The Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (LA)

Free meeting with the ICP community in LA open to all.  Most psychoanalysts never serve on a jury. This essay narrates my experience of being juror number 11 for nine days. This criminal trial involved horrific allegations of rape, sodomy, kidnapping, armed robbery, and brutal beating. The case also involved issues of race and of violence. […]

Connections and Conversation is a free monthly Zoom meeting. This conversation will explore the space between violence and trauma is dangerous silence. Time, space and history collides. Silence intensifies the impact of trauma, and trauma that goes unspoken, un-witnessed and unclaimed produces more trauma to self and others. Silence can be associated with a ghost, […]

Connections and Conversation is a free monthly Zoom meeting. From the first contact with our patients, we begin to engage the question: who is this person who has sought out our help? How do we understand their suffering? The maverick founders of interpersonal school of psychoanalysis, originally known as the cultural school, each in his/her […]

Connections and Conversation is a free monthly Zoom meeting. The core thesis, threading through several publications is that if contemporary psychoanalysis aspires to contribute to addressing our socio-political and ecological challenges, we must develop an enlarged repertoire of theory and practice. The distinguished Harvard Law School Professor, Lawrence Lessig has eloquently argued that repairing our […]

Participants will explore challenging places of analytic work from different theoretical perspectives of working in the psychoanalytic field: Autism is the Treatment: Suturing the Rupture Between Body and Mind by Leon Brenner, Ph.D; Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Substance Use and Mis-use by D. Bradley Jones, Psy.D, LCSW; Placement, Displacement, Replacement: Where the Social and the Unconscious […]

Free zoom event Eyal Rozmarin, Ph.D: For a long time, I have been interested in the relations between individuals and collectives: the groups they are, and feel, part of; the groups they identify with, and in the act of identifying, becoming who they are. In other words, I’ve been interested in belonging: in how we […]

D. Bradley Jones, PsyD, LCSW and Darren Haber, PsyD, MFT demonstrate how a relational psychoanalytic approach that engages the subjective experience of the patient and contextualizes emotional pain can facilitate developmental growth for two patients on the “continuum of change,” not yet ready for abstinence. Heather Ferguson, LCSW, faculty from The Institute for the Psychoanalytic […]

Free zoom event with Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, FIPA, CEDS-S : Psychoanalytic thinking offers valuable insights to clinicians working with eating disorders and body image concerns. In a field that increasingly emphasizes rapid symptom reduction, treatment providers risk neglecting less overt, and less easily measurable, aspects of the patient’s experience. This presentation will bring together […]

Free zoom event with Janine de Peyer, LCSW-R: Why has so little been written about the female analyst’s sexual desire? Is sexual arousal during clinical work such a rarity, or is it a natural response that has simply been relegated to the unmentionable? This workshop will explore cultural and gender prohibitions against the acknowledgement of […]

Free zoom event with Charles Turk M.D. By means of a metapsychologic elaboration of certain psychoanalytic concepts “Le388” a psychoanalytic treatment program for psychotic young adults in Quebec City has achieved a 60% cure rate among those engaged in that program. Those cured have been guided to dismantle their delusion and to find satisfying activity […]

Free zoom event with Linda Michaels, PsyD, MBA: Our psychotherapy practices do not exist in a vacuum and in these last few years we have witnessed unprecedented upheaval in the areas of politics, social justice, the natural world, and public health. It is vitally important for our practices and communities to be informed about what […]

Free zoom event with Adrienne Harris, Ph.D.: In this talk, I consider Ferenczi’s groundbreaking work on sexual abuse in conjunction with other projects he undertook, in which trauma, regression, and destructiveness clearly preoccupied him. In addition to attention to the landmark paper on sexual abuse, “The Confusion of Tongues” (1929/32), I will draw on his […]

Free zoom event with Koichi Tagashi, Ph.D., L.P.: Are you able to cure your patient? In this presentation, I like to pose this question, without defining what a “cure” might look like, in order to get at your initial instinctive feeling. This presentation is intended to be an ethical question. I am not examining whether […]

Free zoom event with Veronica D. Abney, Ph.D.: This paper presents a description of the analysis of an African-American patient with Dissociative Identity Disorder. It will focus primarily on one year of the analysis when the transference was extremely negative resulting in the analyst moving from a very empathic and loving countertransference position to feeling […]

Join for us for a presentation with Dr. Jason Jost followed by a panel discussion with Dr. Earl Bland and Dr. Michelle Harwell. Psychoanalysts unfamiliar with the worldview and child-rearing practices of Evangelicals may unintentionally replicate the patient’s childhood experience of accommodating a transcendent, authoritative perspective of themselves and others. To bridge this cultural gap, […]