Wisconsin Psychoanalytic Society

Art Nielsen, MD. Asking for Things and Listening to Criticism: Two Fundamental Challenges in Intimate Relationships and Targets for Couples Therapy. Grounded in self psychology, Dr. Nielson uses everyday language to convey complex challenges in working with couples. He begins his talk with an experience-near discussion of why people have trouble asking for what they want, […]

Greg Rizzolo, PhD. Compulsions and Obsessions: A Lifespan Perspective.  Freud's concept of the obsessional neuroses has evolved into today's obsessive compulsive disorder with ideas from many fields helping to understand this condition. Dr. Rizzolo contributes to this effort by framing the variety of obsessive presentations as "a disorder of volition, an exaggerated sense of willpower […]

Jana K. Edwards, LCSW. Shame and Reunions: A New Look at the Compulsion to Repeat.  Ms. Edwards frames the repetition compulsion in her work with adult partners as a path to healing previously unmetabolized wounds, traumas and losses. In their repetitive conflicts, she sees couples accessing historically dissociated affects. Ms. Shaw illustrates her ideas by […]

Wendy Katz, PhD. Silence, Second Skin, and the Unrepresented.  Dr. Katz uses the concepts of microdialect and secondskin to to explore the patient's silence in session and how it may function on multiple levels of psychic and relational organization. Using this as a vehicle for moving between levels, it provides a potential avenue to access and creatively transform unrepresented experience.

Tyia Grange Isaacson, PhD. Daring to Hope: A Couple's Journey from Trauma to Connection.  Dr. Isaacson presents her treatment of a deeply traumatized, high conflict couple that is massively overwhelmed by multiple stressors. She delineates how she uses concepts from self psychology within a systems treatment framework to demonstrate how to invite traumatized partners to […]

Daniel Shaw, LCSW. Understanding Traumatizing Narcissism and Its Clinical Utility.  Mr. Shaw presents a way of understanding the traumatic impact of narcissism as it is engendered developmentally and as it is enacted relationally. Here, he focuses on the "traumatizing narcissist's" need for control, describes the internal needs and developmental narrative of the traumatizing narcissist, the […]