Linking Field Theory and Systems Psychodynamics to Enhance Leadership: Perspectives on Racism, Discrimination & Othering
2024-10-31 11:00 - 13:30, 2024-11-07 11:00 - 13:30, 2024-11-14 11:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York) | Virtual (Zoom)

The Independent Tradition in Child & Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
2024-10-31 20:00 - 22:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
This is an introductory course on the evolution of the Independent Tradition (British in origin) applied to our work with children and adolescents. This tradition (or approach) is developmentally appropriate to our work with younger populations, as it moves from the more epistemological (knowing) approach, with its emphasis on interpretation and insight, to a more ontological framework (being and becoming). The emphasis is on the child talking through their play and the adolescent exploring who they are through discussions of music, films, sports, inter alia. This results in the child and the parents beginning to understand their child’s emotional struggles and how they are to be managed.

Alumni Group: Apology, Accountability and Repair in Couples Therapy
2024-11-01 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presenter: Ellen Safier, LCSW | Our intimate partnerships are the places where we are most vulnerable. It is of course these relationships that have the potential to provide the greatest sense of safety and security and comfort that are also the relationships where we can experience the greatest hurt and be most easily wounded.

Psychodynamics as an Anchor: Navigating Personal, Social, and Political Turmoil in Clinical Treatment
2024-11-02 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Loan Vo, PhD, LISW-S

Conference - Imagination, Interpretation, and the Analytic Field
2024-11-02 11:00 - 15:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Donnel B. Stern
In my first model of unformulated experience (Stern, 1983, 1997), my intention was to study our capacity to reflect on our own experience; and that meant that the boundary between formulated and unformulated experience needed to be defined by verbal language: My first model held that if you can think or speak about a meaning in the reflective terms of verbal language, the meaning is formulated; if you cannot reflect on the meaning in verbal language, the meaning remains unformulated. Now, though, I think of the boundary between formulated and unformulated experience differently. Now I think of it in terms of the degree of personal meaningfulness of unformulated experience: Formulation is a matter of becoming someone for whom the experience in question is meaningful. One crosses the threshold into explicitly meaningful experience when one can accept the meaning in question. If one can accept it, one can use it in the construction of spontaneous, creative living. The formulation of experience is therefore the imaginative transformation of not-me into feels-like-me. The crucial point is not that particular, new experiences are given shape, but that one becomes the new and slightly different person who can shape experience in that new way.

Erotophobia: Queer Theory & Psychoanalysis
2024-11-02 12:00 - 16:00 | Hybrid (In-person: Oregon Psychoanalytic Center & Virtual), 2250 NW Flanders Street, Suite 312, Portland, OR, 97210, United States
Gila Ashtor, PhD, LP

The Basics of Psychopharmacology
2024-11-02 12:00 - 16:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Dr. Mauricio Salvador Garza Villalobos
Psychiatric medication is surrounded by myths and fears both by patients and even from professionals in the mental health world. Being able to detect when the threshold for a referral to the psychiatrist is an essential skill for everyone who works in psychotherapy. But the work is not only to detect when and how; therapists must have the basic knowledge about how these medications work, their uses and misuses, side effects, and what to look for alongside the patient that reflects the improvement of symptoms so they can guide them to better outcomes in their symptoms and life satisfaction.

Preparing for Retirement: Legal and Ethical Considerations (Hybrid)
2024-11-02 13:00 - 15:00 | Hybrid (In-person: San Diego Psychoanalytic Center & Virtual), 4455 Morena Blvd, Ste 202, San Diego, CA, 94117, United States
DESCRIPTION: Embarking on retirement is a significant transition for any professional, and for mental health providers, it comes with its own set of ethical challenges and clinical considerations. This presentation will detail the relevant clinical, ethical, and legal considerations for the provision of advanced planning for psychologists. Topics covered will include how to identify a professional executor, managing client transitions, outlining a framework for ethical decision-making, and creating a strategic plan for times of uncertainty in the form of a professional will. Dr. Rochelle Perper, Ph.D. will guide you through the process and provide you with the tools and insights needed to ensure that your departure from active practice is handled in an ethical, responsible, and professional manner.
BIO:
Rochelle Perper, Ph.D. is the Founder and Principal Psychologist of Therapy Changes, a multispecialty group psychology practice in San Diego, California. She is an active member of the San Diego Psychological Association (SDPA) and Chair of the SDPA Ethics Committee. Dr. Perper has been providing professional training courses on topics related to the standards of ethical practice in psychology since 2011. Dr. Perper specializes in complicated grief and is recognized for her compassion and skill in helping clients heal from trauma and working with victims of crime. In addition to her work in private practice, Dr. Perper provides consultation and expert
testimony and review for forensic cases.

Nursing + Psychoanalysis Group Mentorship Q&A
2024-11-02 14:00 - 15:30 | Virtual (Zoom)
The American Psychoanalytic Association(APsA) Advanced Practice in Nursing Committee is hosting an online Q&A session about Nursing + Psychoanalysis. Free to Nursing Professionals and Colleagues interested in Psychoanalysis.
With Miriam Lundy, Brooke Finley, Sidney Miller and Linda Grey.
Please do register (no password required for the meeting):
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMpdO-vrDIiEtAQcBZXpf9uBhLnZyxaXkt4

Study Group - Contemporary Models: The Post-Bionion Work of Betty Joseph, James Grotstein, Thomas Ogden, Antonio Ferro and Giuseppe Civitarese
2024-11-05 20:30 - 22:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
6 Tuesday Evenings – Nov 5 – Dec 17
Facilitated by Joseph Aguayo, PhD
In the aftermath of Wilfred Bion’s notable contributions to psychoanalysis, there have been succeeding generations of psychoanalysts who have addressed underdeveloped themes in his many papers and books. This seminar addresses the succeeding psychoanalysts, primarily in Europe and the United States who have devoted significant attention to Bionian themes in psychoanalytic theory and practice. We begin with an overview presentation of the various modes subsumed in the approaches of the contemporary London Kleinians, followed by American approaches to intersubjectivity—and finally, with the advances made by Italian Field Theory in the new millennium.
One overarching theme in this course is the clinical and historical development of ideas on contemporary technique: we begin with how Betty Joseph took up many of Bion’s ideas, particularly on disturbed, ‘difficult-to-reach’ patients—and developed a tracking technique that followed carefully the patient’s subjective experience in analysis. We then turn to the work of James Grotstein and Thomas Ogden, American analysts working in California, who creatively amalgamated Klein, Winnicott and Bion in their theorizing and practice. Finally, we end with the work of Antonino Ferro and Giuseppe Civitarese, with its emphasis on a different conceptualization of the analytic field, notions of intersubjectivity and increased emphasis on the analyst’s deployment of his ‘waking-dreaming function,’ reverie and creative use of hallucinosis in the analytic situation. Here, an attempt is made to pull together psychoanalytic literature that has existed in separate analytic traditions that have cropped up in the UK, the United States and Italy.

Micro-processing Love and Hate in the Couple Dyad
2024-11-06 09:45 - 11:45 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Nestor Kapusta

Experiences in Ethical Supervision of Child, Adolescent and Family Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
2024-11-07 08:30 - 16:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Special guest Virginia Ungar, MD, along with the International Psychotherapy Institute’s Child Combined Program faculty, Jill Scharff, MD, and Janine Wanlass, PhD, will guide participants in this special one-day event.
Are you engaged in child therapy supervision as a supervisee or a supervisor? Have you faced a difficult moment in your supervision? You are not alone. Child and adolescent patients are stressful for adult therapists, and working online brings even more challenges. That’s where supervision can help us learn about the patient, and about our ways of doing and being as child and adolescent therapists.
We learn from observing our recreation of clinical experience in the supervisory relationship. When working with children, the supervisee is faced with the parent’s authority over the child, which can affect the supervisee’s experience with the supervisor. Working with adolescents, the supervisee is dealing with turbulence that can resonate uncomfortably in the supervisory relationship.
How does the supervisee negotiate the supervisory relationship that offers learning but raises mutual anxiety, fears of incompetence, and the shame of not knowing? How does the supervisor support educate, and respect the supervisee’s cultural affiliations, essential otherness, autonomy, and ownership of their clinical practice? How does the supervisory pair cultivate and sustain a psychic space for truth, fairness, and shared learning?
Please join us at IPI to share concerns and find psychoanalytic ways of thinking about and dealing sensitively with the dilemmas of the child and adolescent psychotherapist in the competence-building supervisory relationship.

Metapsychology: Past, Present and the Future
2024-11-07 20:30 - 22:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Robert S. White, MD
From the point of view of classical psychoanalytic theory, I will survey what is established as the standard model of Freud, including drive/defense, compromise formation, oedipal conflict and development, free association, and interpretation. This is a one-person, intrapsychic model. Klein’s addition did not fundamentally alter the Freudian model. Klein added a more primary set of anxieties/defenses/developmental structures that allowed understanding of deeper structures/conflicts. She also posed object need as a prime motivation. Current issues include integration with social forces, an intersubjective model, and inclusion of poorly or unrepresented mental contents.

Decoupling
2024-11-08 20:00 - 22:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Decoupling (2023) is about a journey the filmmaker took to bring back his daughter who was trapped overseas due to US-China tensions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The film becomes an examination of his family’s suppressed history of trauma caused by forced separation during the Cultural Revolution.

Film & Mind: Asteroid City
2024-11-08 23:00 - 2024-11-09 00:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Asteroid City (2023) has been described by writer-director Wes Anderson as a“poetic meditation on the meaning of life”. Set in the 1950’s, Asteroid City is a young girl’s coming-of-age story that deviates from one simple narrative line. Asteroid City leaves the comfortable and familiar setting of a summer camp/and opens up to a line of adventure that constitutes a complete interruption of all plans through its confrontation with an outer space alien. Dreamlike switches between different layers of the narrative, which reflect on one another, require the audience to question any and all layers of the events, and penetrate beyond the manifest toward the latent, meaningful, content.
Learning Objectives
As a result of attending this session, participants should be able to:
Explain the importance of differentiating manifest vs. latent content in learning the meaning of a dream
Apply the psychodynamic principle of defensive operations to explain how the dramaturgy of Asteroid City (with its use of atomic testing and space aliens) guides the audience to the writer’s intention of contemplating the meaning of life
Describe the mental ecology and function of the intersection in daily life of trauma with fantasy activity and aesthetic function
Presenter:
Bettina Soestwohner, PhD, PsyD holds a doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine and taught literature and language for many years. She is a Research Psychoanalyst and faculty member at the New Center for Psychoanalysis, where she regularly presents in the film series. She taught at the University of California Southern in the Psychology program. A member of the Freudian School of Quebec (EFQ), she is in charge of the work of the EFQ in California. She is a founding member of the group SPIIRAL that works on advancing the theory and practice of psychoanalysis today as required by clashes between cultures and civilizations. Currently she is doing research for a project on Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater and questions of aesthetics. She is interested in the intersection of studies in daily life with trauma, fantasies and aesthetics.
Luis Vallejo, MD is a psychiatrist who attended Vanderbilt University on a full tuition Chancellor’s scholarship and completed his M.D. at Baylor in the Houston Medical Center. Beyond Psychiatry board certification, Dr. Vallejo pursued extensive psychodynamic/analytic training via the Cincinnati Institute, and is a current post-seminar candidate at the New Center for Psychoanalysis. He holds a private practice in Beverly Hills and is a consult-liaison Psychiatrist at Cedars Sinai Beverly Hills Medical Center, Baptist Health Medical Center, and Orbit Telehealth.

Feeling Stuck in Psychotherapy...and What to Do About it
2024-11-09 08:45 - 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Mary Jo Peebles: When we feel stuck in psychotherapy, we feel inadequate, ashamed, and hide our confusion. A common reaction is to blame and feel irritated with the patient, but then we blame ourselves for being irritated. This workshop will address how to break this cycle, which requires a shift from seeing stuckness as a problem to seeing it as just where one wants to be.

Living in the Time of the Great Derangement: Relationships between the Inner and Outer World
2024-11-09 11:00 - 15:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
During this conference, four presenters (one biodiversity scientist and three psychoanalysts) will each present their perspective on the complexity of humans’ relations to the natural world and how these multifaceted relations contribute to and might mitigate today’s climate catastrophe.
Presenters: Lindsay L. Clarkson, MD; W. John Kress, PhD; Donald B. Moss, MD; Lynne Zeavin, PsyD

The Work of Jean Laplanche
2024-11-09 12:00 - 19:30 | Hybrid: Zoom and The Chicago School, 2400 E. Katella Ave, Suite 1200, Anaheim CA 92806, Anaheim, CA, United States
Presented by Dr. Jonathan House, M.D: Dr. Jonathan House was appointed by Laplanche to serve on the Conseil Scientifique of the Fondation Laplanche where he has been responsible for translations of Laplanche’s work into English.
Join Dr. House as he provides an in-depth introduction to the work of Jean Laplanche.

Connections And Conversation: The Analyst’s Search for Empathy In the Face of Hate – Veronica D. Abney, Ph.D
2024-11-10 17:00 - 18:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Free zoom event with Veronica D. Abney, Ph.D.: This paper presents a description of the analysis of an African-American patient with Dissociative Identity Disorder. It will focus primarily on one year of the analysis when the transference was extremely negative resulting in the analyst moving from a very empathic and loving countertransference position to feeling hatred for the patient. Examples of rupture and repair in the transference will be presented. The paper will also look at issues related to culture that emerged in this analysis, despite the analyst and analysand having similar cultural backgrounds.

Nourishing the Mind-Body Connection: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for a Medically Traumatized Child with a Feeding Phobia
2024-11-15 09:00 - 11:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Caroline Sehon

Grand Rounds: Transforming Suicide Risk Assessment
2024-11-15 12:50 - 13:50 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Transforming Suicide Risk Assessment-Katie C. Lewis, PhD
2024-25 Grand Round Series
Clinical suicide risk assessment is often conducted using standardized assessment measures that fail to integrate contemporary theories and empirical findings, especially those pertaining the importance of analyzing the timing and contextual factors affecting suicide risk. This presentation will support a more nuanced understanding of patient-centered, ecologically valid methods of assessing risk for suicide in clinical populations, enabling attendees to develop greater precision and sensitivity in their risk assessment and intervention approaches.

Wisconsin Psychoanalytic Society Scientific Meeting
2024-11-16 12:00 - 14:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Jana K. Edwards, LCSW. Shame and Reunions: A New Look at the Compulsion to Repeat.
Ms. Edwards frames the repetition compulsion in her work with adult partners as a path to healing previously unmetabolized wounds, traumas and losses. In their repetitive conflicts, she sees couples accessing historically dissociated affects. Ms. Shaw illustrates her ideas by focusing on how shame is expressed in a couple’s therapy.

Panel Discussion: Understanding the Clinical Process from Multiple Perspectives
2024-11-16 12:00 - 15:00 | San Diego Psychoanalytic Center, 4455 Morena Blvd Ste 202, San Diego, CA, 92117, United States
Description: Three esteemed psychoanalysts will discuss a case presented by a fourth-year candidate, each from their distinctive theoretical orientation. This stimulating panel presentation will provide a glimpse into the spectrum of psychoanalytic approaches and their convergences and divergences. Following the presentations, a moderated discussion will encourage the exchange of ideas and perspectives.
Bio: Charles M. Cutler, Ph.D., has a clinical psychology practice that involves working with adults, seniors, and adolescents. Based in La Jolla, California, he works with individuals, couples and families who present with a wide variety of clinical problems. Problems may be acute or chronic, and Dr. Cutler will tailor the treatment to each situation. Dr. Cutler is a psychologist and psychoanalyst with advanced training. He is a faculty member of the San Diego Psychoanalytic Center where he teaches and supervises psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers.
Alan Sugarman, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist, practicing in Solana Beach. He provides psychotherapy and psychoanalysis to children, adolescents, and adults, and works with parents on parenting issues. He is also a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. Before coming to San Diego Dr. Sugarman was a postdoctoral fellow at the Menninger Foundation and a faculty member of the Yale University Department of Psychiatry where he was the Chief Psychologist at the Yale Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Sugarman has almost 90 professional publications and is a frequently invited speaker and teacher at local, national, and international psychoanalytic institutes, organizations, and conferences.
Richard Tuch, M.D. believes strongly in the value of talking treatments and the thrust of his practice is seeing patients in individual psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Dr. Tuch believes in fashioning treatments that are custom tailored to the unique needs of each individual he sees. He maintains an active interest in, and has published papers that explore the factors that make psychotherapy effective. Dr. Tuch capitalizes on his classical training in psychoanalysis by fashioning modern treatments that address the underlying factors that keep individuals from maximizing their potential. Dr. Tuch’s approach to treatment takes into consideration current thinking about such topics as attachment theory, mentalization, and the “relational approach” to treatment. He sees value in helping people understand why they do the things they do: why they repeat self-defeating behaviors, how they keep themselves from achieving what they’d like to achieve, and what keeps them from becoming the person they’d like to become.

How Relational Sensibility Enhances Psychotherapeutic Experiencing
2024-11-16 13:00 - 16:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Lawrence Hedges, PhD, PsyD, ABPP.
Technologically driven research during the last three decades in the fields of neuroscience, infant research, and relational psychotherapy has made clear the importance of the ongoing impact of experiencing and processing the relationship in psychotherapy. In this course Dr. Hedges will review the ways that psychotherapists of all persuasions are coming to recognize and work with relational variables in their practices. And how relational sensibility makes a significant difference to both clients and therapists not only in overall outcome but in the richness of everyday experience of both client and therapist.

God’s-eye-view: The Evangelical Patient on the Couch
2024-11-16 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Join for us for a presentation with Dr. Jason Jost followed by a panel discussion with Dr. Earl Bland and Dr. Michelle Harwell.
Psychoanalysts unfamiliar with the worldview and child-rearing practices of Evangelicals may unintentionally replicate the patient’s childhood experience of accommodating a transcendent, authoritative perspective of themselves and others. To bridge this cultural gap, Dr. Jost highlights key aspects of evangelical child-rearing and their potential impact on a child’s emotional development, sharing from his own personal childhood experience as well as his work as both a patient and an analyst. With this contextual understanding, Dr. Jost suggests developmentally supportive attitudes that, while important for any analytic dyad, are particularly critical for patients whose childhood emotional experiences were organized by an evangelical blueprint. This program aims to enhance cultural understanding and empathy in treating individuals raised in evangelical Christian environments.

Couples and Families during War
2024-11-20 09:45 - 11:45 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Hanni Mann-Shalvi

How Our Work as Analysts Changes Us as Persons
2024-11-20 19:00 - 21:00 | Hybrid (Rockland – East Fairmount Park 3810 Mt Pleasant Dr. Philadelphia, PA & via Zoom), 3810 Mt Pleasant Dr, Philadelphia, PA, 19121, United States
Based on 25 years of psychoanalytic and intensive psychotherapy work with patients and his experiences as a teacher, supervisor, and mentor, Dr. Klafter will describe how psychoanalysts are affected by their relationships with their patients. Drawing on object relations theories of psychological development, he will describe how the patient inhabits the analyst’s representational world, and how the analytic situation catalyzes unprecedented changes in the analyst’s self-representations and adult personality development. Dr. Klafter will also discuss how these changes can impact the analyst’s marriage and romantic relationships, parenting, political views, religious beliefs, and friendships.

Book Review and Discussion - Playing and Vitality in Psychoanalysis by Giuseppe Civitarese, MD, PhD & Antonino Ferro, MD
2024-11-21 20:00 - 21:30 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Mark Winborn, PhD
In our discussion, we’ll review some of the major ideas of Bion and Ogden that the authors reinterpret or recontextualize within field theory, bringing these ideas alive through clinical vignettes. We will also touch on Winnicott’s transformative ideas on play, Ogden’s depiction of “aliveness and deadness” in psychoanalysis, as well as his call to pursue psychoanalysis from an ontological perspective rather than an epistemological perspective, and Daniel Stern’s research on forms of vitality in infants. Time permitting, there will also be some comparison between the agenda that the authors intended for this volume and some of the parallel themes Jung was developing during the time of split from Freud and the psychoanalytic community.
Hopefully, by the end of the evening, we will all be in a subversive mood and more inclined to lean towards playing and vitality during our next forays into the playgrounds we refer to as offices or consulting rooms!
