Going Deeper Into Transference-Focused Psychotherapy
2024-09-13 08:30 (America/New_York)
Going Deeper Into Transference-Focused Psychotherapy:
Details of the Diagnostic and Contracting Processes and Their Crucial Role Throughout the Therapy
This live, online only, interactive two-day program with Master TFP Clinician Frank Yeomans, MD. PhD offers a refresher of basic TFP techniques and a sharp focus on the diagnostic phase of treatment with implementation of the TFP Contract, including the methodology, reasoning, and evidence which supports contracting with difficult patients suffering from personality disorders.
Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) is a manualized, evidence-based psychoanalytic therapy for patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) that has recently been adapted for patients with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and pathological narcissism (PN).
TFP is based on a contemporary object relations model of psychological functioning that incorporates findings from attachment and neurocognitive research. The treatment focuses on internalized representations of self and other that organize the patient’s interpersonal experience.
PRESENTER:
Frank Yeomans, MD, PhD, is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College, Director of Training at the Personality Disorders Institute of Weill-Cornell, and Adjunct Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons. He is president of the International Society for Transference-Focused Psychotherapy, an Honorary Member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and past Chair of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry Committee on Psychotherapy, Dr. Yeomans’ primary interests are the development, investigation, teaching, and practice of psychotherapy for personality disorders. He headed the specialized unit for patients with Borderline Personality Disorder at Weill Cornell Medical Center for ten years and has subsequently focused on the practice and teaching of TFP nationally and internationally.

Psychosomatics and Psycho-dermatology
2024-09-13 09:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Jorge Claudio Ulnik (Buenos Aires)

Photographing What You Know: How a Psychoanalyst Became a Photographer
2024-09-14 10:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Jon K. Meyer, MD

COWAP NA: Women the Longest Revolution
2024-09-14 11:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Please join us for a series of conversations
Time: Saturday mornings, 11:00 am to 12:30 pm EST
7 sessions
2024: September 14, October 26, December 14
2025: January 11, February 22, March 8, April 12
Via Zoom
Presented by the Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis of the International Psychoanalytic Association (COWAP) North America, and sponsored by the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. Organizing Committee: Chair: Margarita Cereijido, Co-chair: Catherine Mallouh, Members: Anne Adelman, Janice Lieberman, Jill Gentile and Jeri Isaacson.
Registration Link: https://wbcp.memberclicks.net/registration_cowap_women_revolution_2024-2025
Click Here to View the Program Flyer:
https://wbcp.memberclicks.net/assets/docs/PR/24-25/V3%20of%20COWAP%20Women%20The%20Longest%20Revolution%20%28Final_No%20Bios%29.pdf
1.5 CME/CE per session
10.5 CME/CE total
First Session:
September 14, 2024
Session 1: The Female Psychoanalyst’s Longest Revolution
Panel: Virginia Ungar in conversation with Margarita Cereijido, and Margarita Valladares
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. Inspired by the title of
Juliet Mitchell’s iconic book, Women: The Longest Revolution, we will explore the ongoing changes experienced by the female psychoanalyst, including analytic training and later professional life. It will discuss issues about prejudice, authority, and working online.
Virginia Ungar will talk about her challenges as the first IPA woman president in 102 years, and will have a conversation with Margarita Valladares, a psychoanalytic candidate, and Margarita Cereijido. The audience will reflect with the presenters about how our thinking has
changed.

COWAP: Women the Longest Revolution
2024-09-14 11:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Please join us for a series of conversations
Time: Saturday mornings, 11:00 to 12:30 EST
7 sessions
2024: September 14, October 26, December 14
2025: January 11, February 22, March 8, April 12
Presented by the Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis of the International Psychoanalytic Association International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) (COWAP North America) North America, and sponsored by the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. Organizing Committee: Chair: Margarita Cereijido, Co-chair: Catherine Mallouh, Members: Anne Adelman, Janice Lieberman, Jill Gentile and Jeri Isaacson.
Via Zoom
CME/CE Offered
Registration Link:
https://wbcp.memberclicks.net/registration_cowap_women_revolution_2024-2025#!/
To see the full list of presenters and session descriptions please view the 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 Bios:

COWAP: “Women, The Longest Revolution” Presenter Biographies

Upcoming Session:
September 14, 2024
Session 1: The Female Psychoanalyst’s Longest Revolution
Panel: Virginia Ungar in conversation with Margarita Cereijido, and Margarita Valladares
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. Inspired by the title of Juliet Mitchell’s iconic book, Women: The Longest Revolution, we will explore the ongoing changes experienced by the female psychoanalyst, including analytic training and later professional life. It will discuss issues about prejudice, authority, and working online. Virginia Ungar will talk about her challenges as the first IPA woman president in 102 years, and will have a conversation with Margarita Valladares, a psychoanalytic candidate, and Margarita Cereijido. The audience will reflect with the presenters about how our thinking has changed.

Vitality in Human Development and Vitalization in Psychoanalytic Treatment
2024-09-14 22:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Stephen Seligman, DMH, Anne Alvarez, PhD, M.A.C.P. & Christopher Bonovitz, PsyD
Vitality might be considered the essence of aliveness. Louis Sander and Daniel Stern drew our attention to vitality as a core component of human development and psychotherapeutic treatment. They were the most visionary of the first group of infant observation researchers, along with Colwyn Trevarthen. Both were inspired by deep experiences beyond the usual psychoanalytic preoccupations: Sander by spiritual faith, sustained in his passion for the essential principles of living systems; Stern by a lifelong commitment to aesthetics and the arts, especially dance, reflected in his extraordinary eye for the choreography of infant-parent interaction and psychotherapy process. Both were also exceptional researchers and creative, integrative scientists. From these platforms, Sander and Stern broke through crusts that had restrained both developmental psychology and psychoanalysis, reaching toward the sources of human vitality throughout the life cycle. Conference presenter Stephen Seligman will discuss Sander and Stern’s foundational findings about the origins, development, and manifestations of vitality, as well as the implications for treatment.
While classical psychoanalysis has taught us much about the passions, less explored are the passionless, often mindless and empty states presented by certain passive patients. In some instances, according to presenter Anne Alvarez, these states may not be the result not of a defensive or aggressive retreat, but of having given up in despair or boredom. Such patients do not seem to be hiding, but lost; not withdrawn, but undrawn. Their internal objects seem to be unvalued rather than devalued and nothing much matters. This may affect curiosity and desire, even the desire to follow a train of thought. Alvarez discusses what might be missing or underdeveloped and ways in which analytic technique may try to address these issues via processes of vitalization.
There also is a relationship between human vitality and sense of time. Presenter Christopher Bonovitz uses Loewald’s concept of time in examining the temporal dimension of self states and enactments that emerge in the psychoanalytic situation. This includes looking at the relationship between time and vitality, fragmented and unitary time, and the role of imagination in developing the dyadic capacity to contain linkages between the past, present and future.

The Robert Waelder Memorial Lecture: Can Psychoanalysts Listen to Each Other?
2024-09-18 19:00
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. Other prominent contemporary thinkers will be cited, including Frantz Fanon. The author emphasizes our failures, including his own.

A Thorn in the Flesh: Trauma
2024-09-20 09:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Advanced Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
In A Thorn in the Flesh: Trauma you will learn more about theories and techniques of treating trauma and about the empirical research that supports successful treatments.
Course includes 8 total sessions, 16 CE credits

Book of the Month: "Theoretical" vs. "Clinical" Bion: Bion’s Long Road Towards Intuiting the Patient’s Suffering I Introducing the Clinical Work of Wilfred Bion by Joseph Aguyao, PhD
2024-09-20 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Ofra Eshel was invited to review and discuss Joseph Aguayo’s book, Introducing the Clinical Work of Wilfred Bion (Routledge, 2023). After reading the book, she decided to focus on what she discerned as the complex relationship and the significant gap between Bion’s theoretical and clinical work, as documented by Bion’s own writings from the critical years of his move to LA (1967-1968), and during his later years, particularly in the last two years of his life a decade later. Her presentation focuses on two of Bion’s own analytic case descriptions from 1967 in Los Angeles and 1968 in Buenos Aires, and on the account of the Brazilian analyst Junqueira de Mattos of his analysis with Bion over the final two years of Bion’s life — while comparing them to a close reading of Bion’s radical theoretical-clinical writings during those years. These detailed accounts allow a textual investigation of Bion the theoretician versus Bion the practicing analyst, particularly highlighting the significant and disturbing gap between them. Eshel attempts to offer a possible explanation and understanding of this gap, and especially of Bion’s long road towards intuiting the patient’s suffering.

Trauma, Guilt, and Conspiracy: The Zero Process and The Superego
2024-09-20 18:30
A Scientific Meeting presented by Dr. Joseph Fernando, MDCM

Trauma, Guilt, And Conspiracy: The Zero Process And The Superego
2024-09-20 18:30 - 20:00 | Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center, 2460 Fairmount Blvd #312, Cleveland, OH, 44106, United States
A Scientific Meeting presented by Dr. Joseph Fernando, MDCM. This presentation explores the links between trauma, guilt, and the superego, and through this exploration attempts to make some additions to our understanding of individual dynamics, group regression, and group delusions. Dr. Fernando first describes his concept of the zero process as the form of mental functioning that is a product of the breakdown of the construction of the present moment during trauma. These unconstructed, bits and pieces memories exist as present experiences or future expectations.
From time to time, in relation to traumas that are either individual or developmental, inner objects which have the quality of immediate presences form — we usually call them introjects. The presenter suggests that these are best conceptualized as zero process structures in having many characteristics of the zero process, and that the obligatory connection between trauma and guilt, and the manner of transmission of culture and the superego, and of conspiracy theories and other group delusions, can be better and more deeply understood once the part that zero process structures play in all these phenomena is brought into focus.
CE

Film and Mind Online: Saltburn
2024-09-20 20:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Cinematic masterpiece Saltburn, (2023) directed by Academy Award winning Emerald Ferrell, is a fascinating study in perverse autonomy. Barry Keoghan stars in the psychological drama Saltburn from which he won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor. Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a bright, young, brooding social outcast who lands at Oxford and is quickly drawn to the handsome and aristocratic Felix Catton. Oliver strategically enters Felix’s inner circle by casting himself as a poor unfortunate soul, drenched in familial madness and tragedy and thus secures an invitation to spend the summer at Felix’s grand ancestral home in the British countryside. The tropes of Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr. Ripley are reworked with fascinating freshness.
Most of the story locates at the massive Saltburn, a grand estate complete with a labyrinth and colorful characters. Mesmerizing cinematography captures the opulence of the British upper class juxtaposed with grotesque ways in which the repressed returns in ruthless and devouring relational enactments.
Join us in exploring these evocative themes, stirring rich psychoanalytic dialogue about essential early relationships, environmental conditions, un-held losses and the impact of these on one’s creative aliveness and establishing cohesive, autonomous selfhoods.
Mary Starks MA, LPCC, is licensed psychoanalytic therapist in private practice in Santa Monica, CA and holds a post graduate certification in Infant and Family Clinical Practice from the Harris Institute. She specializes in working with adults with childhood trauma and facilitates virtual Circle of Security Parenting Groups. She has a special interest in Psychoanalytic Film Theory and is a rising Mental Health Coordinator in Film/TV.
Josh Richmond, MPW, FIPA, offers psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for adults at his office in South Pasadena. He is a psychoanalyst and a graduate of the New Center for Psychoanalysis of Los Angeles, where he is also on faculty, and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytic Association. Joshua C. Richmond is in the process of getting certified in Transference-Focused Psychotherapy, an evidence-based modality designed to treat personality disorders such as Borderline Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Joshua C. Richmond was an Adjunct Professor at Cal State Fullerton for four years and is a vested member of the Writers Guild of America West. He served on the Board of Directors for the New Center for Psychoanalysis as a past CAO President and currently serves on the Program Committee.

Differentiating Identification with the Aggressor From PRojective Identification
2024-09-21 09:00
Workshop presented by Dr. Joseph Fernando, MDCM

Differentiating Identification with the Aggressor From Projective Identification
2024-09-21 09:00 - 11:00 | Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center, 2460 Fairmount Blvd #312, Cleveland, OH, 44106, United States
A Scientific Meeting presented by Dr. Joseph Fernando, MDCM. In this presentation Dr. Fernando will differentiate two defenses that are important clinically but that are often confused with each other: projective identification and identification with the aggressor. He will show that differentiating these two defenses at the conceptual level can be helpful clinically.
Dr. Fernando will demonstrate that by differentiating defenses relating to different forms of the unconscious – the id versus the unconscious part of the ego, the unconscious primary process versus the unconscious secondary process – we can come to a deeper understanding of these two defenses, as well as of defensive processes more generally. These defenses, and especially projective identification, are now usually understood in terms of inner object relations.
Dr. Fernando will present a view of them which does not necessarily contradict an object relations description, but that supplements it by approaching the two defensive processes discussed from the point of view of Freud’s original distinction between the primary and secondary modes of mental functioning.

Sadomasochism; Understanding and Working with the Self-Defeating Patient
2024-09-21 11:45 - 13:15 | Virtual and In-person PANY, One Park Ave 8th Fl, New York, NY, United States
About the Event:
Self-defeating behaviors are present to some degree in every psychodynamic treatment. We will explore ways in which sadomasochism manifests, particularly in the transference/countertransference arena. The developmental roots and psychodynamic underpinnings will be illuminated through clinical examples. A contemporary understanding via Neuropsychoanalysis will explore self-defeating behavior as a problem with the PLAY instinct, leading to impairment in the ability to collaborate. The goal will be to fortify practitioners for what are often long and difficult treatments.
About the Presenter:
Robert Calcaterra, MD
PANY Faculty
Psychoanalytic Research and Development Fund – Board of Directors
Zucker Hillside Psychiatric Residency – Lead Psychotherapy Instructor and Supervisor
Private Practice, Long Island

Wisconsin Psychoanolytic Society Scientific Meeting
2024-09-21 12:00 - 14:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Art Nielsen, MD. Asking for Things and Listening to Criticism: Two Fundamental Challenges in Intimate Relationships and Targets for Couples Therapy.
Grounded in self psychology, Dr. Nielson uses everyday language to convey complex challenges in working with couples. He begins his talk with an experience-near discussion of why people have trouble asking for what they want, how they avoid making themselves vulnerable and how to more effectively be self assertive. He follows this with the related challenge of listening to criticism, common pitfalls and mistakes made. He concludes with practical suggestions to help couples do better.

Philip C. Wilson Twenty Second Memorial Lecture A Developmental Perspective on Eating Disorders
2024-09-21 14:00 - 16:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
In this era of increasing recognition that most individuals who enter our consulting rooms are struggling with symptoms that mark developmental impasses, we encounter bright individuals who appear to have the capacity for reflective thought but there is often insufficient grounding in integrating thoughts and feelings to learn from experience. In that context, adaptive efforts that fail to resolve the underlying dilemma tend to become addictive. Such difficulties have been traced to inconsistent parenting that leaves the child insufficiently able to mindfully attend to internal and external cues, impeding the symbolization of experience so essential for interpersonal communications and relationships.
From this perspective, eating disorders become addictive because the behaviors cannot resolve the underlying deficits. These deficits can be traced to parental failures across the generations that cannot be recognized and worked with, leaving subsequent generations inhibited in the development of self-regulatory functions and the progressive differentiation of self from other so crucial to maturation. Eating disorders mark early disturbance in relation to what it means to take in and make use of what is offered by another. We will note commonalities and differences in the anorexic versus the bulimic dilemma, recognizing that each position may be seen as a waystation along the road to self-development in relation to overly intrusive and/or neglectful parents. Explorations into the metacognitive and affective difficulties associated with eating disorders can provide useful anchors for our efforts to create space for development in our consulting rooms. Case examples will explore some of the dynamics underlying such difficulties and the value of interactive modeling of reflective capacities and of creative, playful engagement in effecting change.
Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP is a psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Austen Riggs Center, Chair of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS) and Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council. Affiliations include Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis; Universidad de Monterrey; Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis; and Harvard Medical School. A contributing editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, she is actively engaged in mentoring and promoting socially relevant research. Research interests include creativity, psychosis, resilience, reflective function, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Marilyn is also an artist, a poet, and a writer.
Books include Patterns; Constructing Realities; Learning from Experience; Working with Trauma; and Psychoanalysis and Literature. Edited volumes include Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis; Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering (with Michael O’Loughlin); Women and Psychosis and Women and The Psychosocial Construction of Madness (with Marie Brown); and The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education (with Jill Bellinson). Forthcoming from APA Press: Trauma, Development, and Identity: A Clinician’s Guide.

The Neuropsychology of Sex and Romance
2024-09-25 09:45 - 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Janice Hiller

Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP): A Brief History and Modern Day Application
2024-09-28 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
featuring Tyler Beach, MSW, LCSW

Introduction To Theory And Technique In Psychoanalysis And Psychotherapy
2024-09-28 11:45 - 13:15 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
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.
Instructors:
Malini Singh, PhD; Leslie Cummins, DSW, LCSW

Book of the Month - Coming to Life in the Consulting Room: Toward a New Analytic Sensibility by Thomas H. Ogden, MD
2024-10-03 20:00 - 21:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
What do you want to be when you grow up? This provocative question is the title of one chapter as well as the theme woven throughout Thomas Ogden’s book, Coming to Life in the Consulting Room: Toward a New Analytic Sensibility. While the question seemingly refers to occupational goals, Ogden clarifies that he really means what kind of person/analyst do you want to be now, and what kind of person/analyst do you want to become? Ogden differentiates two general kinds of stances in psychoanalytic thinking and practice: (1) epistemological, which focuses on knowing and understanding, and (2) ontological, focused on being and becoming. As introduced and developed by Freud, Klein, and Fairbairn, epistemological psychoanalysis views the mind as an “apparatus for thinking” and privileges the clinical intervention of transference interpretation to promote insight. Over the past 70 years, there has been a shift in emphasis to ontological psychoanalysis, which is rooted in concepts pioneered by Winnicott (i.e., “going on being” and transitional space/phenomena) and Bion (i.e., reverie and “without memory or desire”). Ontological psychoanalysis conceives of the mind as a living process located in the act of experiencing. The analyst is present with the patient in the act of experiencing, more likely describing what the analyst senses is occurring rather than explaining. The goal is to facilitate the patient’s experience of creatively discovering for themselves, to foster their becoming more fully alive.
Though psychoanalytic interventions inevitably involve intertwined epistemological and ontological aspects, one aspect or the other tends to predominate. Ogden described his own personal journey from an internal object relations orientation, which is an epistemic approach, to a more ontological stance. However, he emphasized that ontological and epistemological psychoanalysis refer to sensibilities and attitudes, not separate schools of psychoanalytic thought or technique. He provides numerous clinical vignettes throughout the book, but does not prescribe specific interventions. He instead suggests that each practitioner must develop their own analytic style and essentially “invent psychoanalysis” for each patient. His book is a collection of previously published papers, which describe and exemplify an ontological stance, and delve into its foundational roots. After summarizing Ogden’s concept and practice of ontological psychoanalysis with online attendees, discussant JoAnn Ponder would like to explore with them why, or why not, this might constitutes wild analysis. So how do we safeguard against a wild analysis? If there is time, Ponder also plans to talk with attendees about the applicability of Ogden’s ideas to psychoanalytic supervision.

Alumni Group - Psychoanalysis and Childhood Trauma: An Uneasy Relationship
2024-10-04 11:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presenter: Jean Goodwin, MD., MPH | Psychoanalysis was both a help and a hindrance to me in the late twentieth century as I was beginning to explore child sexual abuse and its sequelae. It was unhelpful that my medical school mentor(1968) explained that incest occurs one per million population. Also unhelpful when my supervisor in residency (1973) explained that my patient was fantasizing when she disclosed the sexual relationship with her father (1973).

Film & Mind: The Headless Woman
2024-10-04 20:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
The Headless Woman is a 2008 Argentine psychological thriller art film written and directed by Lucrecia Martel and starring María Onetto. After hitting something with her car, a bourgeois woman’s life slowly descends into paranoia and isolation, as she fears she may have killed someone. Not well-known to American movie-goers, Martel is “arguably the most critically acclaimed auteur in Spanish-language art cinema.[Paul Julian Smith]” and “one of the greatest directors in the world right now [Vogue]”.
In a 2009 interview, Lucrecia Martel explained the usual layered narration of her films, “I work with a number of elements that are tied together, and each one of them is present in each scene in different positions, different perspectives, foreground or background”. In The Headless Woman Martel ties together the personal (the protagonist personal reaction to her car accident); the sociocultural and economic world she belongs and operates into; the recent Argentine history (the genocide during the 1976-1983 military rule), and the Latin American history based upon colonial power, oppression, and racism. She creates a character of complexity and ambivalence in disarray for the audience to share and ultimately identify with.
Presenter:
Jorgelina Corbatta was born in Bahia Blanca, Argentina where she studies and graduated as Licenciada and Professor in Philosophy and Letters (Universidad Nacional del Sur). She also has a Master and Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures (University of Pittsburgh) and is an Academic Analyst (Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute). Emerita Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture and ex-Director of Women Studies at Wayne State University, and Academic Associate Faculty at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, she has taught courses on Contemporary Narrative and Film, Latin America Literature, Women’s and Cultural Studies, Literature and Psychoanalysis at universities in Argentina, Colombia, Chile, US, Sweden, France, Belgium, Austria, and Spain. In 2004 she received a Research/Teaching Fulbright Award (Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia). She has seven books on literary/film criticism – on sociology of literature, on the narratives of the Dirty War, on Feminism and Women Writers in Latin America, on Juan José Saer, on Jorge Luis Borges, on Manuel Puig, published in Spain and Argentina. Her latest book and first in English, is Psychoanalysis and Narrative. Literature, Film and Autobiography by Routledge (2024). She has also published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed Journals and is currently looking for a publisher for her Spanish manuscript on “Auto-fiction/ Psychoanalysis and Intertextuality”. In 2017 she received the IPA/IPSO International Psychoanalytic Award for her paper “The Quest for, and the Denial of, Intimacy in Luisa Valenzuela’s Dark Desires and the Others. Diaries of New York (IPA/Buenos Aires, July 2017). In addition, she has received several awards for teaching, directing graduate students and conducting research at Wayne State University. She is currently writing her autobiography and continue writing essays on literature and film through a psychoanalytic lens.

Raphling Memorial Lecture: Racial Rage, Racial Guilt: The Uses of Anger in Asian America
2024-10-06 13:00
Racial Rage, Racial Guilt: The Uses of Anger in Asian America
Time: 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Presenter: David L. Eng
Live Presentation
Post Hall
George Washington University Mt. Vernon Campus
REGISTRATION DEADLINE: Wednesday, October 2, 2024
Description:
Asian Americans are conventionally described as “middle-man minorities,” outside of dominant racial paradigms of White and Black, adjunct to White privilege and exempt from the brunt of systemic violence directed against Black people. Historical accounts of the in-betweenness of Asian Americans trace their origins to how Asian coolie labor has served to triangulate White capital and African slavery over the course of European modernity. If this is the material history of in-betweenness, what is the psychic corollary of the middle-man thesis? Through an analysis of the Netflix dark comedy series Beef, as well as case histories of Asian American patients and students, I argue that the psychic effects of occupying a racially intermediate position implicate an unexplored terrain of racial rage and racial guilt that Asian Americans are insistently socialized to hold on behalf of others.

Couple Therapy in the UK
2024-10-09 09:45 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Brett Kahr

Mark Solms’ “Source of Consciousness” Prep Course
2024-10-09 19:30
Mark Solms, neuroscientist and psychoanalyst, has substantially altered contemporary understanding of both Consciousness and Self-Experience. Solms is a clear and personable writer, but his understanding draws on science largely unfamiliar to psychotherapists.
In preparation for his appearance at next Spring’s NCP Manifest Mind conference, we are offering an introductory course (5 monthly sessions over Zoom) in which we will study Solms’ important 2021 book: The Hidden Spring. The final session will review a recent paper by Dana Sawyer, who will also be presenting at the May 2025 Manifest Mind Conference.
The following is a partial list of the topics and concepts to be covered in this course.
Affect is the fundamental form of consciousness;
Feeling by an organism of fluctuations in its own needs enables choice and thereby supports survival in unpredicted contexts. This is the biological function of experience;
Consciousness is seated in the midbrain, not the Cortex;
The cerebral cortex provides context, “memory of the future”, to consciousness;
Consciousness is part of nature and it is mathematically tractable;
Perception is applied uncertainty;
Action is an ongoing process of hypothesis-testing and error correction;
Affect is an extended form of homeostasis, bringing choice into LIFE’s fight against ENTROPY;
Affect hedonically valences biological needs… Each category of need—of which there is a great variety—has an affective quality of its own;
Needs cannot all be felt at once. They are prioritized in midbrain and ranked on a “saliency map”. The actions that are generated by prioritized affects are voluntary, which means they are subject to here-and-now choices rather than pre-established algorithms;
All mammals share midbrain seated MOTIVATIONAL SYSTEMS described by Jaak Panksepp;
The default drive (when all goes well) is SEEKING—proactive engagement with uncertainty, with the aim of resolving uncertainty in advance. When this affect is prioritized, it is felt as curiosity and interest in the world.
*Course has a limited space for participants and will be held over Zoom only.*
Course Sessions & Learning Objectives:
Regarding Session Learning Objectives (below): These objectives aim to connect Solms’ work in “The Hidden Spring” to practical applications in psychodynamic education and clinical practice, focusing on its relevance to psychiatry, neurology, and psychoanalysis. They encourage learners to critically engage with the material and consider its implications for patient care and clinical decision-making.
SESSION 1 – Oct. 9, 2024
Topic: Feelings
Reading: Chapters 1-6 (to page 148)
Learning Objectives:
Explain the role of the brainstem in generating consciousness, emotions, and the core of self- experience;
List the seven Panksepp motivational systems that define mammalian behavior;
SESSION 2 – Nov. 13, 2024
Topic: Friston Free Energy
Reading: Chapters 7-8 (pages 148-189)
Learning Objectives:
Define the terms “Friston Free Energy” and “predictive priors”;
Explain the importance of the terms “Friston Free Energy” and “predictive priors” to neuro-psychoanalytic analysis of brain function;
SESSION 3 – Jan. 8, 2025
Topic: Consciousness
Reading: Chapters 9-10 (pages 190-237)
Learning Objectives:
Describe the key neurobiological mechanisms underlying consciousness as presented by Solms, and their implications promoting adaptive, creative, and pathological behavioral consequences;
Analyze the relationship between affect and consciousness outlined in “The Hidden Spring” to understand the demands on the mind for action;
Summarize Solms’ critique of consciousness as a cerebral cortex function;
SESSION 4 – Feb. 12, 2025
Topic: Mind
Reading: Chapters 11+post (pages 238-305)
Learning Objectives:
Explain how Solms’ integration of psychoanalytic concepts with neuroscience can be applied to improve psychodynamic formulations in psychiatric evaluations;
Discuss the psychological importance of Solms’ characterization of the function of the Cortex is to provide “memory of the future”;
SESSION 5 – Mar. 12, 2025
Topic: Perennial Philosophy in relation to Solms work and topics presented in Manifest Mind
Reading: Sawyer, D. W. (2024). Redressing a Straw Man: Correcting Critical Misunderstandings of Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 64(4), 535-563. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678211024399
Learning Objectives:
Discuss the ethical implications of Solms’ views on consciousness and free will in the context of psychotherapeutic process and change, particularly regarding patient autonomy and informed consent;
Prepare a case presentation that integrates Solms’ neuropsychoanalytic approach emphasizing the seven drives studied by Panksepp with traditional psychodynamic assessment, demonstrating its potential to enhance clinical understanding of motivational systems.
Course Readings:
Solms, M. (2022). The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. National Geographic Books.
Sawyer, D. W. (2024). Redressing a Straw Man: Correcting Critical Misunderstandings of Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 64(4), 535-563. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678211024399
Faculty:
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.
Thomas M. Brod MD, Coordinator of the NCP Manifest Mind Series, is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and has been an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine. He is a senior faculty member at NCP, the co-coordinator of the Film and Mind Series, and is psychoanalyst in private practice.
Recording:
Even though all sessions will be held on Zoom, this presentation will not be recorded.

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