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. […]

Presenter: Brin Grenyer, PhD The Sheila Hafter Gray Memorial Lecture is underwritten by ACPEinc and honors Dr. Gray's role in advancing the importance of psychoanalytic education. The mechanisms of patient change have been described in detail by prominent psychoanalytic thinkers over the last 130 years. These descriptions form the basis for analytic training and are […]

Presenter: Stephen E. Finn, PhD Psychological assessment is typically viewed as something one does to diagnose psychological disorders or to plan for or evaluate an intervention. In this Grand Rounds, Dr. Finn will discuss Therapeutic Assessment, a brief intervention during which psychological testing is used collaboratively with clients to help them develop new self-narratives that […]

Presenter: Dagmar Herzog, PhD These days, the topic of intellectual disability seems frequently to function as a conversation stopper, and yet studying its history can teach us much we need to know about the seductive appeal of fascisms both past and present. The Question of Unworthy Life resituates the hundredthousandfold Nazi coercive “eugenic” sterilizations and […]

Presenter: Derek Hook, PhD - Obsessional neurotic analysands are notoriously good at neutralizing a psychoanalytic treatment. They annul the role of the analyst, avoid the dimension of the Other’s desire (or lack), deny the relevance of parapraxes, and use free association as a means of defense. Given then that the obsessional, for Lacan, is never […]

Presenter: Daniel José Gaztambide, PsyD - This presentation will use a decolonial lens to review current thinking in psychoanalytic case formulation that addresses a) intrapsychic functioning (Davanloo’s feeling-anxiety-defense model), b) interpersonal dynamics (Luborsky’s wish-response of other-response of self), c) personality structure (Kernberg’s level of personality organization), and d) structural forces (Raque and Meisels’ structurally informed […]

Presenter: Katie C. Lewis, PhD - Psychic pain – often described as unbearable, overwhelming emotional suffering – has been increasingly recognized as a core contributor to suicide risk, yet its clinical contours and empirical significance have only recently begun to be clarified. This talk will review the concept of psychic pain within the broader landscape […]

Speaker: Catherine L. Grus, PhD - New tools using artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies with applications for health care and specifically mental health care are increasingly being developed. While clinicians and treatment settings vary with respect to their adoption, the rapid and pervasive development of these technologies suggests a need for all mental […]

Presenter: Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD This presentation begins with a summary of the theory of overwhelm, a way of conceptualizing working with intensity and excitation that is not about guarding the self (not about emotional regulation, not about protecting the ego from the drives) but which explores what becomes possible when one reaches the limit of […]

A virtual conference presented by the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center, Yale Child Study Center, and the Anna Freud Centre Mentalization—the capacity to understand one’s own and others’ behavior in terms of underlying thoughts, feelings, and intentions—is fundamental to emotional well-being, learning, and effective interpersonal functioning. Yet, how mentalization develops and operates can […]

Presenter: Dionne R. Powell, MD Yasmin Roberts Memorial Lecture Racism, and otherness, continues to be contentious for psychoanalysts to consider as a psychic phenomenon. Unlike aggression and sexuality, racism is held in silence and resistance, inhibiting exploration of this aspect of mind. By closely examining how and where the analyst/psychotherapist locates themselves racially and working […]

Speaker: Lisa L. Moore, PhD, LICSW - The deployment of racialized fear as a political strategy has a profound impact on the individuals and communities who are targeted as objects of fear. In our current climate the use of fear as a tool of racialization is an important site for practitioners to consider in their […]

In-person (at the Austen Riggs Center) and virtual attendance options. Featuring: Ben Kafka, PhD Leora Trub, PhD Christian Thorne, PhD Hannah Schmitt, PsyD (Moderator) The final roundtable examines how digital technologies are reshaping psychic life within the context of place and its disembodied absence. What becomes of presence, intimacy, and therapeutic containment in virtual space? […]

2026 Grand Rounds Series Speaker: Hadas Pade, PsyD This session highlights the need to address the current inequitable access to psychological assessment services by acknowledging and embracing different levels of assessment versus a more traditional comprehensive assessment approach, and the potential role of various health care providers other than psychologists. While comprehensive assessments are highly […]

2026 Grand Rounds Series Speaker: Hannah Zeavin, PhD From the mid-1940s until the 1960s and beyond, class, race, and maternal function were linked in metaphors of temperature in pediatric psychological studies of Bad Mothers. Newly codified diagnoses of aloof “refrigerator mothers” and overstimulating “hot mothers” were inseparable from midcentury conceptions of stimulation, mediation, domesticity, and […]

Keynote of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Rapaport-Klein Study Group hosted by the Erikson Institute for Education, Research, and Advocacy of the Austen Riggs Center Speaker: George Makari, MD In Of Fear and Strangers, George Makari, MD, considered how different psychological models – behaviorist, cognitive, phenomenological – accounted for xenophobia, and in the end, […]

The ethical codes for mental health professionals are guided by internationally recognized standards centered around core principles: respect for others, competence, integrity, and responsibility to society. Central to these standards is our integrity as a human being, a professional, and a member of society, based on principles of fairness, justice, and respect for difference. These […]

2026 Grand Rounds Series Speaker: Michael D. Garrett, MD Research in the last four decades has shown a strong correlation between childhood adversity (e.g., sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional neglect) and psychosis, which recasts chronic psychosis as a trauma-related/stress/related disorder requiring psychotherapy as well as medication. This presentation will describe how psychotic symptoms can be […]

2026 Grand Rounds Series Speaker: Robert J. Gregory, MD Engaging suicidal clients in treatment and recovery is intense and challenging. Clients may state: “I just want to die”, “Nothing is going to help”, or “If you discharge me, I’m going to kill myself”. Therapists can sometimes feel helpless, hopeless and trapped in the responsibility of […]

2026 Grand Rounds Series Speaker: Rhoda Olkin, PhD Clients come to therapy with entrenched ideas about illness, health, and disability. How they conceptualize disability impacts all aspects of therapy, including goals, acceptable interventions, and the therapeutic relationship. These conceptualizations, called Models of Disability in the literature, are one aspect of Disability Affirmative Therapy. The models […]

2026 Grand Rounds Series Speaker: Mareike Ernst, PhD This presentation introduces the concept of intersession processes—patients’ thoughts, feelings, fantasies, and internalized experiences of therapy and therapist between sessions—and examines their relevance from a contemporary psychodynamic perspective. Drawing on psychodynamic theory and empirical research, the talk will discuss how intersession processes may illuminate clinically meaningful fluctuations […]

In-person attendance: $250; limited to 50 people at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, MA Virtual/remote attendance: Free CE/CME available: 6 hours (pending approval) Hope in Hard Times: Building Community is a hybrid conference designed for mental health clinicians and allied professionals seeking to think together about the ethical, clinical, and institutional challenges of practicing […]