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Program Highlights
Explore programming highlights* at APsA’s 2027 National Meeting in Washington, D.C. Learn more about our featured plenary sessions, research presentations, panel discussions, and special events that show the evolving role of psychoanalysis in clinical practice, education, culture, and society. Review the featured programming below and check the full meeting program for details on all available sessions.
Monday, February 1, 2027
Research Training Program
Day 1 – Monday, February 1 | 9:00 a.m.
Day 2- Tuesday, February 2 | 11:00 a.m
This training program, now in its third year, introduces a rigorous research approach into psychoanalysis and is intended for individuals interested in conducting psychoanalytically orientated treatment research. This two-day program occurs on February 1 and 2 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, just before the Association’s 2027 National Meeting. Individuals interested in conducting psychoanalytically oriented treatment research are invited to apply for this exciting program. Learn more about the Research Training Program.
Administrative Meetings
Day 1 – Monday, February 1 | 8:30 a.m.
If you are on an APsA committee, please review the committee schedule to see when your group will meet.
Tuesday, February 2, 2027
Awards & Plenary- Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D.
9:00 a.m. | Saving Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapies are facing devaluation from corporate interests, from mistaken assumptions that there is no evidence supporting psychoanalytic treatments, from the characterization of Sigmund Freud as a cocaine-addled misogynist, and from political and generational stresses within psychoanalytic organizations. As analytic supervisors age out of medical schools and graduate programs, students are losing access to psychoanalytic ways to think about patients. Yet there is a growing interest in psychoanalysis among clinicians trained in other perspectives and among scholars of sociocultural privilege, power, and trauma – areas that neither biological psychiatry nor cognitive psychology illuminate adequately. Dr. McWilliams will focus on factors that have undermined the standing of psychoanalysis and will suggest ways to preserve and expand psychoanalytic thought and practice in the contemporary environment. Learn more about the plenary.
Poster Session
10:30 a.m.
The American Psychoanalytic Association sponsors this annual research poster session designed to promote stimulating conversations and mutual learning among psychoanalytic practitioners, theorists, and researchers. Submissions have relevance to psychoanalytic theory, technique, practice, and effectiveness of psychoanalysis or interdisciplinary scholarship addressing research questions in neighboring fields.
The deadline for submissions: Tuesday, December 1, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. EST.
Click here for Poster Session submission guidelines.
Ernst and Gertrude Ticho Memorial Lecture
11:00 a.m. | Omnipotence and Omnipotentiality In the Age of AI
This session will build on theoretical ideas of omnipotence, as distinct from narcissism or infantile-phantasy, as a normal part of development, and as a useful force in the creative process, in development of a sense of agency and also as an issue that warrants clinical attention in a new way in the age of ubiquitous AI. Using short vignettes and stories of experiences of a psychoanalyst in the AI-laden San Francisco Bay Area, the presenter will consider the aims and values of psychoanalysis, putting forth omnipotentiality as an important aim for our times in dialogue with the work of Ernst and Gertude Ticho in this memorial lecture. This session is designed for psychoanalysts, psychodynamic psychotherapists, candidates, trainees, researchers and academics, and psychoanalytic/psychodynamic practitioners in all contexts.
Panel 6: Mind the Gap
4:30 p.m. | Thinking Analytically About the Climate Crisis
Climate and environmental crises are affecting people everywhere – albeit unequally – but their impacts have yet to be widely addressed in our field. This panel presents interdisciplinary voices raising awareness about psychoanalytic aspects of the crisis. Dynamic therapists have unique and invaluable ways to a) understand unconscious forces involved, and b) contain unbearable realities, helping people to come to grips with them. We address clinical and theoretical features of these capacities, focusing especially on specific unconscious defenses – minimization, dissociation, projection, splitting, etc. – considering how to recognize and respond to them in our consulting rooms. We address the strengths and limitations of psychoanalysis’ theoretical bases in this area and propose some ways our theories might expand to help understand the situation.
Wednesday, February 3, 2027
Discussion Group 25: Swiping Through Desire
8:30 a.m. | How Digitalization Shapes Relational and Intimate Longing in LGBTQ+ People
This discussion group is designed for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, candidates, and trainees interested in how digital platforms are reshaping relational and intimate desire among LGBTQ+ patients/clients. Three presenters, working across different clinical and cultural contexts in the United States and Europe, will each offer a clinical vignette illustrating how dating apps eliminate what Winnicott described as “transitional space,” collapsing the intermediate area where desire can emerge and be negotiated. The session will examine how the shift from community belonging to platform-based individualism has converted LGBTQ+ individuals from community members into consumers, producing an erotization of relational longing that patients/clients bring into psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. The discussant will situate these clinical observations within the broader psychoanalytic literature on sexuality, gender, and digital culture.
Panel 8: AI Live
11:00 a.m. | Exploring the Uses of AI in a Clinical Setting
This session is designed for all conference attendees interested in the reality of AI chatbots proliferating in our personal lives, in mental health care, and in the potential benefits and harms of patient and clinician use of AI. The workshop will feature a “therapy session” role-play with a panelist role-playing a patient using ChatGPT as a therapist. Following this session, the other panelists will comment along with the panelist-patient describing their experience. The live experience and commentary will explore what it feels like and what happens when one interacts with AI chatbots. They will explore the possible roles AI can or cannot perform safely and effectively. Needs for guardrails and support for necessary public and clinician AI-fitness journeys will be identified.
Panel 9: Bearing Witness
11:00 a.m. | The Black Psychoanalysts History Project and the Work of Institutional Memory
The Black Psychoanalyst History Project Committee of the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis presents our interview project, which documents the experiences of Black psychoanalysts during and after analytic training. The format invites the audience to witness narrative testimony and the processing of race among colleagues who occupy different racial, generational, and institutional positions. The panel unfolds in three segments. First, we will screen a 15-minute trailer drawn from the videotaped interviews. Second, two co-chairs, three panelists, and a discussant examine how institutional memory, racial identity, and dialogue have shaped psychoanalytic identity and Institute racial dynamics over time. In the final hour, we will invite any interviewees available for an open discussion to join us for Q&A with the audience.
Come think with us in Washington, D.C.
Thursday, February 4, 2027
Panel 12: Psychotherapy Selection Algorithm
8:30 a.m. | A Tool for Determining When Psychodynamic Therapy or Psychoanalysis are Indicated and at What Frequency and Duration
This session is designed for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, candidates, and trainees interested in understanding and contributing to an algorithm for determining when psychodynamic therapy or psychoanalysis is indicated and at what frequency and duration. The session presents the Psychotherapy Selection Algorithm (PSA) developed at the request of APsA. The session highlights evidence for the effectiveness of psychodynamic therapy and psychoanalysis and biases against them. The PSA counters biases with a series of jargon-free, evidence-supported decisions to differentiate patients who are and are not candidates for psychodynamic therapy or psychoanalysis versus other therapies. Attendees will enhance their ability to select patients for treatment and, through discussion, contribute to shaping the evolving PSA. If ultimately adopted as an APsA guideline, the PSA would advance acceptance of psychoanalytic treatments.
Presidential Symposium
11:00 a.m.
As part of APsA’s transition, this Presidential Symposium will be a conversation between Bonnie Buchele, APsA’s current President, Dan Prezant, APsA’s immediate past President, and the audience about where we have been and where we are going. We hope the discussion will be an opportunity for participants to hear how presidents think about their leadership wishes, fears, achievements, and disappointments as well as for Members to let the Presidents know how they think and wish their Presidents would think.
Research Track: Psychotherapy Selection Algorithm
2:00 p.m. | Interview with a Major Scientist from an Allied Discipline
This is an interview with one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, Joseph E. LeDoux, Ph.D.In his early research, he pioneered the study of the brain mechanisms of emotion, focusing mainly on fear memory and the amygdala. His recent research has been more integrative in nature, focusing on what is conscious and what remains unconscious. The relevance of both of these topics for psychoanalysts is obvious.
Panel 16
4:30 p.m. | Neurodivergence, Defensive Ingenuity, and the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Misunderstood Children
This session is designed for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists/therapists, candidates, and trainees interested in child development and its neuropsychoanalytic underpinnings and pathways to health. Children with severe attentional difficulties, oppositionality, or autistic withdrawal are often disliked, misunderstood, and overtreated with medications. Teachers describe them as “impossible”; parents oscillate between rage, guilt, and despair. They frequently accumulate diagnosis after diagnosis — ADHD, autism, oppositional defiant disorder, mood disorders — and a corresponding list of medications meant to correct what is assumed to be a disorder inside the child. Presenters will explore current research on a shared defensive architecture in autism and ADHD and the effects of shared defensive solutions in the child’s relational world. Focus will be on case illustrations, clinical strategies, and evidence-based psychoanalytic interventions that promote positive development.
Friday, February 5, 2027
University Forum: Social Miracle or Social Curse?
11:00 a.m. | Understanding the Appeal of Authoritarianism
This session, designed for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, scholars, candidates and trainees, examines the appeal of authoritarianism. Peter Gordon, Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University, will explore Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor W. Adorno’s argument that the authoritarian leader performs a “social miracle,” appearing at once fragile and powerful, everyman and superman. Gary Gerstle, Paul Mellon Professor of American History, Emeritus, at the University of Cambridge, will discuss how citizens’ loss of confidence in democratic institutions often precedes an authoritarian embrace. Kimberlyn Leary, psychoanalyst/psychotherapist, public policy scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School, and former Executive Vice President of the Urban Institute, will offer psychoanalytic reflections on both presentations and the current moment. It aims to help clinicians understand how political anxieties shape patients/clients and clinical work.
Discussion Group 57
2:00 p.m. | Psychedelics in Psychoanalysis
This discussion group will provide an ongoing forum to explore the mutual relevance that psychoanalysis and psychedelics have with one another. As clinical research and public interest increase exponentially, psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists have both an opportunity to deepen understanding of their own theoretical constructs, such as the unconscious, regression, trauma, transference and countertransference, and to make a much-needed contribution to the “psychedelic renaissance.” The presentation will use the topic of countertransference to focus the discussion. Using clinical case material from a ketamine-assisted session and its integration into an ongoing psychoanalytic treatment, participants will have an opportunity to learn about the unique challenges to countertransference that non-ordinary states of consciousness evoke, and how grounding in psychoanalytic theory and practice is essential to this work.
Awards & Plenary – Dionne R. Powell, M.D.
4:30 p.m. | Ghosts In the Institutions: Psychoanalytic Education In a Raced World
A critical gap exists in psychoanalytic education regarding how systemic racism, institutional structures, and unconscious resistances impede the field’s transmission and evolution. Educators often conflate diverse training standards with a deflation of clinical rigor, reinforcing exclusionary practices illuminated by the Holmes Commission. Furthermore, a lack of non-hierarchical, culturally humble approaches leaves training systems ill-equipped to integrate the diversities of current psychoanalytic/psychotherapy candidates/trainees with the modernity of AI and virtual treatments. Of particular educational and clinical interest is to return to the origin story of psychoanalysis, founded in the biopsychosocial model, as a discursive enterprise that disrupts the frame by confronting internal resistances to exploring our raced selves, securing an immersive, rigorous, and sustainable structure for the future of psychoanalytic education, analytic identity and the profession. Learn more about the plenary.
Dinner Dance
8:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m. | $150 per person | Cash bar
Join us in the District Ballroom of The Mayflower Hotel for APsA’s Second Annual Dinner Dance — an evening of good food, music, and celebration! After a full week of learning, discussion, and connection, take a break and enjoy a festive evening with colleagues and friends. The evening will feature:
- A hot buffet dinner with chicken and vegetarian options
- Music and dancing
- Great company and an opportunity to connect with colleagues in a relaxed, joyful atmosphere
If you would like to sponsor a ticket for a Candidate or someone for whom the cost may be a barrier, please contact George Pelch at gpelch@apsa.org.
Preregistration is required.
*Promotional inclusion reflects the editorial needs of APsA’s communications program — not an endorsement, ranking, or quality judgment about any session. Our goal is to build programming highlights that are useful and interesting to the broadest possible audience of registrants.