Houston Psychoanalytic Society

Presented by: Nancy McWilliams, PhD Dr. McWilliams will reflect on contemporary diagnostic conventions in mental health, emphasizing the unintended negative consequences for both patients and clinicians of diagnostic practices that focus solely on symptoms and observable behaviors. She will describe alternative taxonomies intended to remedy the weaknesses of the DSM and ICD for guiding treatment, […]

Facilitated by: Barton Jones, LCSW & Lindsey Hogan, PhD A collegial companion to Dr. Nancy McWilliams’ lecture, Diagnosis and Its Torments This seven-week, all-level study group invites clinicians to engage deeply with Nancy McWilliams’ widely respected and clinically invaluable text, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process. Co-facilitated by Barton Jones, LCSW and […]

Presented by: Lauren Levine, PhD Discussion by: Janine de Peyer, LCSW In this presentation, Dr. Levine examines the transformative power of storytelling and witnessing in creating shared symbolic meaning and coherence from ungrieved trauma. She explores creativity as a transformative force that emerges within the clinical process, drawing on film, dance, literature, and dreams as […]

Presented by: Clara Mucci, PhD Dr. Mucci will use neurobiology of attachment and affect regulation theory (Allan Schore), developmental psychopathology (Giovanni Liotti) and contemporary relational psychoanalysis to illustrate her own contribution to the field through what she terms the “three levels of trauma of human origin” and what she indicates as “embodied witnessing” as a […]

Presented by: Karen Hopenwasser, MD While moments of attunement with individuals manifesting dissociated self-states are often confusing, dissociative attunement can be used as a valuable tool in therapeutic process. Attunement is a synchronized awareness of implicit knowing that is nonlinear and bidirectional. It is an embodied rhythmic encounter that can be understood, in part, through […]

Presented by: Donnel Stern, PhD In the interest of integrating the social and the individual in psychoanalysis, Dr. Stern examines the relation of Althusser’s concept of interpellation and the psychoanalytic idea of dissociative enactment. Interpellation is a way of conceptualizing the creation of subjectivity via individual participation in the ideological tropes of power. Dissociative enactment […]

Presented by: Shir Shanun, PhD Civitarese (2024) writes we have a need to exist in the eyes of others, it is what makes relationships meaningful. Such loving connections and freedom in complex analytic system and the positive relationship between them are at the center of this paper. I will argue that restriction or expansion of […]