Is a patient’s distress predominantly rooted in their personality or in the cultural milieu, or both? There has been a tendency to separate the psyche and the social throughout the history of psychoanalysis, and tensions persist in theorizing about this issue. In this program, we will explore how personality is shaped by sociocultural context and […]

If deep and enduring psychodynamic change is the ultimate goal of treatment, then periodically juxtaposing seemingly contradictory “forces” (Hegel’s thesis and antithesis) will eventually jump-start the patient’s “adaptive recovery” by creating optimally stressful, growth-incentivizing “mismatch experiences.” I will be proposing use of something to which I refer as a “conflict statement” – a clinically useful […]

Michael J. Diamond, PhD, FIPA In this two-hour presentation, Dr. Diamond will examine larger social and cultural factors at play during today’s perilous times. He describes destructive populism and group regression as exemplified by malignant cult-like elements. The current political discourse. Using both a psychoanalytic and a cultural lens, he analyzes the development of paranoid, […]

Dr. Lynne Harkless of the Florida Psychoanalytic Center will be presenting her paper, forthcoming publication in JAPA, which questions and retheorizes the connection between embodiment of erotic desire and embodiment of gender. She proposes that children identify with caregivers’ modes of embodying erotic desire and that these identifications can be thought of as separable from […]

Session 2 will be held on September 30 @ 10:30 am - 12:30 pm EDT This seminar attempts to raise awareness of unconscious states of mind around race in clinical work using a variation of the Balint method. This Method utilizes group engagement with a case problem brought by a case holder who describes a […]

Ketamine and Trauma On the Couch presented by Megan Rundel, PhD In this interactive presentation, we will explore the biological and psychological effects of ketamine on mental health issues, with a special focus on trauma. We will learn about how to carefully and effectively utilize the power of ketamine for patients with different kinds of […]

Mary Jo Peebles, PhD will present on... We have all felt stuck as therapists. This may be difficult to admit (and seldom do we tell our patients). But rest assured, the experience is universal. Feeling stuck has been discussed in traditional psychoanalytic settings as being stuck; i.e., a point of non-movement, or “impasse,” whose synonyms […]

Free Angela and All the Political Prisoners (Shola Lynch, 2013) 1 hr 42 min. Contemporary psychoanalysis as a field is struggling to make sense of racism and culturally imposed trauma. The final report of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis was published this past June. In discussing this 2013 documentary, the NCP […]

Presented by Presented by Boris Thomas, JD, PhD, with discussant Huey Hawkins, Jr., PhD Regardless of our approach to treatment, a foundational aspect of the work is the relationship between therapist and client/patient. For those accustomed to working psychoanalytically or psychodynamically, how do we think about incorporating somatic work with our clients (or somatic work […]

Description: Even for those of us with prior tele-analytic experience, our sudden immersion in practicing tele-analytically during the pandemic caused a seismic shift in our ordinary way of practicing with all the psychic reverberations such a change evokes. Now that the dust has settled some, we have an opportunity to reflect on what we’ve observed […]

Join us for a clinically rich and socially relevant discussion with renowned psychoanalyst and author, Sue Grand, PhD. Across the globe, neo-fascism is on the rise and democracy is at risk. This ominous turn calls for psychoanalytic decoding. This presentation argues that we are all carrying totalitarian objects and perpetrator fragments, inherited from our forebears’ […]

Presenter: Abbot Bronstein, PhD The Comparative Clinical Methods Working Party Group started by David Tuckett and a group of European Psychoanalysts and brought to APsA and NapSac IPA institutes by Abbot Bronstein about 17 years ago, is a way to explore and study the implicit and explicit clinical methods psychoanalysts use in doing clinical psychoanalysis. […]

Presented by Tina Marie Dale, LCSW. This course is intended for clinicians new to the therapeutic field or those with little to no exposure to the psychodynamic approach thus far in their professional careers. We will look at what the psychodynamic approach can offer to clinicians treating families, treating children, and/or working with parents. We […]

The concept of self-alienation is inextricably linked to shame. Working with adult children of traumatizing narcissists, and with others who experience narcissistic abuse, Shaw’s way of working with these clients shifted as he began to study and integrate concepts and techniques from some of the contemporary traumatologists. What he has learned has led Shaw to […]

"As analysts have expanded their involvement outside of the consulting room, institutes around the world have increasingly recognized that learning about leadership, followership, membership, and social dynamics might need to be a fourth pillar in psychoanalytic training (alongside seminars, personal analysis, and supervision). In this conference, and working together over four days, the staff and […]

With Amy Levy, Psy.D. & Todd Essig, Ph.D. In her paper, “The Phone as a Subject,” Dr. Levy contests the commonly held assumptions that the smartphone is an object, susceptible to healthy or pathological employment and comparable to other objects used to ameliorate the pain of reality. Instead, she will argue that the phone is […]

This program begins with a talk on what a social psychoanalysis might look like in the clinic and draws on some earlier psychoanalysts’ concepts that have connected the social world and the psychic world without reducing one to the other. Exploring identity formation in cultural contexts and within various power hierarchies, Dr. Layton introduces the […]

Join Andrea Celenza, PhD, for our next Meet the Author event with Shari Thurer, Sc. D., and the online audience. We will be talking about Andrea's book, "Transference, Love, Being: Essential Essays from the Field".

Presented by Stuart Ozar, MD and Juliana Varela, MSW. For clinicians or mental health students who are curious about what it is that psychodynamic therapists actually do, we offer a “window” into the process and a chance to connect an introduction to theory with actual clinical material. Each class will begin with a brief theoretical […]

This weekend conference addresses teletreatment and teletraining under geopolitical conditions of pandemic, division between factions and countries, international tension with China and Russia, and war in Ukraine. We review APsA empirical studies on teleanalysis uptake, reconceptualize online teaching for challenged psychoanalytic psychotherapy training programs in China and Russia, illustrate technology-mediated support for traumatized Russian/Ukrainian colleagues, […]

Dr. Solms will discuss how the emotional mind works (using Panksepp’s scheme for core human emotions) and how psychoanalysis achieves relief of mental suffering by making emotions conscious.

This presentation is aimed to enrich psychoanalytic theory by exploring how societal and historical factors shape generational experiences in different contexts. Each generation grows up in a specific cultural, social, and historical context, which influences their values, beliefs, and psychological challenges. In these regards generation Z in general has been characterized as an environmentally aware […]

Directed by Kelly Freeman Craig, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (2023) is a film adaptation of the Judy Blume young-adult novel. Social, biological, and (to a much smaller extent) identity issues of puberty’s early edge are presented with charming verisimilitude (and earned a 99% positive rating on RottenTomatoes.com). In our discussion we will […]

Jack Drescher, MD: The history of psychoanalytic theorizing about homosexuality is more than a century old and has undergone numerous revisions. Early on, psychoanalytic attitudes toward homosexuality could be reasonably characterized as hostile. The presentation begins with Freud’s early views on homosexuality within the cultural context of his times. It then reviews later pathologizing psychoanalytic […]

Presented by Gary Hirshberg, LCSW. This two session workshop will challenge clinicians to look at our own deeply held beliefs about sex and coupling, specifically what is ‘perversion’ and what is ‘healthy’ coupling. Most of us have come of age and been trained to still consider kink as deviant and as deriving from early childhood […]

This event will focus on ideas from Galit Atlas’ new book "Emotional Inheritance."  It will address silenced experiences that belong not only to us or to our patients, but to their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and the ways they impact our lives. The clinical tales will focus on emotional material that is passed down from […]

Danielle Novack, PhD. “Meeting Again, Meeting Anew: A Child Patient Returns as an Adult”

Masud Khan was a brilliant psychoanalyst, Winnicott’s “principal disciple,” collaborator, editor, and analysand. He was chief editor of the International Psychoanalytical Library for 20 years, wrote four books, and served as training analyst for Christopher Bollas and Adam Phillips. Simultaneously, Masud Khan was an alcoholic, antisemitic, alcoholic, who repeatedly engaged in sexual relationships with patients […]

This study group is based on a book authored by Carl Shubs, PhD, titled Traumatic Experiences of Normal Development: An Intersubjective, Object Relations Listening Perspective on Self, Attachment, Trauma, and Reality (Routledge, 2020). It describes a new conceptualization of trauma, so we can be better prepared to work with it. The book presents a psychoanalytic […]

This is a continuation of NCP's Manifest Mind Series. As psychedelic medicine moves toward wide clinical implementation, psychoanalysts are establishing a specialized set of roles and methods separate from other psychotherapists. The value of psychedelic medicine in psychodynamic care has been extensively documented in the past decade, corroborating published clinical experience in the earlier LSD […]

In this presentation, Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou urges psychoanalysts to let the debate about the validity of trans children take its place in the fossil record of analytic history. Encouraging us to stop squandering our energies sparring with colleagues who see trans existence as cause for alarm, she suggests it is time to move beyond transantagonism […]

Weekend Event - October 21 & 22 A Psychoanalytic Retrospective: Thoughts on the Essence of a Happy and Fulfilled Life Calvin A. Colarusso M.D. Training and Supervising Child Adolescent and Adult Analyst San Diego Psychoanalytic Center. Dr. Colarusso will describe the effect of more than fifty-five years of exposure to psychoanalytic theory and the practice […]

Weekend Event - October 21 & 22 A Psychoanalytic Retrospective: Thoughts on the Essence of a Happy and Fulfilled Life Calvin A. Colarusso M.D. Training and Supervising Child Adolescent and Adult Analyst San Diego Psychoanalytic Center. Dr. Colarusso will describe the effect of more than fifty-five years of exposure to psychoanalytic theory and the practice […]

Speaker: Margarita Cereijido, PhD Discussants: Kirsten Dahl, PhD & Rosemary Balsam, MD Psychoanalysis, from its beginnings, has a long history of pathologizing certain groups – women and homosexuals, to name a few. Personal beliefs and prejudices of the times – both past and present –seep into psychoanalytic theory, education and practice. Many new psychoanalytic ideas […]

Weekend Event - October 21 & 22 Sunday, October 22 The Developmental Process: The Analysis of a Traumatized Three-Year-Old. Rex McGeHee, M.D. Training and Supervising Child, Adolescent and Adult Analyst. Denver Institute for Psychoanalysis Dr. McGeHee will present a case to illustrate how psychoanalytic treatment changes the developmental trajectory of a life. Building on Freud's […]

Our discussion of the Under the Skin screening will introduce viewers to the psychoanalytic notion of alienation from humanist (classical Freudian and relational theory) and posthumanist (contemporary French psychoanalytic) perspectives.

Presented by Johanna Dobrich, LCSW-R Working with Survivor Siblings in Psychoanalysis: Ability and Disability in Clinical Process explores a previously neglected area in the field of psychoanalysis, addressing undertheorized concepts on siblings, disabilities and psychic survivorship, and broadening our conceptualization of the enduring effects of lateral relations on human development. What happens to a person’s […]

Discussion of the film:  The Invitation (2015) (104 min) Director: Karyn Kusama *** Film must be viewed prior to event.*** REGISTRATION DEADLINE: October 25, 2023 Discussant: Alex Smith, Psy.D. Film Description: When a man accepts an invitation to a dinner party hosted by his ex-wife, the unsettling past reopens old wounds and creates new tensions. […]

Association for Child Psychoanalysis:  Presented by Denia Barrett and Peter Bruendl Clinical work performed in isolation or within only a small group of colleagues risks a narrowing of techniques. A continuing conversation between experienced clinicians, working together throughout the year and then sharing their discourse with the conference participants, allows for a detailed examination of […]

Free meeting with the ICP community in LA open to all.  Most psychoanalysts never serve on a jury. This essay narrates my experience of being juror number 11 for nine days. This criminal trial involved horrific allegations of rape, sodomy, kidnapping, armed robbery, and brutal beating. The case also involved issues of race and of violence. […]

This CPI/AAPE webinar will focus on the concepts of internalization and identity, integrating the sociocultural with the intrapsychic. One thread of the discussion will involve the inevitable tensions between sociocultural determinants and individuality in the context of an individual psychoanalysis. Clinical vignettes will be interwoven with a review of the relevant literature.

Presented by Jean Goodwin, MD Electra, like Oedipus, is a character from Greek mythology. The founders of psychoanalysis used their names to denote a psychosocial developmental phase. However, Electra’s story, like the biography of Oedipus, teaches us more about murderous violence than about internal conflict. Electra can also teach us something about recovery; she and […]

Presented by Richard Gartner, PhD Research suggests that in the United States one in six boys is directly victimized sexually by age 16. It has also become increasingly apparent in recent years that adult men, like women, are subject to sexual abuse, harassment, and assault. In order to treat this population, it is crucial that […]

Presented by Micah J. Knobles, MD A case study and discussion of how psychoanalytic technique remains relevant to today's modern medical settings.

A Scientific Meeting presented by Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D., ABPP with Respondent, Lisa Damour, Ph.D.