Austen Riggs Center

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 […]

Relating Racially: Shifting Between We, They, and I Senses of Self - Michelle Stephens, LP, PhD (Live) 2024-25 Friday Night Guest Lecture Series Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are currently showing considerable interest in, and concern over, the relevance of different forms of racism to psychological suffering and to the development of the field of psychoanalysis itself. […]

Part of the 2024 Virtual Roundtable Series, Minding the Gaps: Addressing Mental Health Through the Life Cycle Erik Erikson outlined specific tasks associated with developmental stages across the life cycle. In Erikson’s model generativity, stagnation, ego integrity, and despair are all potential aspects of development in the second half of life. Aging brings a crisis […]

2024-25 Grand Rounds Series Dr. Theodore Fallon will present ongoing work illuminating a developmental perspective on working with adult patients in talk therapy. This perspective focuses on three different stages in child development: Developing a core sense of self which in “normative” chronology takes place during the first 18 months of life; The psychic equivalent […]

Fred Busch, MD, speaks about Problem-Focused Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, a modified psychoanalytic treatment approach that addresses patient’s specific problems, including symptoms, personality issues, relationship struggles, and behavioral difficulties. The primary facets of this treatment approach will be described, including identification of problems and their associated triggers and feelings, and developing a psychodynamic formulation to aid therapists […]

This presentation first explores key concepts from Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of psychosis, highlighting its role as one of several ways humans navigate existential dilemmas such as sexuality and love. According to Lacan’s 1950s theory, psychosis arises when conventional frameworks for making sense of reality collapse due to the absence of the so-called Name-of-the-Father, the […]

Presenter: David Mintz, MD - This presentation will review the evidence base for harmful meaning effects in psychiatry and some of the common dynamics by which the meanings of medication cause harm. We will explore some of the ethical dilemmas posed by mechanisms of harm and efforts to avoid harm. We will also consider the […]

Presenter: Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP - The most destructive force waylaying development in children comes from failures in mourning that leave parents unreliably available to attend to the needs of the child, the type of small-t trauma that impedes growth. Parental failures invite overwhelming experiences of helplessness that become precursors for later feelings of shame, […]

Speaker: Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, FIPA, CEDS-C - The role of the father, both flesh-and-blood and symbolic, is explored in a subset of families of patients with anorexia nervosa. In these families the mother’s narcissistic investment in her child makes separation-individuation difficult. A factor potentially influencing whether the child goes on to develop anorexia nervosa […]

Presenter: Todd Essig, PhD - The AI revolution is here—and by “here,” I mean right here in our consulting rooms. Interactive self-help tools are now marketed as AI psychotherapy, and for many, they’ve become a viable treatment option. Augmentation technologies for clinicians are readily available, reshaping aspects of clinical practice in real time. Meanwhile, patients […]

Presenter: Gila Ashtor, PhD, LP - There is a type of patient who haunts psychoanalysis from the margins, never settling into existing diagnostic categories but never completely disappearing either. Variously referred to as “normotic” (Bollas, 1987, McDougall, 1978, 1985), “false self” (Winnicott, 1960), and the “as if” personality (Deutsch, 1942), this patient confounds conventional classificatory […]

Presenters: Golzar Naghshineh, MS, LP, CGP, and Nancy Kaufman, LCSW, LP - While addressing behavioral needs and surface level fears and anxieties is crucial in helping patients who struggle with infertility, it is also crucial that we help patients process their deeper unconscious (and often conflicting) feelings around treatment, failure, loss, inadequacy, and successful pregnancy. […]