Psychoanalyst Track

The APsA National Meeting is predominately a psychoanalytic meeting. The majority of the programming at the National Meeting is designed for analysts so this program track features select sessions*. Scroll down to review the featured selections in the analyst track but be sure to check out the full meeting program for details on all available sessions.

Monday, February 1, 2027

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

Panel 1: Generative Mourning

11:00 a.m. | Play, Paradox, and the Relationship Between Creative Living and Mourning

This session explores how two psychoanalysts understand the relationship between mourning and creative living. The first paper examines how analysts can facilitate generative mourning, drawing on Lear, Winnicott, Ogden, and Cooper to help grieving patients harness imagination and liberated eros to live beyond the devastation, ambivalence, and pain of loss. The second paper considers his own views of mourning in relation to Winnicott, Kristeva, and Kris. It offers a theory of how play and mourning are often linked to unconscious grandiosity and fantasies of infinite possibility. He proposes that mourning grandiose fantasies about the self and relationships can allow patients to move from being “alone and frozen,” characterized by malignant nostalgia and deadness, toward being “alone and alive.” The latter is filled with the paradox of limit, and at the same time greater capacity for a vibrant present and uncharted future.

Discussion Group 7: The Unhoused Psyche

2:00 p.m. | Navigating Failures of Containment, Holding, Skin, and the Claustrum

This discussion group explores clinical failures in containment (Bion) and holding (Winnicott), focusing on “difficult-to-reach” patients trapped in preverbal states. It examines how deficiency of primary emotional skin can lead to adhesive identification (Meltzer) or the development of “second skin” defenses (Bick). Through detailed clinical material, and discussion of assigned reading, it maps the claustro-agoraphobic dilemma (Rey), where the patient fluctuates between a suffocating retreat into the claustrum and agoraphobic boundaryless terror. By integrating these concepts, this discussion group aims to deepen the therapist’s capacity to survive and process concrete, sensory communications of patients unable to symbolize internal catastrophes. This synthesis offers a vital toolkit for working within the “unhoused” psyche at various levels of disturbance.

Discussion Group 8:

2:00 p.m. | Impasses in Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

This session helps clinicians identify and address clinical impasses, a topic analytic clinicians have historically been reluctant to discuss openly. In a supportive setting, participants will examine detailed case presentations to identify often-unconscious factors and patterns in both patient and analyst/therapist that may contribute to stalled treatments. Open discussion and collaborative reflection will be used to develop creative strategies, uncover new possibilities for treatment, and help participants more effectively navigate impasses in their own clinical work.

Discussion Group 19

4:30 p.m. | Psychoanalysis with Psychotically Organized Patients

While psychoanalysis has become more open to working with primitive personality organizations, analysis of patients experiencing active psychotic symptoms remains considered risky and is generally avoided. The presenter discusses a control case of a patient with bipolar and schizoaffective disorder who began treatment with active paranoid ideation and significant difficulty with reality testing–initial work combined supportive/expressive psychotherapy with CBT for psychosis. The presentation explores how the work evolved into psychoanalysis, and traces the transformation of psychotic symptoms both in the transference and in displacement. Clinical material will be shared, with particular attention to what makes an approach analytic with primitive personality organizations. The work draws on Bion, Winnicott, Klein, Searles, and Novick and Novick’s sadomasochistic frameworks.

Wednesday, February 3, 2027

Discussion Group 28

11:00 a.m. | Psychoanalytic Understanding and Treatment of Addiction

This session is designed for those wishing to better understand and psychoanalytically/psychodynamically treat people with addictive behavior. Psychoanalytic theories of addiction will be briefly reviewed, followed by a description of a modern view of addiction and its treatment. The session will include case illustrations and clinical techniques to demonstrate how the new understanding of the psychological mechanism behind addictive behavior allows attention to these symptoms to be fully integrated with the entirety of a psychodynamic therapy. We will emphasize that the psychology of the addictive/compulsive behavior is a “royal road” to understanding the person, while simultaneously understanding the whole person allows understanding of the drive behind the behavior.

Discussion Group 36: Queer All Along?

2:00 p.m. | Psychoanalysis, the Unconscious, and Non-Normative Desire

This presentation is designed for psychoanalytic clinicians interested in whether psychoanalysis needs to be stretched to fit queer subjects, or if it anticipates them. Drawing on a range of traditions-including Freud, Laplanche, and scholarship from Black studies and queer studies — the presentation explores psychoanalytic viewpoints on non-normative sexualities and genders. It also asks whether metapsychological models are best suited for queer subjects and wonders about how they may limit what we perceive and imagine. Clinical vignettes illustrate analytic work that sustains the opacity of sexuality and desire, leaving open the possibility that sexuality and gender may simultaneously be life-affirming yet remain partially unknown, non-integrative, and not fully available to psychoanalytic attempts at meaning-making.

Experiential Large Group (Part I)

4:30 p.m.

The large group is intended for any attendee wanting to learn about group experience in the here-and-now. Unlike small groups used for therapy, Large group allows members to find their voices in the social situation. Large Groups foreground societal, rather than personal processes, including Bionian basic assumptions and group-as-a-whole experiences. Large groups have been successful at IPA and APsA last year, facilitating reflection on psychoanalysts and therapists in community. As a here-and-now learning group with members exploring the social field, Consultation will be provided to facilitate dialogue and containment. As an experiential group, attendees should come ready to reflect on a range of experiences, including what might be uncomfortable. The large group has application to organizational-level dynamics, evident in Institutes and when taking up leadership.

Discussion Group 41: Between Bion and Laplanche

4:30 p.m. | On the Nature of “Truth” in Clinical Psychoanalysis

For Bion, truth in clinical psychoanalysis relates to evolving, never-fully-known, “O”. Yet, somehow, the analyst/therapist must come to know it in some form to be able to transmit to the patient a useful version of his psychoanalytic truth. Historically a debatable concept, the quality of what constitutes “truth” today is shifting. If Baudrillard is correct in his assertion that truth today is mere representation without an underlying reality — in Bion’s term, a transformation in hallucinosis — Bion and Meltzer assert that to live in reality is to discover emotional and aesthetic truth. Drawing on Laplanche’s elaboration of Freud’s concept of the ‘internal foreign body,’ the discussant offers a contrasting perspective on the clinician’s relationship to their patient’s truth, revisiting debates on limits of the domain of psychoanalysis.

Come think psychoanalytically with us in Washington, D.C.!

Thursday, February 4, 2027

Panel 11: Lacanian and Neuropsychoanalytic Perspectives on Dreams

8:30 a.m. | Theory and Technique

This session will introduce psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and trainees to Lacanian dream interpretation through dialogue with neuropsychoanalysis. First, the presenter will situate dreams within Lacan’s register theory (real, symbolic, imaginary). The presenter will then discuss recent research on dreams in computational neuroscience (the Free Energy Principle) and neuropsychoanalysis. Integrating these perspectives shows how dreams metabolize felt uncertainty (affective consciousness) arising, in part, from unconscious, relational strategies for managing the drives. In this light, Lacanian dream interpretation techniques (elaborating and isolating signifiers) facilitate the patient’s capacity to make use of uncertainty for therapeutic change. Through illustrative clinical examples, this presentation aims to promote dialogue between Lacanian and other psychoanalytic approaches and to introduce attendees to new clinical and theoretical ways for working with dreams.

Discussion Group 50: Between Repression and Revelation

11:00 a.m. | A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Religious Convictions

Religious convictions often pose a challenge in psychoanalytic psychotherapy: should they be treated as sacred taboos outside the clinic, or understood as psychic formations shaped by familial and sociopolitical histories? Building on the philosophy of Ernst Troeltsch and Hans Joas and contemporary Laplanchean metapsychology, this discussion group proposes an interdisciplinary framework for approaching faith as a dynamic language through which trauma, desire, and alterity are expressed. Participants will examine how religious convictions originate, take hold in the psyche, and shape therapeutic impasses. Drawing on a clinical case study, the session explores how religious language may function not merely as ideology but as an expression of psychic life—where faith persists as a “foreign body,” demanding ongoing interpretation rather than simple resolution.

Panel 15: Nonlinear Dynamic Systems for the Working Clinician

2:00 p.m.

This session is for clinicians who want to apply the insights of nonlinear dynamic systems (complexity) thinking to clinical practice. It is aimed at both clinicians who are familiar with these concepts and those new to them. The panelists, each with extensive experience in using this perspective in clinical situations, will demonstrate how ideas like emergence, nonlinearity, synchrony, and the edge of chaos influence their clinical work, with numerous examples from their practice. This panel is especially important because concepts from nonlinear dynamic systems (complexity) thinking are already transforming how many psychoanalytic and psychodynamic clinicians’ work. Greater clarity about the connection between these ideas and clinical practice will help expand our clinical effectiveness.

Experiential Large Group (Part II)

4:30 p.m.

Friday, February 5, 2027

Discussion Group 52: Facing the Facts

8:30 a.m. |Self Disclosure and the Analytic Relationship

This discussion group is for all clinicians interested in the inevitability of self-disclosure within the therapeutic dyad and professional community. Stephanie Brody, chair and presenter will describe how an intrusive medical event affected her professional relationships, clinical experience, and personal perspective. Comparing the impact of a previous intrusion to the current event, Dr. Brody will describe differences in her clinical praxis, especially regarding the issues of therapist anonymity, “the frame”, and ethical responsibilities. Attention to existential awareness in the dyad will demonstrate that addressing human vulnerabilities within the dyad is a treatment benefit throughout the life span of both patient and clinician.

Discussion Group 53: The Pull Toward and Resistance to Retiring

8:30 a.m. | What’s an Analyst to Do?

Psychoanalysis inhabits liminality, where the past is examined in the present, and questions of endings inevitably arise. Yet clinicians may postpone retirement and avoid confronting their own aging and mortality, both privately and in their work with patients. This discussion group invites clinicians of all ages and levels of training to explore the fears, anxieties, and resistances surrounding retirement and the awareness of limited life expectancy. Discussion will consider whether and how clinicians might acknowledge these realities with patients, as well as the ways retirement and end-of-life concerns can evoke loss while also creating opportunities for reflection, growth, and self-discovery. Through shared exploration, participants will consider how greater openness to aging and mortality may enrich both professional and personal life.

Discussion Group 55: Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Therapy

11:00 a.m.

Couples and families seek help with individual developmental problems, communication difficulties, sexual problems, or family and couple relationships. This presentation examines the psychoanalytic treatment of a couple together since preadolescence, making their partnership their primary developmental environment. Clinical material spanning several years illustrates how early attachment expectations, projective identification, and splitting shaped their evolving relationship. The clinical material illustrates how psychoanalytic couple treatment unblocked arrested development for the couple and individuals, fostering mourning and enabling differentiation and greater mutual recognition. The presentation will introduce group-wide discussion of how psychoanalytic couple therapy acts both as treatment for conflict and to foster developmental processes for individual, couple, and family psychological growth.

Discussion Group 56: The Effects of the Holocaust and Other Massive Psychic Trauma on Survivors and Their Families

2:00 p.m.

This session is for clinicians of all levels, and aims to increase knowledge of the long-term effects of massive psychic trauma on survivors and family members. There is an emphasis on intergenerational transmission of trauma and resilience, to successive generations. This phenomenon is not well known to clinicians, and a parallel but different dynamic may be seen in perpetrators’ families also. This program is intended to increase the efficacy of treatment for those working with these populations. Utilizing actual clinical material and the literature, the leadership shares their decades of experience.

*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.