American Psychoanalytic Association

Evening Lecture: Metaphors and their Storylines
2025-01-09 20:30 - 22:00 (America/New_York) | 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

“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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

“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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Psychoanalytic Takes on the Cinema: Discussion of the Film: “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On
2025-01-31 16:00
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.

The Thomas and Julia Saltz Annual Adult Seminar Workshop featuring Dr. Anton Hart
2025-02-01 09:00
The Thomas and Julia Saltz
Annual Adult Seminar Workshop
Presents
Something to Lose: Being in Dialogue About Difference When We Feel Like Leaving
A special presentation by
Dr. Anton Hart
When: February 1, 2025
Time: 9:00 am – 11: 30 am
Live Presentation
Where: University Club of Washington DC
1135 16th Street NW, Washington, DC 20036
This event qualifies for required DEI credits for WBCP Faculty
Registration Link: https://wbcp.memberclicks.net/reg_salz_seminar_anton_hart_february_1_2025#!/
Program Flyer: https://wbcp.memberclicks.net/assets/docs/PR/24-25/Saltz%20Lecture-Anton%20Hart%202%3A1%3A25.pdf
Registration Deadline: January 29, 2025
Seating is limited. We recommend registering early to guarantee your spot.
Presentation:
Racial and other diversities-related enactments in psychoanalytic and other organizations that convene, and train, psychotherapists can be observed to occur regularly, exposing schisms that are carried and caused by personal, relational, and social-structural elements. Our collective good intentions and “diversity trainings” fail to avert this. This experiential presentation proposes a framework for being in dialogue about differences when such dialogue becomes difficult, and impasse seems inevitable.
Alertness to emergent enactment, and receptivity to the possibility of our unwitting, unconscious participation in such enactment—called “radical openness” by the presenter—is seen as key to finding our way out of oblivious, polarized, and entrenched, positions.
A framework is offered for understanding the challenges and promises of addressing enactments involving race, class, culture, sex, gender, and other forms of divisive difference. This will involve placing attention to security and self-esteem concerns (of self and other), and a corresponding need for openness to discovery of unconscious implication, at its center. We will use compelling, hypothetical vignettes derived from psychoanalytic institute life to explore the idea that setting out to lose what we already know could be a useful strategy for being in and tolerating the anxieties of “impossible” conversations.

Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis
2025-02-01 12:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presented by Dr. Lauren Levine, Ph.D.
In this presentation, Dr. Lauren Levine will reflect on the power of stories to create shared symbolic meaning and coherence out of ungrieved trauma. Through evocative clinical stories, she will explore creativity as transformative, emergent in the clinical process, drawing on film, dance, and literature and dreams as frames for experience exceeding what words alone can capture. As an analyst and writer, Dr. Levine is interested in the stories we tell, individually and collectively, the interstitial gaps created by unmetabolized trauma, and that potential for an intimate psychoanalytic process to help patients become the storytellers of their own lives.

?3rd Annual Marianne Goldberger Memorial Lecture "The Image of the Female Body: Three Challenges to Conventional Interpretations of Celebrated Ancient Civilizations"
2025-02-01 14:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Scholars like Sir James Fraser, Erich Neumann, Joseph Campbell, Will Durant and most Biblical Scholars of the19th and early 20th centuries wrote persuasive stories about the meanings of the figurines found by archeologists studying Prehistory, Ancient Mesopotamia, and Ancient Egypt. These scholars argued that the figurines represented mother goddesses, fertility, and perfect images of elite or royal Egyptian women.
Modern feminist archeologists have questioned these visual tropes and have discovered that entirely different realities lay behind the stereotyped images. Like the fixed and usually idealized mental images of their parents that our patients carry from childhoods, these stereotyped images are difficult to dislodge. With new archeological findings and depictions of the figurines, I shall paint a very different picture of the ancient icons, illustrating how an analytic perspective of the past can reveal fresh and liberating insights into both the past and the present.

Alumni Group - Imagining a (Social) Ethics of the Unconscious
2025-02-07 11:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Presenter: Sean Fitzpatrick, PhD, LPC | We live in a liminal moment in which mental health stigma is crumbling, in great part because of increasing psychological struggle triggered by the pandemic and recent social unrest.

Search for Relationships in the 3rd Age
2025-02-12 09:45 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Dina Oren and Israeli research group

Talking About Money
2025-02-12 19:30
Some say the love of it is the root of all evil. Others do not believe they can ever have enough. Therapists can, at times, avoid discussing it as much as anyone. Money. This course will examine how we talk about money in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. We will begin with a general overview of the relationship of money and psychoanalysis, including a consideration of the ethics and politics of the sliding scale. Then we will consider how to explore the fee with patients as part of the analytic process. And, finally, we will discuss how to work with patients and analysands who have problems with money. Classes will be discussion-based, and students will be asked to come prepared to talk about two articles per week.

When the Body Speaks
2025-02-14 09:00 | Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)
Ronny Jaffe
