American Psychoanalytic Association

Psychoanalytic Takes on the Cinema: Discussion of the Film: “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On
2025-01-31 16:00 (America/New_York)
Psychoanalytic Takes on the Cinema: Discussion of the Film: “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On”
2021 (89 mins)
Directors: Dean Fleischer Camp
A documentary maker struggling with finances decides to make to make his newest documentary about a mollusk shell he finds living in his Airbnb with his friends.
*Film must be viewed before the discussion
via Zoom
Presenter: Jonathan Stillerman, PhD
Registration Deadline: January 29, 2025
Presentation Description:
As psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, we are constantly confronted with and immersed in our clients’ experiences of trauma and loss. But how often do we explore moments of awe in our clients’ lives and our own? And how often do we experience awe in the clinical encounter itself? Through a discussion of the 2023 animated mockumentary, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, we will focus on the role of awe in life and in therapy and examine its potential to mitigate grief and isolation and boost our resilience in the face of personal and communal experiences of trauma and loss.

Love Songs and Couples Therapy
2025-01-30 19:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Perrine Moran, M.A.
The dilemma of how to be emotionally dependent on another without losing oneself permeates many popular love songs and underlies issues that couples often bring to therapy. Its management results in different dynamics which place partners in couples on a spectrum going from too close to too far apart. This presentation will explore where the ability of love songs to trigger emotion and echo couple dynamics originates. It will highlight how songs can help a therapist’s thinking and interventions when listening to the unconscious “music” of couples’ interactions. Finally, reference will be made to a case study in conjunction with a particular song and couple dynamic and to concepts borrowed from mentalization theory.

Interpretation Viewed through the Lens of Attachment-informed Couple Psychotherapy
2025-01-29 09:45 - 11:45 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Chris Clulow

Frame to Frame: Film Through the Lens of Psychoanalysis
2025-01-28 22:00 - 23:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
From the start, the craft of filmmaking has been intertwined with psychoanalysis. Both were developed around the turn of the 20th century, and both involve, in practice, a fair amount of art as well as science. Perhaps most importantly, film and psychoanalysis share preoccupations with creativity, viewing and listening, primal desires, and primal fears. In this course, we will use some core concepts from psychoanalytic theory to enrich our understanding of four contemporary films. We will also try to consider the experience of viewing these films using the interpretive framework of psychoanalysis and the model of the mind that it offers. The films we will explore are symbolically rich, entertaining, and, like a good analysis, successful at getting under the skin, as one of the titles suggests.

Wisconsin Psychoanalytic Society Scientific Meeting
2025-01-25 12:00 - 14:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Wendy Katz, PhD. Silence, Second Skin, and the Unrepresented.
Dr. Katz uses the concepts of microdialect and secondskin to to explore the patient’s silence in session and how it may function on multiple levels of psychic and relational organization. Using this as a vehicle for moving between levels, it provides a potential avenue to access and creatively transform unrepresented experience.

Ethics Conference - Toward An Ethic of Play: How to Conceptualize Ethics in Play in Adult Analysis
2025-01-25 11:00 - 14:15 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Steven H. Cooper, PhD with discussion by Joyce Slochower, PhD
Through a series of clinical vignettes, the author explores the ethical undergirding of play in analytic work with adult patients. He defines play as a form of idiomatic, verbal responsiveness that emerges in the context of the analytic intersubjectivity, one that can illuminate elements of fixed transference-countertransference engagement. He outlines an ethic of play that considers whether these forms of responsiveness deepen and enliven the patient’s understanding of unconscious fantasy, conflict, and internalized object relations. Play poses challenges and potential risk for the analytic couple since in play, rules are often changing in the dialogue between the conscious and unconscious minds of the analytic couple.
This conference is intended to fulfill licensure renewal requirements for continuing education in ethics. However, registrants should check with their licensing board if uncertain.

Kramer Mahler Forum: The Moving Picture: How Children’s Art Illustrates Change During Treatment
2025-01-25 09:30 - 11:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Robin Holloway, PhD, CPsych, will use children’s artwork from psychotherapy to explore how drawings provide insights into a child’s mind, helping to understand fears, relationships, and emotional growth. Click here for the flyer and full description.
CE.

Edge of Catastrophe: Erich Fromm’s Fight Against Fascism and Racism
2025-01-24 18:30 - 20:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Dr. Roger Frie asks: What does it mean to be both a social critic and a practicing psychotherapist? In this talk he draws on the early work of Erich Fromm to answer this and other questions.

Judith Butler's Psychoanalysis
2025-01-22 20:30 - 21:30 | Hybrid (In-Person and Virtual)
This course will focus on Butler’s experience and engagement with psychoanalysis, in order to explore what impact their thinking can hold for clinical practice. We will focus both on their early work concerning gender as well as more recent writings about non-violence.

“Will Psychoanalysis, AI, and Philosophy Collide, Or Enrich Each Other?" A Conversation with Luca Possati, Ph.D. hosted by Amy Levy, Psy.D.
2025-01-19 11:00 - 13:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
The APsA/DPE Council on Artificial Intelligence (CAI) is pleased to announce the next event in our Workshop Series. On January 19th, from 11 AM to 1 PM EST, Dr. Amy Levy will be in conversation with Dr. Luca Possati, author of The Algorithmic Unconscious: How Psychoanalysis Helps in Understanding AI. They will consider Dr. Possati’s theories of projective identification between machines and humans, his theories about a new unconscious forming through human-machine interactions, his research into “grief bots” (AI companions that simulate the deceased), and the unconscious human needs driving the AI revolution. You can also expect conversation about, among other topics, Dr. Possati’s model of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) developed as a critique of Mark Solm’s model for artificial consciousness.
Luca Possati’s work has been a frequent topic of discussion within the CAI. As an internationally recognized philosopher whose research illuminates historical, ethical, social, and psychological implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI), we have been significantly enriched by our encounters with his work. Well versed in Lacan, Object Relations theory and software studies, he is well positioned to dialogue with the psychoanalytic community about the nature of our relationship to AI and what we may expect in the coming AI wave.
We are delighted by the opportunity to share his work, and this conversation, with our community. There is no charge to attend and attendance is open to all who may be interested. Here is the link to the registration form: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUqdu-pqTIjGNah476wSSwPed_Yb2HeDTQx

Saturday Salon: Exploring the Transgender Edge in the Analytic Relationship
2025-01-18 13:00 - 16:10 | Long Beach, CA (In Person)
Presented by Tiffaney Hale, LMFT
Attendees will explore Griffith Hansbury’s paper, The masculine vaginal: Working with queer men’s embodiment at the transgender edge (2017) as a conduit for both thinking about their own gendered experiences and clinical stances toward patients’ gendered presentations.

The Unconscious Triad: Hidden Unconscious, Buried Unconscious, Implicit Unconscious
2025-01-18 13:00 - 15:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Description: The current extension of the concept of the unconscious to different levels, configurations, and functioning of the mind is the result of decades of collective reflection on the clinic and on theory. Analysts today have a broader, more refined and complex knowledge of defensive and transformative processes, and this has also led to an evolution in technique. The paper presents a combination of psychoanalytic theory and technique through two clinical cases that present complex articulations of spurious unconscious functional areas and modalities, alternately repressed and not repressed.
Educational Objective(s)
1) To provide the audience with an update on the current extension of the concept of the unconscious, with regard to different levels, configurations and functioning of the mind.
2) To present clinical examples of these new conceptual extensions, to transfer this update to daily therapeutic practice.
Presenter Information
Bio: Stefano Bolognini, M.D. is a psychiatrist and training analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, of which he was Scientific Secretary and President. After serving as a Representative on the first IPA Board, he became its President in 2013 and served in that role until 2017. He also founded the “IPA Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis” and is a member of the Advisory Board of the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin (IPU), Honorary Member of the New York Contemporary Freudian Society (NYCFS), and of the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies (LAISPS). Bolognini was a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for 10 years, and has published over 250 psychoanalytic works, both books and papers.

Doubting Doubt: Success, Failure and Ambiguity in Two Psychodynamic Treatments of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
2025-01-18 12:00 - 13:30 | Hybrid (In-Person and Virtual)
Paul Doyen, LMSW, will discuss Glen Gabbard’s claim that psychoanalytic therapy cannot cure OCD. He will present two cases in which the use of behavioral interventions brought on benefits as well as unexpected conflicts and transference reactions in clients with OCD. Finally, Paul will review recent research on the need to combine psychoanalytic and behavioral models in order to successfully treat OCD.

Body and Mind
2025-01-17 09:00 - 11:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Donald Campbell

Paul A. Dewald Lecture: Developing a Stable Internal Home
2025-01-16 20:30 - 22:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Aisha Abbasi, MD: Homesickness is a commonly used term, and a feeling that has been studied with interest, in psychoanalysis. The connection and distinction between homesickness and nostalgia has been noted in many analytic papers. Normal and pathological forms of both have been described. In this paper, Dr. Abbasi discusses the theoretical framework that informs our current understanding of homesickness. She outlines developmental factors that affect the evolution, emergence, and at times, the persistence of this feeling. Using clinical vignettes from her work, she demonstrates how and why the sense of homesickness emerges in therapeutic work at the time when it does, and the challenges and opportunities it presents, both for the patient and the analyst. Dr. Abbasi also shares with us her evolving understanding of her own feelings of homesickness, following two major immigrations in her life: one, when she moved from Pakistan to the USA in 1987; and the other, when she moved from Michigan to Portland, Oregon, in 2023. She delineates the intrapsychic work involved in such a process, and postulates that such work gives rise to the development of a new and more stable internal home within one’s mind. She elaborates on the implications of this idea for analytic technique, especially as patients consider ending their work with the analyst. She also sees this as an important aspect of adult maturation and growth, one that is profoundly helpful during relocations, both local and distant, that many adults go through. Building upon Mahler’s description of the first separation-individuation phase of toddlerhood, Blos’ understanding of adolescence as a second individuation, and Akhtar’s insights about immigration as a third individuation, Dr. Abbasi suggests that the development of a stable internal home in one’s mind, during mid to late adult life, is akin to a fourth individuation process within the self.

Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis by Steven H. Cooper, PhD - Book Review and Discussion with Nora Swan Foster, MA, ATR-BC, LPC, NCPsyA
2025-01-16 20:00 - 21:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
What if the leading purpose of the therapeutic relationship is to elevate the process of play? And when this capacity is absent, how might we find ways to fertilize the imagination? These questions were posed by Nora Swan-Foster, a Jungian analyst and art therapist who was invited to review and discuss Steven Cooper’s recent book. In his book, Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis, Cooper suggests that there is tremendous value in play. He writes: “the capacity to mourn is often paradoxically helpful to the capacity to play, just as the capacity to play is often a part of the mourning process” (p. 6). With Winnicott’s radical theory of play as the foundation for intersubjective therapeutic work, Cooper builds upon Winnicott’s key contributions through exploring such ideas as the “bad object,” the relationship between play and mourning, metaphors and dreaming, ethics and play, and the role of play in transference-countertransference dynamics. Cooper shows us through clinical examples how and why play is clinically essential, and how its application can have a powerful influence on the direction of the analytic work. Holding play in mind shifts our clinical attitude and therapeutic approach, perhaps at times helping to detangle difficult emotional knots.
Nora invites us to bring paper and any art supplies we might have available to our online discussion, so that we can have a lived experience of spontaneous play. No need to be an artist for these two to three-minute explorations, she assures us, but have in mind a clinical dilemma or specific case. She has been experimenting with this method as a means of gaining a new perspective on countertransference issues. Theoretically, it should tap on right-brain functions and expand the play space in our discussion group.

“I’ll Be Your Mirror”: Love Songs and Couples - A Mentalizing View
2025-01-15 09:45 - 11:45 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Perrine Moran

Meet the Author: Steven Cooper & Judy Kantrowitz
2025-01-14 19:30 - 21:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Join Steven Cooper, PhD, and Judy Kantrowitz, PhD, for our next Meet the Author event with John Martin-Joy, MD, and the online audience.

COWAP: Women the Longest Revolution: Session 4: Women’s Role as Caregivers Through Their Lifespan
2025-01-11 11:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
COWAP: Women the Longest Revolution
Session 4: Women’s Role as Caregivers Through Their Lifespan
Panel: Jessica Benjamin in conversation with Margarita Cereijido, Erika Lepiavka and Tracy Sidesinger
Presentation:
Notions of woman and the feminine have changed dramatically over the last decades and this is reflected in how women perceive themselves, how they are perceived by society, and how this is understood from a psychoanalytic perspective. Jessica Benjamin will talk about how feminism changed our understanding of the human psyche, including issues in psychosexual development related to gender and our rejection of normative heterosexuality. She will also reflect on her early work. She will have a conversation about these issues with Tracy Sidesinger, and Erika Lepiavka, considering new gender dynamics, the deconstruction of motherhood and women having multiple ideals.
Full Program Flyer: https://wbcp.memberclicks.net/assets/docs/PR/24-25/V3%20of%20COWAP%20Women%20The%20Longest%20Revolution%20%28Final_No%20Bios%29.pdf
Presenter Biographies: https://www.wbcp.org/cowap-women-the-longest-revolution-presenter-biographies/
Registration Link: https://wbcp.memberclicks.net/registration_cowap_women_revolution_2024-2025#!/
Registration Deadline: Registration Deadline: January 8, 2025 at 4:30 pm ET

Elements of Vitalization in Psychoanalytic Work with Empty or Dissociated Patients
2025-01-11 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Anne Alvarez, PhD

Alumni Group - The Lure of the Symptom in Psychoanalytic Treatment
2025-01-10 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presenter: Glen O. Gabbard, MD | Psychoanalysis, which at its core is a search for truth, stands in a subversive position vis-a-vis the contemporary therapeutic culture that places a premium on symptomatic “cure.” In this communication I am tracing the evolution of Freud’s thinking about the relationship between the aims of psychoanalysis and the alleviation of symptoms.

The Work of Christopher Bollas
2025-01-09 22:00 - 23:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)

Evening Lecture: Metaphors and their Storylines
2025-01-09 20:30 - 22:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Daniel Goldin, PsyD
Aristotle believed that having a grasp of metaphor was a sign of genius, as it “implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilarities.” Freud saw this metaphoric grasping together in the art of the dreamer, who compresses into a single story a day’s worth — perhaps even a life’s worth — of important stories. He compared the metaphoric mandate of condensation implicit in the dream work to the task an illustrator faces in coming up with a single illustration to represent the day’s headlines. This talk aims to trace the hidden imaginative process behind this process of augmenting through reduction, of compressing dissimilar ideas into one working parable. Both the dreamer and the analyst follow invisible immaterial schemas or storylines that serve as a kind of procedure for the telling of a story but are not the story itself. Like the symmetry of a group of marbles, a storyline has no existence of its own — symmetry cannot be separated out from the grouping of marbles nor a storyline from its story — and yet both have the power to organize other groupings and other stories. They have an immaterial coding power. We psychoanalysts have divided ourselves into tribes, each arguing in favor of one site of psychoanalytic change — the here-and-now — the transference — the so-called real relationship – dreams — trauma — infancy — the self-self-object matrix — moving from dissociation to conflict — but our true art lies in following a structural invariant that invisibly organizes our imaginings together in all these realms, following it wherever it may lead with a certain faith in the rule
of metaphor.

Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
2025-01-08 22:00 - 23:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
This series of ten bimonthly meetings is designed to meet the needs of clinicians interested in incorporating psychodynamic concepts and techniques into their clinical practice. This course will have a clinical focus and will provide an opportunity for participants to hear and discuss case material e will apply the technique of free association as a group to understand clinical material from a psychodynamic perspective.

Online intensive Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program-The Online IPPP
2025-01-08 09:00 - 11:45 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
The Online IPPP is designed for working clinicians who wish to learn the Interpersonal psychoanalytic perspective.The 28 week curriculum is divided into 4 modules: Consultation and Beginning a Treatment, Key Concepts in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Child Development and Adult Psychotherapy and Listening, Formulating and Intervening. Each class consists of two parts, lectures in theory and clinical case seminars. The program meets on 28 Wednesdays from January 8, 2025 to August 6, 2025 from 9:00-11:45am Eastern Time.

Study Group - Meaning and Metaphor in Psychoanalysis
2025-01-07 20:00 - 21:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
A Note from the HPS Program Chair: Metaphor is a fitting topic for our 2024-2025 educational program this year, in that it evokes both depth and vitality. It will be fun to explore this form of symbolism and word play with Gretchen Heyer, who is a published writer and poet as well as a practicing Jungian analyst!***** JoAnn Ponder, PhD
A metaphor makes an implicit comparison between two unlike things, usually by succinctly stating that one thing is the other. This form of symbolism and word play is used in poetry, writing, and everyday conversation, as well as psychoanalysis. In dialogue, metaphors can enhance understanding between people and aspects of their experience that seem, on surface level, to be very far apart or even beyond comprehension (Orange, 2011). The insight might prove surprising, and the effect is perhaps softening or jarring. As part of a psychoanalytic treatment process, a metaphor can evoke, discover, and create meaning, thereby expanding consciousness even as it organizes it (Seiden, 2004). Metaphors thus serve beneficial functions in treatment by connecting with the patient’s unconscious, bridging affect and cognition (Modell, 2009), and deepening the analytical work (Caspi, 2018).
This study group will explore the use of metaphors in psychoanalytic treatment. The group will be limited to 23 participants. Registrants should have a basic grasp of psychoanalytic theory and be willing to complete the assigned readings. We will discuss the concepts and consider their application in our own clinical practices.

Luminaries of the Interpersonal Tradition-The Online TOPP
2025-01-05 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
The Online TOPP is an ADVANCED course for clinicians who are already working interpersonally or relationally and wish to deepen their clinical work. Most students in the program are psychoanalysts or have extensive clinical experience. Currently, the topic is “Luminaries of the Interpersonal Tradition” and includes the work of Edgar Levenson, Jay Greenberg, Philip Bromberg, and Donnel Stern. It is taught by senior faculty members – Miri Abramis, Jenny Kaufmann, Seth Aronson and Luis Rippol. The program runs for 28 SUNDAYS, January 5 – August 3, 2025, 10:00am-12:00pm EASTERN TIME.

Considering Child Development in Adult Clinical Work
2024-12-20 12:50 - 13:50 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
2024-25 Grand Rounds Series
Dr. Theodore Fallon will present ongoing work illuminating a developmental perspective on working with adult patients in talk therapy. This perspective focuses on three different stages in child development:
Developing a core sense of self which in “normative” chronology takes place during the first 18 months of life;
The psychic equivalent mode of thinking predominates and the child lives in dyadic relationships in the present moment which has been identified “normatively” between the ages of 3 and 7 years of life, and;
After a watershed developmental moment, reflective thinking, object constancy, theory of mind, empathy, triadic and community relationships predominate in the child’s mind. The child “normatively” has the capacity to reach these psychological capacities by seven years of age.
At each of these three stages of development, growth promoting interactions, that is, good parenting, occur in one of three frames depending on the development of the child. In each of these three frames, the parent and the child predominantly follow one of three general sets of rules of engagement that fit the stage of development.
In ongoing clinical work, as well as extensive observations of residents’ interactions with patients, and recent public events over the last ten years, Dr. Fallon has observed that each adult thinks, behaves and interacts with others using predominantly one of these three sets of rules of engagement. In the context of a talk therapy, growth promoting interactions seem to occur when the therapist follows the rules of engagement that match the patient’s. Teaching residents to identify and engage in the rules of engagement that are growth promoting for each particular adult patient has enhanced the residents’ capacity for effective talk therapy.

Philosophy, Heidegger and Hans W. Loewald’s Early Papers
2024-12-14 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Speaker: Elizabeth Brett, PhD
Discussant: Alfred Margulies, MD
From his first publications, Hans Loewald presents a model of mother?infant unity, in which psychic development takes place in the tension systems of an interpersonal field. He outlines the almost undetectable and emergent processes in the psyche as psychological functioning begins to form and evolve in its earliest stages, proposing a conception of development based on successive levels of differentiation and integration. All of these proposals, influenced by Heidegger and Loewald’s philosophic training, challenged basic concepts of Freud’s and of the psychoanalytic theory of the day. Many, especially early readers, were confused by these challenges, particularly given Loewald’s strong agreements and disagreements with carefully, explicated positions of Freud’s; by the magnitude of the theoretical questions under consideration; and by the attraction to and suspicion of Loewald’s poetic writing.

Saturday Salon: Identifying and Treating “Psychotic Pockets” in Relational Psychotherapy
2024-12-14 13:00 - 16:10 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Dr. Lawrence Hedges, Ph.D., Psy.D., ABPP:
Over the past two decades, it has become increasingly clear that the earliest of life’s experiences have left “pockets” of primitive relational patterns in many otherwise well-developed people. Hedges will discuss the nature of early relational experience and how early experiences of distress often leave marks on later personality functioning, and how these experiences can be addressed in Relational Psychotherapy.
