Wisconsin Psychoanalytic Society

Danielle Novack, PhD. “Meeting Again, Meeting Anew: A Child Patient Returns as an Adult”

Donald Moss, MD. “The Traumatizing Disorder of Everyday Life”.  

For patients, it's seldom the content of the analyst's interpretation that's memorable but rather the feeling of being understood. Within the interpersonal field, the analyst's interpretation gives voice to field shifts that are jointly created between analyst and patient and make way for a new freedom to think and feel.

Psychoanalytic theories are needed to sense, understand and connect with our patients but they can limit the analyst's participation in terms of theoretical and technical categories. Using his concept of needed relationships, Dr. Stern offers a more holistic view of the analyst-patient relationship in all its therapeutic complexity. He invites the therapist to work creatively […]

Clinicians and researchers find it difficult to adequately describe how the patient changes and what roles the clinician has in facilitating change. What approaches have been developed to help us understand how patients can expand their understanding of the source of the difficulties and what they can do to improve their lives? Dr. Gabbard will […]

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, […]

Compulsions and Obsessions: A Lifespan Perspective. Greg Rizzolo, PhD. 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 not […]

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 […]

Dr. Stark’s therapeutic approach to working through neurotic conflictedness, “Conflict Statements: Leveraging the Patient’s Anxiety to Incentivize Transformation and Growth”

Nancy Kulish Ph.D Educational objectives: 1. Describe how early infantile trauma can be expressed in bodily symptoms or replayed in a person’s behavior. 2. Identify how the manifestations and symptoms of early infantile trauma appear in the transference and countertransference in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. 3. Discuss how to relate to and empathize with traumatized patients. […]

“Holding and Containing: The Metaphor of the Baby in Winnicott, Bion, and Klein