on mental health, and serves on the Advisory Board of the Psychoanalytic Horizons series of Bloomsbury Academic Publishing.
Riccardo Steiner, is a distinguished psychoanalyst, historian, and author based in London, recognized for his substantial contributions to the understanding of psychoanalytic theory, history, and its sociopolitical context. Born and educated in Italy, Steiner relocated to England in the 1970s to complete his psychoanalytic training, subsequently becoming a full member and Distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He has also served as the Society’s Honorary Archivist and as Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association’s committee on Archives. Steiner’s scholarly work is especially noted for illuminating the intellectual and organizational controversies that shaped British psychoanalysis during and after the Second World War. He co-edited, with Pearl King, the landmark volume The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941–45, which meticulously documents the debates between Kleinian, Viennese, and “middle group” analysts. This work has been acclaimed internationally, earning nominations for Book of the Year by both the American Association of Psychoanalysis and the Paris Association of Psychoanalysis.
Moderator
Barton J. Blinder MD, PhD, is an active member of the NPC Senior Faculty in Adult and Child Psychoanalysis and Chair of the NPC Research Committee. He is an active member of APsA and IPA and a Distinguished Life Fellow of APA and AAPAC. He is a Clinical Professor and past Director of Eating Disorder Treatment Research at UC Irvine and additionally on the teaching faculty at the University of Washington and USC. At APA, in addition to leadership, Dr. Blinder participated in the establishment of Practice Guidelines, Commission and Caucus on Psychotherapy in Psychiatry, and editing a major text on Integrating Psychotherapy and Pharmacotherapy. His active research interests include Autobiographical memory, Neuropsychoanalysis, Spontaneous Thought, and Free Association in Psychoanalysis and relation to Neuroscience Contributions, and Treatment Resistant Depression and Early Life Trauma, Response to psychoanalytic/psychodynamic treatment, psychodevelopmental and neurobiologic roots of somatization, embodiment and eating disorders. He is in private practice of Adult and Child Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis in Newport Beach.
CE.

Psychoanalysis Creativity and the Arts: Session 1: “Lo creativo y lo vital”
2025-10-04 14:00 - 16:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Psychoanalysis Creativity and the Arts: Session 1 of 3: “Lo creativo y lo vital”
Presented by
Alfredo Panceira, MD, Jani Santamaria, PhD, Ariel Liberman, PhD, and Rosa Aurora Chavez, MD, PhD, FABP
Saturday, October 4, 2025
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm (2 CME/CE)
Presentation and Discussion via Zoom
*This first session will be conducted in Spanish with Closed Caption translation available through Zoom. The other 2 sessions will be in English
Presentation:
In this panel presentation we will discuss how creativity is linked from early ages to vitality, and how both are creativity and vitality are activated through psychoanalysis. This seminar will be in Spanish. English translations and related materials will be shared. This will be our first event in Spanish acknowledging the vast community of Spanish speaking psychotherapists and psychoanalysts throughout the USA and providing the opportunity to also invite important contributors to the field of psychoanalysis from Latinoamerica and Spain.
Flyer: https://wbcp.memberclicks.net/assets/docs/PR/25-26/Psychoanalysis%20Creativity%20and%20the%20Arts%202025_26%20flier%20Multi-Session%20program%20%28B%29.pdf
Registration Link: https://wbcp.memberclicks.net/reg_psy_creativity_arts_25-26#/

Paul A. Dewald Lecture: The New Other: A.I., What Have We Created & Why?
2025-10-04 16:00
DEWALD LECTURE: The New Other: A.I. What have we created, and why? (Amy Levy, PsyD)
Humanity has engineered a new Other. Sometimes referred to as “alien intelligence,” AI technology has the capability to think about our minds, communicate with us at conscious and unconscious levels, and act as a new “container” for human psychic life. From a psychoanalytic perspective, AI is our symptom. What does it reflect about humanity? Our conflicts and our desires? Join Dr. Amy Levy as she shines light on the meanings, origins, and effects of this very human innovation. 1.5 Credits

Paul A Dewald Lecture: A.I., What Have We Created & Why?
2025-10-04 16:00
Humanity has engineered a new Other. Sometimes referred to as “alien intelligence,” AI technology has the capability to think about our minds, communicate with us at conscious and unconscious levels, and act as a new “container” for human psychic life. From a psychoanalytic perspective, AI is our symptom. What does it reflect about humanity? Our conflicts and our desires? Join Dr. Amy Levy as she shines light on the meanings, origins, and effects of this very human innovation.

LGBTQ+ Workshop: Monstrousness and Aliveness: Engaging Gender in Psychoanalysis
2025-10-05 13:00 - 16:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
LGBTQ+ Workshop
Please join us as
Sien Rivera, MD and Justin Shubert, PsyD, PhD
present
Monstrousness and Aliveness: Engaging Gender in Psychoanalysis
Sunday, October 5, 2025
Public Session:
1:00 – 4:00 pm
Presentation and Discussion Via Zoom
Presentation: This workshop seeks to explore a range of engagements with gender in the psychoanalytic encounter. One portion of the workshop will explore how contemporary anti-trans legislation and cultural narratives of monstrosity distort the analytic space for trans and gender expansive patients, threatening their capacity for playful work, while highlighting how trans survival and creativity might persist in the face of annihilating projections. The other portion turns to aliveness: how loosening gender constraints in the consulting room allows for the exploration and re-avowal of certain, gendered parts and ultimately can lead to a unique, profound experience of feeling alive. Together, these presentations underscore psychoanalysis as both refuge and crucible—where both monstrousness and aliveness might meet.
Presenter: Sien Rivera, MD, is Assistant Program Director of the Prisma Health Midlands/University of South Carolina General Psychiatry residency program, and Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine in Columbia, SC. They received their medical degree from SUNY Stony Brook School of Medicine and completed their general psychiatry residency and child adolescent psychiatry fellowship at Prisma Health Midlands/University of South Carolina. They are a former fellow of the American Psychoanalytic Association and a winner of the Ralph Roughton Paper Award. They are the former co-chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Committee on Gender and Sexuality and they present nationally and internationally on topics related to gender, sexuality, and new technologies.
Presenter: Justin Shubert, PsyD, PhD is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst working in private practice in Los Angeles, where he is the founder and director of a psychodynamic private practice group called Silver Lake Psychotherapy. He is the former chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Committee on Gender and Sexuality, the past Diversity Editor of The American Psychoanalyst, a founding member of the Committee for Diversities and Sociocultural Issues at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, and has been a faculty member at the Los Angeles Institute of Psychoanalytic Studies, The Wright Institute of Los Angeles, and the New Center for Psychoanalysis. He is endlessly fascinated by the mystery and wonder contained in gender & sexuality.
Registration Link: https://wbcp.memberclicks.net/registration_lgbtq_workshop_public_10-5-25#/
Flyer: https://wbcp.memberclicks.net/assets/docs/PR/25-26/LGBTQ%20FLIER%20Public%2010-5-25%28B%29.pdf

Erotic Entanglements in the Search to Be and Belong: Traversing the Forcefield of Dependency and Desire
2025-10-07 20:00 - 22:00 | Hybrid (In-Person and Virtual)
This paper takes up the clinical challenges of working with patients for whom the repetitive pursuit of intense, erotic relationships both expresses and conceals yearnings to be and belong. While sexual experiences can elicit core fantasies of transformation, awareness of the very otherness that offers such promise also threatens a fragile self and is thus negated. A detailed clinical account illuminates sexuality’s dense entanglement with experiences of coming alive and the knotted strands of character armor, sexual charge, developmental trauma, disintegrative anxieties, and concretized longings for physical touch that permeate eroticism in the space of breakdown. The author takes up how these unstable intersections contribute to patients’ and analysts’ fears and avoidance of engaging these entanglements in the analytic relationship with its inherent seductions and frustrations; at the same time, it’s through delving into and living through these overlaps that the basic issues of being and becoming can emerge.

Erotic Entanglements in the Search to Be and Belong: Traversing the Forcefield of Dependency and Desire
2025-10-07 20:00 - 22:00 | Hybrid (In-Person at Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine and Virtual), New York, NY
Psychoanalytic clinicians often encounter the complexities of erotic transference and countertransference, yet struggle with conceptual frameworks and language that adequately capture these intense, often ambiguous experiences. Traditional models can obscure the subtle intersubjective and developmental meanings of erotic material, resulting in impasses or missed therapeutic opportunities.
This presentation aims to expand clinicians’ capacity to think about and work with erotic dynamics that emerge within the analytic dyad. Drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic theory, particularly relational and developmental perspectives, Dr. Schoen will examine how erotic experiences in the transference may reflect unconscious longings for recognition, repair, and vitality.
CE.

Dreamweavers: Children who Dream & Wonder
2025-10-08 19:30 - 21:00 | Hybrid (In-person: 7700 Clayton Rd., Suite 200, St. Louis, MO 63117 & Virtual)
Speaker Linda Horrell, MDiv, MSW, LCSW. This course is for anyone curious about child development and for experienced psychotherapists who are interested in the psychoanalytic insights into the dreams of children and adolescents. We will have fun discussing the animation, Dream Productions, a Pixar-created mini-series from the creators of Inside Out.

Traces of Memory, Structures of Resilience: Encounters Between Architecture and Psychoanalysis
2025-10-09 20:30 - 22:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by: Elizabeth Danze, FAIA
This presentation examines the concept of resilience in both architecture and human experience through the shared metaphor of the palimpsest—a form that retains traces of its past while adapting to the present. Drawing on Vitruvius’s notion of firmitas and extending it through the study of buildings, we explore how architecture responds to time, material change, and shifting cultural, political, and spiritual forces—including the impact of war and destruction. The architectural palimpsest, through visible layers, erasures, and reinterpretations, serves as a model for the layered nature of human consciousness, where memory, trauma, and transformation accumulate rather than disappear. Analogies between built form and psychological depth show how both architecture and the mind bear history not as static inheritance, but as evolving potential. Just as buildings undergo adaptive reuse to remain meaningful, psychotherapy offers tools for internal resilience. Ultimately, architecture and psychoanalysis illuminate each other, revealing how we build upon the visible and invisible structures of the past to navigate change and pursue a fuller, more integrated life.

Film & Mind: The Seed of the Sacred Fig
2025-10-10 23:00 - 2025-10-11 00:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG (2024) written, co-produced and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof won them Special Jury Prize of 2024 Cannes Int’l Film Festival. The film centers on a family thrust into the public eye when the father is appointed as an investigating judge in Tehran, as political unrest erupts in the streets. When the judge’s gun mysteriously disappears, he suspects his wife and daughters, imposing draconian measures that strain family ties.
We will discuss themes of paranoid psychology, psychological splitting, intergenerational trauma, and the implications of the title which refers to a species of fig that spreads by “wrapping itself around another tree and eventually strangling it.” From a psychodynamic perspective, the father’s psychological deterioration represents the internalization of state paranoia, where external political threats become projected onto intimate family relationships.
The film is particularly relevant as it was filmed in secret over 70 days from late December 2023 to March 2024 with real TikTok and Instagram videos of the bedlam interwoven with the narrative connecting individual psychological drama to actual political resistance movements in Iran.
Where to watch:
Hulu and Disney+ (subscriptions), AppleTV, Amazon Prime, and others
Discussants:
Jack Brennan, LMFT is an advanced candidate in psychoanalysis at the New Center, Los Angeles, and a licensed marriage and family therapist with a private practice in LA. Jack is a community sociologist by education and training in rural northern California and Vermont, and holds two masters degrees including practicing sociology and counseling psychology with an emphasis on community mental health. In addition to his work in LA, Jack is involved in Lacanian psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic formation at large — as a collaborator with SPIIRAL and training participant in Lacanian Psychoanalysis at the École Freudienne of Quebec, as well as a long term member and co-facilitator of the seminar series “Lacanian Thought in the Nonprofit and Public Clinic” in collaboration with the SF Bay Area Lacanian School. Jack was an MFT consortium MHSA award recipient in 2016 for culturally sensitive and dedicated work with underserved and marginalized populations in community mental health settings, and in 2024, was awarded the Elyn Saks scholarship from the New Center for his work in applications of psychoanalysis to the study and treatment of psychosis and severity.
Shahin Sakhi, MD, PhD is a psychiatrist in private practice, and an assistant clinical professor at UCLA psychiatry department from 2007 to 2024. He supervises therapists and psychiatrists internationally. He is a certified consultant from AK Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems. He has directed experiential group relations conferences on decision-making while dealing with biases and uncertainty. He also holds a graduate certificate from Human Complex Systems program at UCLA. He did his PhD studies in molecular neurobiology at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, studying genetic expressions during a specific neuronal death called neuronal apoptosis. He is interested in raising consciousness about the link between mental health, lifestyle, and global effort in transforming our socioeconomic life in a way that our children could enjoy life in a child centered culture of peace.
CE.

Bodies on the Edge: De/constructing the Ideal
2025-10-11 12:00 - 19:30 | Hybrid (In-person: The Chicago School 2400 E Katella Ave, Ste 1200 Anaheim, CA 92806 or Virtual), Anaheim, California, United States
This hybrid conference offers clinicians and psychoanalytic practitioners an opportunity to deeply engage with how social positionality, embodiment, and therapeutic practices intersect—equipping attendees with reflection tools, case-based learning, and strategies to foster more inclusive, body-conscious therapy.
Presented by Jamie Steele, LMFT, Molly Merson, LMFT, and Laura Westmoreland, LMFT.

APsA Candidates' Council Seminar: Psychoanalysis and Identity Formation in Fashion
2025-10-18 12:00 - 14:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Instructor: Golzar Selbe Naghshineh, LP, CGP
This seminar explores how fashion influences identity through the lens of heritage— how it’s either embraced or rejected in both cultural fashion and in what is passed down/inherited in families. What is inherited can be both a gift and a burden; heirlooms and inherited wardrobes carry meanings and identifications that create the opportunity to keep loved ones alive. The superego demands limitations on aesthetic presentation while culture offers norms that are often reinvented.
Personal narrative will guide the discussion of how the landscape of projections and identifications can contextualize the importance of fashion creating an opportunity to escape mortality. Participants are invited to bring their own fashion story, recollections, and heirlooms that shaped their identity with – or rejection of – fashion to deepen the conversation.
Registration is required. Sessions will not be recorded.
Saturday, October 18, 2025, 12 – 2 PM ET
The Candidates Online Seminar Series events are a benefit of APsA Membership for its In-Training Members.
Not an APsA In-Training Member? To learn more & join, visit apsa.org/in-training
Click to view the Flyer | Click to Register

Radical Histories of Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles and Beyond
2025-10-18 13:00 - 15:00 | Hybrid (Virtual and In Person – address sent upon registration)
Join us for an illuminating exploration of the hidden narratives and alternative histories that have shaped psychoanalytic practice from Los Angeles to the broader therapeutic landscape.
Hannah Zeavin will open our program by examining the overlooked histories of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, revealing how these forgotten chapters continue to inform and illuminate contemporary therapeutic practice. Her presentation will challenge therapists and scholars to reconsider their current knowledge base through the lens of these radical historical perspectives.
Following Zeavin, David James Fisher will focus specifically on Los Angeles’s unique psychoanalytic heritage, presenting his research “California Dreamin’: On the History of Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles With Special Emphasis on the Merger of 2005.” Fisher’s presentation will uncover the distinctive developments that made LA a crucial yet underexamined center of psychoanalytic innovation.
Perwana Nazif will moderate a lively discussion between our presenters, facilitating dialogue about how these historical insights reshape our understanding of psychoanalytic theory and practice today.
This program offers a rare opportunity to discover the untold stories that have influenced modern therapeutic approaches while exploring the specific cultural and institutional forces that made Los Angeles a unique laboratory for psychoanalytic thought.
PRESENTERS:
Hannah Zeavin, PhD is Assistant Professor of the History of Science in the Department of History and the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press) and Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century (MIT Press). She is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis and cofounded The Psychosocial Foundation in 2021. She is at work on her third book, All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance (US: Penguin Press; UK: Fern Press).
David James Fisher, PhD is Senior Faculty at the New Center for Psychoanalysis and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute of contemporary Psychoanalysis. He specializes in the history of psychoanalysis, the convergence of cultural history within psychoanalysis, and psychoanalytic applications to politics, movies, literature, and works of art. Dr. Fisher’s background is in European Cultural and Intellectual History. He has published four books: The Subversive Edge of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2025), Bettelheim: Living and Dying (2008), Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition (2009), and Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (1988, 2011). He has been practicing psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Los Angeles for 45 years.
Moderator:
Perwana Nazif, PhD is the Art Director of the Los Angeles Review of Books and a contributing editor at Parapraxis. She recently edited Institutional Psychotherapy as a Resistance Movement by François Pain (Semiotext(e), 2025) and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.
CE

Childhood Bereavement: An Analysis of a Six-Year-Old Girl Who Experienced Loss
2025-10-18 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Felecia Powell-Williams, Ed.D., LPC-S, RPT/S presents a case presentation with a focus on clinical material of a four-year analysis that has continued therapeutically from childhood into adulthood, and her early attachment disruptions in relationship with her mother and father. The presentation will illustrate the internal conflicts concerning a difficulty with aggression surrounding traumatic loss of the maternal object and explore the relationship throughout the analytic process.
CE.

Patriarchy and Misogyny: Manifestations in Our Culture, Theory & Consulting Rooms
2025-10-21 20:00 - 21:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
6 Tuesdays | Oct 21 – Dec 9 | Facilitated by JoAnn Ponder, PhD
We have recently witnessed brazen displays of patriarchy, oppressive behavior toward women, attempts to control their bodies, and threats or acts of violence toward them in American political and social life. Given the longstanding roots of patriarchy and misogyny in our culture, it is not surprising that patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes and beliefs have found their way into psychoanalytic theory, organizations, and consulting rooms. HPS will offer a study group consisting of 6 meetings to explore these issues. While volumes have been written on these issues, we will read and discuss only a sample of relevant articles authored by contemporary relational psychoanalysts as well as earlier articles by a social psychologist and analysts who have devoted a major portion of their careers to thinking and writing about these topics. Our study group will explore the cultural basis and psychodynamics of patriarchy/misogyny and its effects on people of various gender identities and sexual object choices. We will consider how these biases may be enacted and addressed in our clinical work with patients in individual and couples treatment.
CE

Growing Up Through the Life Cycle: A Revised Psychoanalytic Framework for Adult Development
2025-10-22 19:00 - 21:00 | Hybrid (Rockland – East Fairmount Park 3810 Mt Pleasant Dr. Philadelphia, PA & via Zoom), 3810 Mt Pleasant Dr, Philadelphia, PA, 19121, United States
Please join PCOP in welcoming Dr. Steve Axelrod from NYC to speak about some of the most recent considerations of adult psychological development in our field.
CE.

Defense Mechanisms: Hierarcy, Adaptation and Change - Dr. Chris Perry
2025-10-23 18:00 - 19:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Defense Mechanisms: Hierarcy, Adaptation and Change – Dr. Chris Perry

Book Discussion: Early Women Psychoanalysts and Their Marginalized Legacies
2025-10-23 20:00 - 21:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Book Editor: Klara Naszkowska, PhD | Discussant: Rosemary Balsam, MD
This book discussion is dedicated to filling a hole in the history of women pioneers of psychoanalysis. Their groundbreaking contributions to the nascent field notwithstanding, their biographies have been largely and systematically erased from the historical narrative. Klara Naszkowska will draw on the anthology that she edited, Early Women Psychoanalysts: History, Biography, and Contemporary Relevance (Routledge, 2024), to provide an introduction to their lives and legacies as a collective force. Her lecture will be illuminated by an in-depth exploration of the story of Sabina Spielrein. The emphasis is on the sociopolitical circumstances and historical developments that affected these women psychoanalyst’s lives, career choices, and paths, centering on the themes of gender, Jewishness, women’s education, the rise of autocracies, and forced migration. Following the lecture, commentary will be provided by Rosemary Balsam, a psychiatrist-psychoanalyst who has written extensively about gender, early women psychoanalysts, and their contributions.
CE

The AI Pharmakon in Psychoanalytic Care: Ambivalence, Augmentation, and Psychoanalytic Futures
2025-10-24 12:50 - 13:50 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presenter: Todd Essig, PhD – The AI revolution is here—and by “here,” I mean right here in our consulting rooms. Interactive self-help tools are now marketed as AI psychotherapy, and for many, they’ve become a viable treatment option. Augmentation technologies for clinicians are readily available, reshaping aspects of clinical practice in real time. Meanwhile, patients are forming relationships with AI entities that range from instrumentally useful, to emotionally resonant and companionable, to psychologically destabilizing—even destructive. This Grand Rounds will explore the clinical state of play amid these rapidly accelerating developments, with a focus on how psychoanalytic sensibilities can help us think, feel, and act in response.

“Case of Infantile Trauma and Resilience" (Nancy Kulish. Ph.D.)
2025-10-25 12:00 - 14:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Nancy Kulish Ph.D
Educational objectives:
1. Describe how early infantile trauma can be expressed in bodily symptoms or replayed in a person’s behavior.
2. Identify how the manifestations and symptoms of early infantile trauma appear in the transference and countertransference in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis.
3. Discuss how to relate to and empathize with traumatized patients.
CE

Can Psychoanalysts Listen to Each Other?
2025-10-25 14:00 - 16:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
The 2 recent explosions within the Program Committee and then within the American Psychoanalytic Association are examined, from an insider’s perspective, as analysts’ difficulties with listening to each other. Analysts’ anxiety with erotic excitement, especially with racial erotics, even when used for self-affirmation, is discussed. So too is the need for Othering and the need for those who have been Othered to validate themselves, using anger for self-affirmation. Not primarily psychoanalytic ethics, ethics for psychoanalysts, but human ethics, valuing of the other, of our relationship with the other, becomes the pathway for psychoanalysts to listen to the other. Emmanuel Levinas and his psychoanalytic elaborator, Viviane Chetrit-Vatine, are seen as triumphing over their own personal Holocaust trauma via their model of ethical behavior with others. Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, Judith Butler, and Stephen Frosh help us get there. The author emphasizes our failures, including his own.
