Meet the Author: Steven Cooper & Judy Kantrowitz

Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)

Join Steven Cooper, PhD, and Judy Kantrowitz, PhD, for our next Meet the Author event with John Martin-Joy, MD, and the online audience.

Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis by Steven H. Cooper, PhD – Book Review and Discussion with Nora Swan Foster, MA, ATR-BC, LPC, NCPsyA

Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)

What if the leading purpose of the therapeutic relationship is to elevate the process of play? And when this capacity is absent, how might we find ways to fertilize the imagination? These questions were posed by Nora Swan-Foster, a Jungian analyst and art therapist who was invited to review and discuss Steven Cooper's recent book. […]

Paul A. Dewald Lecture: Developing a Stable Internal Home

Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)

Aisha Abbasi, MD: Homesickness is a commonly used term, and a feeling that has been studied with interest, in psychoanalysis. The connection and distinction between homesickness and nostalgia has been noted in many analytic papers. Normal and pathological forms of both have been described. In this paper, Dr. Abbasi discusses the theoretical framework that informs […]

Body and Mind

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Donald Campbell

The Unconscious Triad: Hidden Unconscious, Buried Unconscious, Implicit Unconscious

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Description: The current extension of the concept of the unconscious to different levels, configurations, and functioning of the mind is the result of decades of collective reflection on the clinic and on theory. Analysts today have a broader, more refined and complex knowledge of defensive and transformative processes, and this has also led to an […]

“Will Psychoanalysis, AI, and Philosophy Collide, Or Enrich Each Other?” A Conversation with Luca Possati, Ph.D. hosted by Amy Levy, Psy.D.

Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)

The APsA/DPE Council on Artificial Intelligence (CAI) is pleased to announce the next event in our Workshop Series. On January 19th, from 11 AM to 1 PM EST, Dr. Amy Levy will be in conversation with Dr. Luca Possati, author of The Algorithmic Unconscious: How Psychoanalysis Helps in Understanding AI. They will consider Dr. Possati’s […]

Edge of Catastrophe: Erich Fromm’s Fight Against Fascism and Racism

Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)

Dr. Roger Frie asks: What does it mean to be both a social critic and a practicing psychotherapist? In this talk he draws on the early work of Erich Fromm to answer this and other questions.

Ethics Conference – Toward An Ethic of Play: How to Conceptualize Ethics in Play in Adult Analysis

Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)

Presented by Steven H. Cooper, PhD with discussion by Joyce Slochower, PhD Through a series of clinical vignettes, the author explores the ethical undergirding of play in analytic work with adult patients. He defines play as a form of idiomatic, verbal responsiveness that emerges in the context of the analytic intersubjectivity, one that can illuminate […]

Wisconsin Psychoanalytic Society Scientific Meeting

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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.

Frame to Frame: Film Through the Lens of Psychoanalysis

Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)

From the start, the craft of filmmaking has been intertwined with psychoanalysis. Both were developed around the turn of the 20th century, and both involve, in practice, a fair amount of art as well as science. Perhaps most importantly, film and psychoanalysis share preoccupations with creativity, viewing and listening, primal desires, and primal fears. In […]

Love Songs and Couples Therapy

Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)

Presented by Perrine Moran, M.A. The dilemma of how to be emotionally dependent on another without losing oneself permeates many popular love songs and underlies issues that couples often bring to therapy. Its management results in different dynamics which place partners in couples on a spectrum going from too close to too far apart. This […]

Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis

Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)

Presented by Dr. Lauren Levine, Ph.D. In this presentation, Dr. Lauren Levine will reflect on the power of stories to create shared symbolic meaning and coherence out of ungrieved trauma. Through evocative clinical stories, she will explore creativity as transformative, emergent in the clinical process, drawing on film, dance, and literature and dreams as frames […]

Alumni Group – Imagining a (Social) Ethics of the Unconscious

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Presenter: Sean Fitzpatrick, PhD, LPC | We live in a liminal moment in which mental health stigma is crumbling, in great part because of increasing psychological struggle triggered by the pandemic and recent social unrest.

When the Body Speaks

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Ronny Jaffe

Mixed Race Couples

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Pierre Cachia

Wisconsin Psychoanalytic Society Scientific Meeting

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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 […]

The Ethics of Divorce

Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)

Arthur Leonoff

Alumni Group – Bringing Psychotherapy Back to Life

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Presenter: Jon G. Allen, PhD | This presentation will include discussion of the developmental trajectory of relationships informed by attachment theory and research; empirical findings from a study of the connections between therapists’ personal relationships and the quality of their relationships with patients; and recent findings regarding what patients value in psychotherapy.

Fingert Lecture: What Words Can’t Say. The Talking Cure and the Limits of Language

Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)

Howard Levine, MD: Psychoanalysis is ‘the talking cure,’ but the problems raised by language are complex, paradoxical, and perhaps unsolvable. At their most effective, words play a vital role in psychic homeostatic regulation and the psychoanalytic process that is analogous to the architecturally structural role played by the keystone of an arch. The problem, however, […]

High Conflict Divorce

Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)

Kate Scharff & David Scharff

Relational Psychoanalysis: In a New Key

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Morning Focus: Core Competencies in Relational Psychoanalysis Drawing from Dr. Roy Barsness’ text, Core Competencies in Relational Psychoanalysis: A Guide to Practice, Study, and Research, this session invites participants to identify and explore the seven core disciplines of relational psychoanalysis, as revealed through his qualitative research. The workshop will deepen participants' understanding of relationally oriented […]

Interpersonal Trauma and the Developmental Roots of Personality Disorders

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Dr. Clara Mucci presents the three levels of interpersonal traumatizations with all the consequences at the level of attachment styles, interpersonal neurobiology, and affect regulation and personability dynamics up to the point of developing complex PTSD and personality disorders.

WPS David Black Memorial Lecture 2025

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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 […]

Alumni Group – What is Effective in Psychoanalytic Treatments?

Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)

Presenter: M. Sagman Kayatekin, MD | Psychoanalytic discipline is in the process of broadening its theory, practitioners and applications. We welcome contributions from different psychoanalytic approaches and related disciplines in social sciences, humanities and neuro-psychoanalysis.

The Place From Which We Know: a Response to the “Ontological” Turn in Psychoanalysis

Virtual (Click on event title to advance to website and registration page)

Dr. Hannah Wallerstein address the recent shift towards was has been termed an “ontological” approach to psychoanalysis (Ogden 2019), in which experiencing and becoming oneself more fully are seen as the goals of treatment, with the generation of knowledge taking a back seat.