American Psychoanalytic Association

Dissociative Attunement: Rhythm and Resonance in Therapeutic Process
2026-03-05 20:30 - 22:00 (America/New_York) | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by: Karen Hopenwasser, MD
While moments of attunement with individuals manifesting dissociated self-states are often confusing, dissociative attunement can be used as a valuable tool in therapeutic process. Attunement is a synchronized awareness of implicit knowing that is nonlinear and bidirectional. It is an embodied rhythmic encounter that can be understood, in part, through the science of entrainment, a natural process by which our biological and psychophysiological systems synchronize within an environment. It is not necessary to understand the complex science of rhythmic entrainment to notice and appreciate the felt sense of being in rhythm. However, some knowledge of the neuroscience and the physics of information flow can help us listen to intuition in an informed and critical way. It takes effort to move beyond concepts of transference and countertransference so embedded in our philosophy and training as therapists. Attunement with dissociated self-states is often mistaken as countertransference and mis-attunement. When that happens, we lose an opportunity to think differently, to understand more about the experience of dissociated self-states and ultimately to appreciate how humans are enmeshed within the deep ecology of complex systems.
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Michelle Harwell, PsyD, MFT
2026-03-07 11:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
“When We Are Undone: Exploring Moments of Vulnerability, Surrender, and Creative Transformation Within the Analyst”

Working Clinically with Overwhelm: The Cost and Growth-Inducing Possibilities of Undoing the Self
2026-03-13 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presenter: Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD
This presentation begins with a summary of the theory of overwhelm, a way of conceptualizing working with intensity and excitation that is not about guarding the self (not about emotional regulation, not about protecting the ego from the drives) but which explores what becomes possible when one reaches the limit of what is bearable in oneself, when one follows the exigency of the unconscious. For the clinician, working with overwhelm is both a challenge and an art form: it requires us, as therapists, to make ourselves permeable to our patients in ways that make us exquisitely vulnerable and to take true risks the results of which cannot be guaranteed ahead of time.
To illustrate the difficulty, but also the extraordinary possibilities of such work, work that rends the self to allow something new to emerge, Dr. Saketopoulou will discuss the analysis of a Jewish patient whose encounter with the Palestinian genocide raised considerable anxieties and revived questions of identity, trauma, and intergenerational transmission. The clinical work–and the presentation–raise questions of ethics, of rethinking questions of intergenerational transmission and the debts it incurs, and the relation of the political to the psychic.

NCP's Virtual Open House 2026
2026-03-16 10:00 | Virtual
Join us online for a lively discussion with students and faculty from each of our programs who will share how their training at NCP has fostered personal growth, a deeper understanding of their patients’ experiences, and opportunities to build professional networks.
You’ll also have an opportunity to meet our program directors and Dean, learn more about our multi-year training programs, and ask any questions you may have.
Whether you are considering training this year or in the near future, all are welcome to attend. We look forward to seeing you!

Multicultural Competency in Psychodynamic Practice
2026-04-08 19:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Speaker: Alicia Naveas, LPC, MEd. This course will explore foundational concepts of cultural competency within psychodynamic frameworks. Emphasizing the work of authors such as Tummala-Narra, Salman Akhtar, and Patricia Gherovici will integrate multicultural awareness into psychoanalytic thinking. For instance, Tummala-Narra (2025) conceptualizes multicultural competence as a reflective capacity to shift perspectives and understand the patient’s lived experience. Credits: 4.5

Thinking Where We Are Not: Interpellation, Dissociative Enactment, and the Social
2026-04-09 20:30 - 22:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by: Donnel Stern, PhD
In the interest of integrating the social and the individual in psychoanalysis, Dr. Stern examines the relation of Althusser’s concept of interpellation and the psychoanalytic idea of dissociative enactment. Interpellation is a way of conceptualizing the creation of subjectivity via individual participation in the ideological tropes of power. Dissociative enactment is a relational psychoanalytic way of referring to unconscious participation in relatedness. In interpellation, one person is “hailed” by another in a way that inducts the person so addressed, without the awareness of either party, into a relational pattern that includes both. Dr. Stern argues that we can see the same process in dissociative enactment. Clinical process is illuminated by the recognition of the continuity of the social and the individual that is modeled by the relation of these two dissociative processes. New meaning–the formulation of unformulated experience–comes about unbidden, sometimes slipping the traces of ideology. Paraphrasing an aphorism from Lacan: We think where we are not.
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Alumni Roundtable
2026-04-10 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Resolving Rapprochement

Becoming Raced-Psychic Consequences of Transgenerational Racial Trauma
2026-04-10 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presenter: Dionne R. Powell, MD
Yasmin Roberts Memorial Lecture
Racism, and otherness, continues to be contentious for psychoanalysts to consider as a psychic phenomenon. Unlike aggression and sexuality, racism is held in silence and resistance, inhibiting exploration of this aspect of mind. By closely examining how and where the analyst/psychotherapist locates themselves racially and working through our resistance and countertransference to this type of exploration, this paper invites us to include these aspects of mind for our analytic use. This paper expands on how we become raced by exploring the transgenerational transmission of racial trauma, and its intra-psychic, structuralizing components. Using examples from the creative arts and clinical vignettes to demonstrate how being raced, as a universal phenomenon, is embodied and symbolized in mind, opens a therapeutic aperture for clinicians who may benefit from a psychoanalytic, intrapsychic perspective on this aspect of our shared humanity.

Anthony Bass, PhD
2026-04-18 11:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
“Unconscious Communication Between Therapist and Patient: The Ordinary Uncanniness of Everyday Psychoanalytic Life-Back to the Future of Psychoanalysis”

Alumni Roundtable
2026-05-01 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Working with Shame

Psychoanalytic Freedom and The Loving Gaze
2026-05-14 20:30 - 22:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by: Shir Shanun, PhD
Civitarese (2024) writes we have a need to exist in the eyes of others, it is what makes relationships meaningful. Such loving connections and freedom in complex analytic system and the positive relationship between them are at the center of this paper. I will argue that restriction or expansion of one impacts the other. I define freedom—as an emergent component within the analytic complex system that reflects an increase in perspectives a person has and experiences; and the loving gaze—as an integral constituent of the conditions that support recognition and an indicator of movement toward or away from recognition and connection. The use of Giuseppe Civitarese’s model of Post Bionian Field Theory (BFT) and Daniel Goldin’s Storying, supports the emergence of both loving gaze and freedom including more freedom to address the socio-political and transform our experience into a loving gaze experience.
In this paper a clinical example will demonstrate a moment of restricted freedom in the context of socio-political impingement. We will explore its transformation into a loving gaze experience using BFT and storying techniques. It will exemplify how when our loving gaze is restricted toward the other and toward ourselves, our freedom is restricted. Whereas we might feel a more intimate connection when we experience more freedom in our relatedness.
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