American Psychoanalytic Association

Conference Day 1: Vicissitudes of a Clinical Career: From Self-Discovery to Profound Impact
2024-04-20 09:00 - 12:30 (America/New_York) | Virtual Event
Join us at the 55th Annual Education Conference (Live Online) hosted by the Advanced Clinical Education (ACE) Foundation of New York State Society for Clinical Social Work (NYSSCSW)– a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to supporting the professional development of licensed mental health professionals, including psychodynamic and psychoanalytic practice.
Two Virtual Saturdays: April 20th 2024 and April 27th 2024, from 9am-12:30pm EST. Sign in and Opening Remarks at 9am followed by two online presentations each conference day. NYS CEs available (3 CEs for each conference day) for NYS-licensed social workers, psychologists, mental health counselors, marriage and family therapists, and psychoanalysts.
On April 20th, from 9:30am-11am EST, Dr. Sandra Buechler, PhD will be presenting on “Phases of a Meaningful Career” to share her professional experiences and the development of her career path as a clinician and psychoanalyst. From 11am-12:30pm EST, Dr. Samoan Barish, PhD, will then be presenting on “Whistle While You Work: Work, Identity and Its Vicissitudes,” where she will discuss the myriad of meanings that work holds for each of us. We all know how central work is for our sense of self-worth, purpose, meaning and our need for mastery, indeed, for our very identity. Certainly, meaningful work performs various functions for each of us, and these functions may change at different stages and phases of our lives.

Grappling With Trauma Treatment: Ambiguities Confronting Psychodynamic Clinicians
2024-04-20 11:00 - 16:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Treating people suffering with trauma disorders present the clinician with several challenges and dilemmas. How does one diagnose and treat a trauma survivor from a psychodynamic or psychoanalytic perspective? How does the clinician understand changes in self-states, moods, and shifting affective states? Are we treating developmental trauma, or the kind of trauma that leads to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, see Criterion A in DSM-V). Is DID real? Some additional issues include working with multiple transferences and frequent enactments, working with parts who are unaware of their multiplicity, working through conflict and discord between parts who have co-consciousness, and addressing parts that are self-destructive and/or potentially harmful to others.
Presented by Sheldon Itzkowitz, PhD
CE.

The Dancer's Voice: Performance, Psychoanalysis, and the South Asian Experience
2024-04-20 15:00 - 16:30 | South Asia Institute, 1925 S. Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL, United States
The Dancer’s Voice: Performance, Psychoanalysis and the South Asian Experience $15 (minimum donation) will benefit South Asian Americans For Change, a mental health non-profit.
In this discussion, University of Georgia professor of music and women’s studies, Rumya S. Putcha, PhD, and Chicago psychoanalytic candidate and psychiatrist Indrany Datta-Barua, MD, will be integrating their respective social and psychoanalytic perspectives as they reflect on Dr. Putcha’s book “The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India” and the effects of Indian dance training and performance in the development of South Asian American identity.
Funding for this program is provided by a grant from the American Psychoanalytic Foundation through the American Psychoanalytic Association.
If you are unable to attend but would like to donate directly to South Asian Americans For Change, you can use this link: paypal.com/us/fundraiser/charity/4827688

Bridging Community and Psychoanalysis
2024-04-25 22:00 - 23:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
This course will offer an introduction to Community Psychoanalysis, with a focus on the experiences of clinicians working in community settings in the midst of sociocultural changes. The course aims to foster mutual dialogue and learning between community-based clinicians and leaders and members of the psychoanalytic community.
CE.

Visiting Scholars Weekend: “A new perspective on Freud’s thinking on truth, it’s foundational role in psychoanalysis, and its contemporary relevance”
2024-04-26 18:30 - 20:00 | Baker Nord Center for the Humanities on Case Western Reserve University Campus, Clark Hall Room 206, 11130 Bellflower Rd, Cleveland, OH, 44106, United States
Rachel Blass presents “A new perspective on Freud’s thinking on truth, it’s foundational role in psychoanalysis, and its contemporary relevance.”
At the foundation of Freud’s thinking is the idea that psychopathology is the result of denial. Truths denied lead to a distorted reality and accordingly coming to know these truths, discovering the true meanings underlying distortions, is what defines psychoanalytic practice and cure. A common criticism of this approach, (within psychoanalysis, as well as outside of it) ?is that it is a limited intellectual and “positivistic” one; it neglects relational, experiential, environmental and “pre-meaning” sources of pathology and modes of cure and hence it is ineffectual and rightly has been replaced by new analytic perspectives.
CE Credits.

Conference Day 2: Vicissitudes of a Clinical Career: From Self-Discovery to Profound Impact
2024-04-27 09:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
Join us at this 2nd Conference Day for the 55th Annual Education Conference (Live Online) hosted by the Advanced Clinical Education (ACE) Foundation of New York State Society for Clinical Social Work (NYSSCSW) – a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to supporting the professional development of licensed mental health professionals, including psychodynamic and psychoanalytic practice.
Sign in and Opening Remarks at 9am followed by two online presentations this conference day. 3 CEs available for attending this particular day for NYS-licensed social workers, psychologists, mental health counselors, marriage and family therapists, and psychoanalysts.
From 9:30am-11am EST, Johanna Dobrich LCSW-R, psychoanalyst from the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in NY, will be presenting on “Healing Disconnection/s: What Therapists Might Expect and Provide In Treating Partners and Friends of Childhood Trauma Survivors (CTS).” In this talk, she will translate some of the common pitfalls and dilemmas a loved one may face while reflecting on the integral role the therapist may play in helping a loved one strive to maintain “healthy-enough” inter-dependent relatedness. She will also discuss the facets of self-identity that naturally become the focus of psychotherapy.
From 11am-12:30pm EST, Gilbert Kliman, MD, psychoanalyst from the Harlem Family Institute, will present on, “How A Child Analyst Helps Change Society Through Litigation.” In this presentation, he will share the trajectory and inspiration of his work in underserved communities and in forensic practice. Many therapists have attended his forensic seminars and some are now actively collaborating with him in developing a nonprofit service, giving voices to oppressed, marginalized and traumatized persons seeking justice.

Trauma of Human Agency, Transmission of Trauma through Generations, & Reparation through Embodied Witnessing: A New Vision for Diagnosis & Treatment of Trauma with Clara Mucci, PhD
2024-04-27 10:00 - 17:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Tapping the roots of mental health history, Dr. Clara Mucci continues the pioneering work begun in 1919 at The Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas with her masterful and highly accessible synthesis of psychoanalytic theorists, such as Freud, Ferenczi, and more, with contemporary perspectives on neurobiology and attachment disturbances. Cultivating refined skills in diagnosis and treatment, clinicians and therapists at all levels will learn to create meaning from traumatic and even harrowing events and gain insights to become an embodied witness to both validate and regulate patient experiences at the margins of self and other.
CE credits.

Connections And Conversation: Psychoanalytic Contributions to the Treatment of Eating Disorders – Tom Wooldridge PsyD, ABPP, FIPA, CEDS-S
2024-04-27 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Free zoom event with Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, FIPA, CEDS-S : Psychoanalytic thinking offers valuable insights to clinicians working with eating disorders and body image concerns. In a field that increasingly emphasizes rapid symptom reduction, treatment providers risk neglecting less overt, and less easily measurable, aspects of the patient’s experience. This presentation will bring together some of the latest thinking about how a psychoanalytic approach can help us to understand the emotional experience of an eating disorder more deeply. As a member of a larger treatment team, the psychoanalyst assists the patient in contending with an internal landscape marked by isolation and loneliness as well as shame, guilt, and embarrassment, not to mention a profound hopelessness about the possibilities of emotional connection. We will discuss the role of the psychoanalytic thinking within a broader therapeutic approach focus on concepts such as no-entry defenses, alexithymia and disruptions in symbolic functioning, autistic-contiguous uses of the body, and self- and body-states.

The Birth of Desire
2024-04-27 12:00 - 14:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Marilia Aisenstein will lead us on a journey inside the mind of the newborn infant to demonstrate how human beings develop the capacity for waiting, a state that involves a pleasurable experience that paves the way for desire. Referencing Freud’s concept of “primary masochism” Ms. Aisenstein shows that having a “good enough mother”– who through words and actions signals to the infant that she is nearby and will be gratifying her soon— promotes the formation of healthy, internalized mental representations in the infant. It is these internalized structures that allow the infant to integrate the capacity for waiting. Ms. Aisenstein will also discuss what happens when inadequate maternal provisions derail this process. Using clinical vignettes, she describes the nature of this impairment in patients with borderline organization: “[their] anti-cathexis is so drastic that it paralyzes the preconscious and isolates the unconscious”, thus thwarting the infant being able to tolerate delayed gratification, and ultimately impedes the development of the capacity for desire. Ms. Aisenstein will discuss ways that the analyst facilitates the repair of these ruptures through intensive treatment.
CE.

Visiting Scholar Weekend: On the special nature of Kleinian transference interpretation, and why it is essential to analytic cure”
2024-04-27 13:30 - 15:30 | Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center, 2460 Fairmount Blvd #312, Cleveland, OH, 44106, United States
Rachel Blass presents “On the special nature of Kleinian transference interpretation, and why it is essential to analytic cure.”
The idea that transference interpretation plays an important role in the analytic process is a familiar one. Underlying the London Kleinian approach is the idea that it is not only essential to the process but that only transference interpretation can bring about cure of an analytic kind. To appreciate this view, one must consider the unique nature of analytic cure and the limitations of other forms of intervention, including and especially other forms of interpretation of unconscious processes, in attaining it. It will be suggested that transference interpretation, as understood and developed by the Kleinian approach, moves beyond promoting awareness to actively denied unconscious ideas, and thus allows for actual change and integration of the unconscious fantasies of the inner world. Brief clinical vignettes will be presented to illustrate these ideas.
CE Credits.

Fiction and Clinical Fiction
2024-04-28 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Marilia Aisenstein will show how the psychoanalytical approach and the writing of fiction share the power to transform human psychological experience, to change the very essence of our being in the world. By referencing masterpieces of literature and presenting clinical vignettes, Ms. Aisenstein will demonstrate the intersubjective processes that are based in the unconscious. She will explore how clinical experiences and the experience of reading fiction rely on creative mentalization and transform an individual’s personal understanding of their inner life. In her discussion of clinical case material, she will show how the analyst can transform “lifeless discourses” and “reanimate them” using metaphoric language.
CE.

Visiting Scholar Weekend: “On the Kleinian View of Narcissism: self-love, perfection and idealization as forces of destruction”
2024-04-28 13:30 - 15:30 | Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center, 2460 Fairmount Blvd #312, Cleveland, OH, 44106, United States
Rachel Blass presents “On the Kleinian view of narcissism: self-love, perfection and idealization as forces of destruction.” In this course we will examine the Kleinian approach to narcissism, focusing on the works of Melanie Klein, Joan Riviere and Herbert Rosenfeld. We will see how and why in this approach narcissism and the self-love, sense of perfection and tendency to idealize associated with it, are usually regarded as manifestations of destructive forces, pulling towards death of oneself and of the other. We will consider the clinical implications of this approach and the rich view of the person as essentially loving that underlies it.
CE Credits.

Angelika Mellema: Case Presentation with Chris Clulow, discussant
2024-05-01 09:45 - 11:45 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Angelika Mellema presents a case for discussion in our ongoing family and couple therapy videoconference series.
2 CEs $60

Trauma, Polyvagal Theory and Therapeutic Presence
2024-05-02 20:30 - 22:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
One of the most damaging sequelae of trauma is the loss of trust and security in interpersonal relationships (Fonagy & Allison, 2014.) When encountering a patient with traumatic interpersonal experiences, we cannot assume a capacity to trust or to form a safe, secure attachment. Nor can we assume the capacity to learn or benefit from the therapy relationship because the edifice of trust (epistemic trust) can be so damaged as to make new ideas impossible (Fonagy & Campbell, 2017.) This evening lecture will tie together three threads of clinical and research work to help identify epistemic hypervigilance, how to use paralinguistic modes of communication to reach our patients (Gedo, 1996,) use marked-contingent mirroring to reduce epistemic distrust, and open channels of receptive language blocked by fear and attachment insecurity. The foundation of the fear response has been articulated most clearly in the polyvagal theory (Porges, 2009) and linked with a basic therapeutic presence (Geller & Porges, 2014) to aid trust and reducing fear responses in clinical encounters. Brief clinical vignettes will highlight these principles for translating to daily clinical practice.
Facilitated by J. Christopher Fowler, PhD
CE.

Lost Classics (2): Primitive Agony and Symbolization
2024-05-02 22:00 - 23:00 | Hybrid (In-person: Oregon Psychoanalytic Center & Virtual), 2250 NW Flanders Street, Suite 312, Portland, OR, 97210, United States
In the seventh installment of “Lost Classics,” we will be taking a close look at Rene Roussillon’s “Primitive Agony and Symbolization. ” How are archaic experiences present in the adolescent and adult mind? What role does “interpretation” play in making contact with these primitive parts of ourselves? Does symbolization help? How might we think about symbolizing what has not yet or can’t be symbolized? What role does the body play in the revealing, discovering or even constructing archaic aspects of self? These are only a few of the important questions in this provocative, insightful contemporary re-examination on how analytic work helps facilitate change in which archaic aspects of self are intertwined within our adult experience of ourselves and the world.
CE.

Alessandra Lemma: The Erotic Body in Psychoanalysis
2024-05-03 09:00 - 11:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Alessandra Lemma presents the final session of our ongoing videoconference series on the Erotic in Psychoanalysis.
2 CEs $60

Rosenblitt Lecture Series: Therapeutic Action and Progress in Analysis: A Child Struggles With Death, Life, and Change
2024-05-04 10:00 - 12:00 | Hybrid (In-Person and Virtual)
Presented by Charles E. Parks, PhD

Helping Change Stick
2024-05-04 11:00 - 18:30 | CU Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO, Aurora, CO, United States
Guest Speaker: Mary Jo Peebles, PhD, ABPP, ABPH
Achieving tangible, structural change isn’t easy. Four skill areas, frequently missing from psychodynamic curricula, help change stick: Goal-setting, Right-Hemispheric processing, enhancing Absorption, and actively developing Internalization. This workshop describes and illustrates these four skill areas to psychotherapists of all experience levels and theoretical orientations, using lecture, slides, case examples, and live role-play.
CE credit.

Here I'm Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis with Adam Blum, PsyD, Peter Goldberg, PhD, & Michael Levin, PsyD
2024-05-04 12:00 - 16:00 | Hybrid (In-Person and Virtual)
This panel will explore how music comprises the forms of collective living in which the body finds its place in psychical life. The presentations will describe the ways that the vitality of the psychoanalytic clinical process depends at all times on this background quality of shared music, and how many of the contemporary maladies we encounter in our work reflect the sensory and emotional isolation of those who remain dissociated from this musical weave of human being. The presenters will use selections of music, draw upon clinical theory, and provide a link to philosophy, neuroscience, and cultural history to frame a discussion of the musical dimension of our psyche-soma-social world.

Trauma and Resilience: Through a Psychoanalytic Lens
2024-05-04 12:30 - 18:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Dr. Gilbert Kliman will present on his preschool Reflective Network Therapy. He will address how children can resiliently emerge from trauma and the adult aftermath of childhood trauma in foster care.
CE.

What is Effective in Psychoanalytic Treatments?
2024-05-10 12:30 - 14:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presenter: M. Sagman Kayatekin, MD
Description: Psychoanalytic discipline is in the process of broadening its theory, practitioners and applications. We welcome contributions from different psychoanalytic approaches and related disciplines in social sciences, humanities and neuro-psychoanalysis. Within this changing psychoanalytic scenery, a clearer articulation of the therapeutic potentialities and limitations of psychoanalytic approach is an important task.

Group Psychoanalysis: Who Knew?
2024-05-11 11:45 - 13:15 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
In this 90 minute offering, Dr. Attwell will introduce the class to the didactic similarities and differences between individual and group psychoanalysis as well as how they can work in effective tandem.
CE.

A Couple State of Mind - Conference
2024-05-11 12:00 - 16:20 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
The speaker will be Dr. Mary Morgan. In this course we will look at some of the theories and clinical technique in working psychoanalytically with couples developed at Tavistock Relationships. Central to the clinical approach is a ‘couple state of mind’. This is seen as an intrinsic part of the couple therapist’s internal setting.
CE.

Revisiting Winnicott's Primary Maternal Preoccupation: The Transition to Parenthood
2024-05-13 20:00 - 22:00 | NYU Langone Health Science Building (NYC), 435 East 30th St, New York, NY, United States
Winnicott’s concept of primary maternal preoccupation highlighted an altered mental state presumed essential to a mother’s transition to parenthood. This presentation will review how Winnicott’s is relevant to more contemporary understanding of the psychological transition of adults to parenthood, what are the challenges to adults becoming parents, and how do individual differences in adults’ development as parents relate to their infants’ development.
CE credits.

Traumatophilia: Notes on Libidinal Fugitivity
2024-05-16 20:30 - 22:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D.
Psychoanalytic thinking teaches us that trauma leaves the subject fractured, less agentic, more subject to iterative, stalled revisitations of the traumatic event. With the help of Jean Laplanche’s metapsychology, Saketopoulou will discuss how significant possibilities for psychic transformation and for contact with experience are courted when we make ourselves passible (Lyotard, Scarfone) to returning to the site of the trauma. Drawing our attention away from the usual – and somewhat rigid – framework of repetition compulsion, this presentation foregrounds a different approach: traumatophilia. Traumatophilia concerns itself less with what to do about trauma, which Saketopoulou describes as traumatophobic, and rather draws attention to what subjects do with their trauma. Therein we find ourselves in the domain of limit consent, that psychic territory where we encounter the vexed entanglements between freedom and constraint, and wherefrom traumatized subjects can make bids to enlarged psychic freedoms. The trauma of slavery and racism’s durational persistence offer premier sites and searing examples for discussing these ideas, revealing that traumatophobic paradigms generate new, specifically psychoanalytic forms of racism.

Day 1: Dr. Mark Solms – The Revision of Freud’s Theory of the Drives
2024-05-17 13:00 - 17:00 | Hybrid: Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, 8 South Michigan Avenue, Ste. 700, Chicago IL, 60603
The Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute invites you to join us for day one of a two-day (Hybrid) event featuring Dr. Mark Solms: Contemporary psychoanalysts have lost confidence in Freudian drive theory but have not replaced it with an alternative drive theory. This is problematic for many reasons, not least of them being the fact that ‘drive’ was Freud’s connecting link between the body and the mind. Psychoanalysis without drive theory is a disembodied discipline. Most psychoanalysts either have abandoned the use of drive theory or they are still using Freudian drive theory in their clinical work, because they are unfamiliar with subsequent developments in the field of neurobiology. This presents a gap in the learners ability to effectively use drive theory in their practice.
After attending this presentation, participants will increase their knowledge of new interpretations of Freudian drive theory, increase their understanding of the 7 major emotional drives of the human being. They will develop new strategies to use this information in the treatment of their patients.
For more information, please visit our events page @ https://chicagoanalysis.org/events
CE.

Day 2: Dr. Mark Solms – The Revised Standard Edition and Its Implications with guest Dr. Lois Oppenheim
2024-05-18 09:00 - 13:00 | Hybrid: Aloft Mag Mile, 243 E Ontario St, Chicago, Illinois, United States, 60611
The Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute invites you to join us for day two of a two-day (Hybrid) event featuring Dr. Mark Solms & Dr. Lois Oppenheim: The most commonly referenced translations of Freud’s works, Strachey’s translations, have been severely criticized over the years. This includes the claim that Freud’s intended meanings have been grossly distorted. Strachey is said to have medicalized psychoanalysis by imposing a spurious scientific consistency on Freud’s sprawling works, while also concocting an awkward pretentious vocabulary. Along with these poor translations, there have been 40 unpublished papers by Freud that the learners will have never seen before. This has left gaps in the learner’s understanding of Freud as a humanist that have never before been taught to them or available until now.
Learners’ will increase their awareness of the challenges Professor Solms faced when translating Freud. Since the practice of psychoanalysis is grounded fundamentally in Freud’s theories, a better understanding of these theories will have multiple implications for how participants practice psychoanalysis clinically.
For more information please visit our events page @ https://chicagoanalysis.org/events
CE

Gender Polymorphism: Another Royal Road to the Unconscious
2024-05-18 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Marco Posadas, PhD, MSW, RSW, FIPA

"Encountering Representations of Evil" with Donald Moss, MD
2024-05-18 10:30 - 12:00 | George Washington University Hospital Auditorium, Washington, DC
Evil is grounded in an effort to correct the errors of Creation– to define, categorize and eliminate what it designates as sources of threat and pain. This logic of elimination distinguishes evil from sadism’s logic of excitement. Stressing personal reactions and leaning on the work of Freud, Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt, the text takes up pertinent issues raised by Israel/Gaza and by the Institute for Peace and Justice (the “lynching museum”) in Montgomery, Alabama.
CE.

Connections And Conversation: Cupid’s Hour: The Transformative Potential of Female Erotic Countertransference – Janine De Peyer, LCSW-R
2024-05-18 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Free zoom event with Janine de Peyer, LCSW-R: Why has so little been written about the female analyst’s sexual desire? Is sexual arousal during clinical work such a rarity, or is it a natural response that has simply been relegated to the unmentionable? This workshop will explore cultural and gender prohibitions against the acknowledgement of the female analyst’s erotic arousal within the therapeutic dyad, whether heterosexual, same-sex or gender variant. Anchored by a particular case presentation in which an older, cisgendered, heterosexual female analyst finds herself unmoored by erotic stirrings toward her younger, cisgendered, heterosexual male patient, de Peyer will explore the emergence of unsettling erotic countertransference, her attempts to manage this arousal, and the inherent potential for healing that resides within an intersubjective dynamic of eroticism. By examining the intersubjective collision between her own desire and her patient’s apparent absence of desire, de Peyer will explore the emergence of dissociative transference-countertransference dynamics, along with culturally embedded associations to gender, power, ageism, the incest taboo, and the potential for ethical boundary violation. This workshop will primarily draw on works by Atlas, Celenza, Davies, and Elise.
