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

Presented by: Carol Gilligan, PhD In a special presentation for HPS, renowned social psychologist and feminist Carol Gilligan, PhD will explore the roots of patriarchy and its persistence in contemporary American political and social life. She is best known for her groundbreaking book, In a Different Voice, published in 1982 and described by Harvard University […]

6 Mondays | Oct 27 – Dec 8 | Presented by: Erica Ehrenberg, Licensed Psychoanalyst, MFA In this course we will discuss, respond to, and write together from the work of artists, writers, and analysts in order to explore the connections between their work, and the creative forces behind psychic change. What does it mean […]

The 2 recent explosions within the Program Committee and then within the American Psychoanalytic Association are examined, from an insider’s perspective, as analysts’ difficulties with listening to each other. Analysts’ anxiety with erotic excitement, especially with racial erotics, even when used for self-affirmation, is discussed. So too is the need for Othering and the need […]

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. […]

Presenter: Todd Essig, PhD - The AI revolution is here—and by “here,” I mean right here in our consulting rooms. Interactive self-help tools are now marketed as AI psychotherapy, and for many, they’ve become a viable treatment option. Augmentation technologies for clinicians are readily available, reshaping aspects of clinical practice in real time. Meanwhile, patients […]

Book Editor: Klara Naszkowska, PhD | Discussant: Rosemary Balsam, MD This book discussion is dedicated to filling a hole in the history of women pioneers of psychoanalysis. Their groundbreaking contributions to the nascent field notwithstanding, their biographies have been largely and systematically erased from the historical narrative. Klara Naszkowska will draw on the anthology that […]

Defense Mechanisms: Hierarcy, Adaptation and Change - Dr. Chris Perry

6 Tuesdays | Oct 21 – Dec 9 | Facilitated by JoAnn Ponder, PhD We have recently witnessed brazen displays of patriarchy, oppressive behavior toward women, attempts to control their bodies, and threats or acts of violence toward them in American political and social life. Given the longstanding roots of patriarchy and misogyny in our […]

Felecia Powell-Williams, Ed.D., LPC-S, RPT/S presents a case presentation with a focus on clinical material of a four-year analysis that has continued therapeutically from childhood into adulthood, and her early attachment disruptions in relationship with her mother and father. The presentation will illustrate the internal conflicts concerning a difficulty with aggression surrounding traumatic loss of […]

Instructor: Golzar Selbe Naghshineh, LP, CGP This seminar explores how fashion influences identity through the lens of heritage— how it's either embraced or rejected in both cultural fashion and in what is passed down/inherited in families. What is inherited can be both a gift and a burden; heirlooms and inherited wardrobes carry meanings and identifications […]

THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG (2024) written, co-produced and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof won them Special Jury Prize of 2024 Cannes Int’l Film Festival. The film centers on a family thrust into the public eye when the father is appointed as an investigating judge in Tehran, as political unrest erupts in the streets. When […]

Presented by: Elizabeth Danze, FAIA This presentation examines the concept of resilience in both architecture and human experience through the shared metaphor of the palimpsest—a form that retains traces of its past while adapting to the present. Drawing on Vitruvius’s notion of firmitas and extending it through the study of buildings, we explore how architecture […]

LGBTQ+ Workshop Please join us as Sien Rivera, MD and Justin Shubert, PsyD, PhD present Monstrousness and Aliveness: Engaging Gender in Psychoanalysis Sunday, October 5, 2025 Public Session: 1:00 – 4:00 pm Presentation and Discussion Via Zoom Presentation: This workshop seeks to explore a range of engagements with gender in the psychoanalytic encounter. One portion […]

Psychoanalysis Creativity and the Arts: Session 1 of 3: “Lo creativo y lo vital” Presented by Alfredo Panceira, MD, Jani Santamaria, PhD, Ariel Liberman, PhD, and Rosa Aurora Chavez, MD, PhD, FABP Saturday, October 4, 2025 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm (2 CME/CE) Presentation and Discussion via Zoom *This first session will be conducted in […]

The Morris Eagle Psychoanalytic Research Lecture is an annual NCP Lecture in honor of the career and contributions of Morris Eagle. Introducing the Revised Standard Edition of Freud’s Psychological Works: Can the existing English translation by James Strachey of Freud’s Psychological Works be salvaged and updated, or is a completely fresh start called for? This […]

Selma Fraiberg and colleagues’ seminal article, “Ghosts in the Nursery,” brought our attention to the infant-parent relationship and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Since the publication of the article in 1975, infant observations and empirical studies have continued to elucidate the developmental consequences of the parent-child relationship and implications for adult treatment. In Part II […]

Join Dr. Holly Han and Dr. Shirley Liao for a five-week, psychoanalytically-informed group exploring the text Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation by David L Eng and Shinhee Han (2019). Together, we will reflect on the social and psychic dimensions of racial identity and belonging in the lives of Asian Americans.

This conference will feature Peter Fonagy, PhD, and Ed Tronick, PhD — distinguished researchers and scholars who have had long academic careers studying and theorizing about the clinical processes that contribute to human growth and therapeutic change. The clinical processes in the psychoanalytic treatment of adult patients have long been viewed as sharing similarities with […]

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

The conference will be divided between exploring four different psychoanalytic models and their relevance to the treatment of major primitive psychopathologies. Dr. Panajian will discuss Freud’s understanding of two principles of mental functioning, thinking, negation, disavowal, and delusions as an attempt to recover psychic functioning. Klien’s paranoid schizoid position, depressive position, manic and obsessive defenses […]

Join Dr. Lawrence Hedges, Ph.D., Psy.D., ABPP for The Unfinished Copernican Revolution: An Introduction to the Work of Jean Laplanche, a thought-provoking salon exploring how Freud’s “four insults to human narcissism” continue to shape our understanding of the human psyche. Drawing on Laplanche’s revolutionary ideas about the unconscious, seduction, and the influence of “otherness,” Dr. […]

APsA's Candidates' Council Online Seminar: Instructor: Bonnie J. Buchele, Ph.D., ABBP, DFAGPA This seminar will focus on the relationship between fashion and the frame as it relates to the analysand, the analyst and the process.  Dr. Buchele will give a brief review of the literature and speak of her relationship with fashion as well as the role it […]

Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center 2025 Virtual Fall Conference The Austen Riggs Center invites you to join an interdisciplinary conference, "Rebuilding Trust in Institutions: Bridging Generational Insights.” This gathering expands Erik Erikson’s foundational insights on basic trust and mistrust, extending them into today's complex social and institutional landscapes.

Author: Katherine Marshall Woods, PsyD | Interviewer: Ricardo Ainslie, PhD | Black Film Through a Psychodynamic Lens delves into the nuanced character development and narrative themes within the struggles and successes presented in Black films over the last five decades. In this pioneering book, Katherine Marshall Woods looks at Black cinema from a psychological and […]

Facilitated by: Erica Ehrenberg, MFA Psychoanalytic, Buddhist, and literary works indicate a vast internal expanse for which each discipline attempts to find language. However abstract the terms for describing variations of this space may seem–the unconscious, emptiness, or Keats’ concept of “negative capability,” our psychic contact with this terrain in all cases has powerful implications […]

The Gender and Sexualities Education and Development Group (sponsored by the APsA Committee on Gender and Sexuality) has initiated the First Things First series to educate ourselves and other psychoanalysts on developing a contemporary psychoanalytic curriculum for sexuality and gender. This development group will be useful for those teaching psychotherapy student classes and curricula, graduate […]

presented by Tobias Wiggins, PhD

Speaker: Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, FIPA, CEDS-C - The role of the father, both flesh-and-blood and symbolic, is explored in a subset of families of patients with anorexia nervosa. In these families the mother’s narcissistic investment in her child makes separation-individuation difficult. A factor potentially influencing whether the child goes on to develop anorexia nervosa […]

7 Wednesdays | Sept 10 – Dec 3 | Facilitated by: Garrett Tanner, PhD | This reading group is offered to explore the foundational texts of our field. Participants will engage in the seminal works of Sigmund Freud that all subsequent psychoanalytic theory – intentionally or unintentionally – responds to. Special attention will be given […]

Sex trafficking is pertinent to psychoanalysis because of its historical roots and its persistence in current culture. It can be traced to ancient civilizations, where adults and children were enslaved for labor and sex. Not until 1921 did the newly formed League of Nations make efforts to ‘suppress trafficking in women and children’. Since then, […]

Elliott Jurist, PhD, uses memoir as a way to understand how patients experience therapy. Memoirs provide an unexplored place to hear from patients, separate from professional opinion. Drawing from diverse sources, Dr. Jurist argues that some memoirists see therapy as transformative, but others are equivocal or even negative. He also reflects upon how our beliefs […]

6 Tuesdays | Sept. 2 - Oct 7 Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank’s significant contributions to modern psychotherapy have been undervalued. Drawing on her comprehensive research, Sara Ekenstierna offers an overview of some of the key tenets of Rank’s psychology, with focus on his relational, integrative, and process oriented approach, and aims to show how he […]

presented by Kate Leslie, MSW, LCSW

Presenter: Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP - The most destructive force waylaying development in children comes from failures in mourning that leave parents unreliably available to attend to the needs of the child, the type of small-t trauma that impedes growth. Parental failures invite overwhelming experiences of helplessness that become precursors for later feelings of shame, […]

Presenter: David Mintz, MD - This presentation will review the evidence base for harmful meaning effects in psychiatry and some of the common dynamics by which the meanings of medication cause harm. We will explore some of the ethical dilemmas posed by mechanisms of harm and efforts to avoid harm. We will also consider the […]

The claim that Strachey ‘falsely scientized’ Freud, mainly through the translation of his technical vocabulary, is the red thread that runs through all the major criticisms of the Standard Edition (e.g. Bettelheim, Ornston, Laplanche). In this lecture, Professor Mark Solms will argue against this criticism on three grounds. (1) It fails to take account of […]

This series of 6 closed meetings offers pre-licensed and licensed therapists a safe and confidential place to get help with difficult cases, discuss professional challenges, and explore new ways to approach clients. The instructor will provide participants with tools to cultivate a foundational understanding of various psychoanalytic theories. This course will be held on Zoom. […]

This presentation first explores key concepts from Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of psychosis, highlighting its role as one of several ways humans navigate existential dilemmas such as sexuality and love. According to Lacan’s 1950s theory, psychosis arises when conventional frameworks for making sense of reality collapse due to the absence of the so-called Name-of-the-Father, the […]

All We Imagine As Light is a psychological journey of revelation, a film of connection, memory, and the intricate emotional landscapes that bind human experience. Set in the vibrant, complex world of contemporary Mumbai, the film weaves an intimate narrative that delves deep into the inner worlds of two women navigating the delicate intersections of […]

Alan Sugarman, PhD will be discussing some of his ideas regarding the prominent place that countertransference has in child and adolescent work. He notes the existence of a “Broader Field” or “Total Situation” when analyzing children and adolescents because of the various roles required of the child analyst i.e. analyst, developmental object, and real object; […]

Dr. Peter Shabad will briefly describe how the origins of chronic shame emerge from chronic experiences of rejected vulnerability at the hands of one’s parents. These cumulative experiences of trauma may be viewed as the psychic loss of a physically present parent, in which one’s expectant hope for a wished-for parent is continually frustrated by […]

Heather Ferguson, LCSW will present on the applicability of tragic consciousness in psychoanalytic work, focusing on the way in which the psychoanalytic relationship can aid in a patient developing such a form of consciousness.

This event will be presented by Dr. Jennifer Hanlin: Attendees will explore Philip Bromberg’s paper, Treating Patients with Symptoms—and Symptoms with Patience: Reflections on Shame, Dissociation, and Eating Disorders. Bromberg’s theory is that the therapist’s task is to allow themselves to slowly discover the patient’s multiplicity of self-states and the existing gap between the states. […]

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.

Join Fred Busch PhD, for our next Meet the Author event with Dan Jacobs, MD, and the online audience.

This event will be presented by Professor Brett Kahr: Although we have all encountered naked human bodies across our lifetime, very few of us have had the opportunity to explore the fully naked human mind, namely, the true contents of sexual thoughts and fantasies and unconscious wishes and unconscious fears. In this presentation on “Psychological […]

Fred Busch, MD, speaks about Problem-Focused Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, a modified psychoanalytic treatment approach that addresses patient’s specific problems, including symptoms, personality issues, relationship struggles, and behavioral difficulties. The primary facets of this treatment approach will be described, including identification of problems and their associated triggers and feelings, and developing a psychodynamic formulation to aid therapists […]

Todd Essig

Michael Langlois

Anora (2024) is the fifth consecutive feature film from Sean Baker to focus on the lives of sex workers and similarly marginalized peoples. It tells the story of Anora, or “Ani”, a resilient and powerful young working class woman from the Russian immigrant community of Brighton Beach. The film is a riotous, heartbreaking, uplifting, laugh-out-loud […]