St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute

What is a baby trying to say when it is crying? For British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, cries are more than a call for food or assistance. They are expressions of an all-consuming fear: of dying. Understanding this fear, and responding to it empathically was, for him, essential to the work of parenting—and analysis. But what […]

Spreaker: Volney Gay, PhD. We explore American slave owners who embodied the existential contradiction of American values (individual liberty) with human bondage. We focus on their struggles to defend themselves against that contradiction. We locate those struggles within the biographies of famous persons, such as President Washington, and unknown persons who claimed to be both […]

Speaker: John Lucas, LPC. Many clinicians are hesitant to begin working with adolescents, although there is a significant need for adolescent therapists. This course will serve as a primer on working with adolescents and their parents/caregivers from a psychodynamic framework. We will cover both theoretical and clinical perspectives. The course will highlight the contributions of […]

Speaker: Nikki Karalekas, PhD, LCSW. Love is both mysterious and a psychoanalytic term of art. Despite worrying that love was beyond the scope of scientific inquiry, Freud developed several different theories of love. Perhaps most famously, in the Three Essays on Sexuality, he writes, “The prototype of every love relationship is the child sucking at […]

Speaker: Robert Grossmark, PhD, ABPP. Unrepresented and yet-to-be-suffered trauma and neglect announce themselves in the language of symptoms, absence and emergent enactments in the treatment field. This lecture will address the challenges when working with patients whose trauma does not avail itself to symbolization and mentalization. In this lecture I will outline how the analyst […]

Speaker: Rudy Oldeschulte, MA, JD, MACP. This is an introductory course on the evolution of the Independent Tradition (British in origin) applied to our work with children and adolescents. This tradition (or approach) is developmentally appropriate to our work with younger populations, as it moves from the more epistemological (knowing) approach, with its emphasis on […]

Speaker: Alicia Naveas, LPC, MEd. This course will explore foundational concepts of cultural competency within psychodynamic frameworks. Emphasizing the work of authors such as Tummala-Narra, Salman Akhtar, and Patricia Gherovici will integrate multicultural awareness into psychoanalytic thinking. For instance, Tummala-Narra (2025) conceptualizes multicultural competence as a reflective capacity to shift perspectives and understand the patient’s […]

Speaker: Phoebe Cirio, MSW, LCSW The NASW Code of Ethics is based on a set of core values: service, social justice, dignity and worth of the person, importance of human relationships, integrity, and competence. These values are stated in the affirmative as something we clinicians should strive for. Yet, at present, these core values seem […]

A presentation of an analyst's illness and how he understood and addressed it when it occurred over 30 years ago; and how he has reconsidered it in face of greater clinical and life experience. Dr. Schwartz discusses his reflections on his original thinking and shares how he engages around it currently.

For clinicians or mental health students who are curious about what it is that psychodynamic therapists actually do, we offer a “window” into the process and a chance to connect an introduction to theory with actual clinical material. Each class will begin with a brief theoretical description of a core clinical concept, followed by the […]

Dr. Alison Feit: We are living through a strange cultural moment. People have never had more freedom, more choices, more opportunities for self-expression, or more language for understanding themselves. Yet everywhere we look, people are reporting some version of the same experience: burnout, numbness, indecision, loneliness, endless scrolling, a loss of direction, a loss of […]

Through an extended case study of a tattoo artist in psychoanalytic treatment, this lecture explores tattooing as a legitimate artistic expression. This point of departure shifts the psychoanalytic perspective away from viewing tattoos as a pathological and masochistic external solution to internal unconscious conflicts. What emerges is a dynamic perspective on tattoos, viewing them as […]