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Schedule

October 21, 2010

Critical Thinking in Psychoanalysis

The first conference will be four days in length. It will include an initial one day workshop, held on Thursday, on critical thinking. This workshop is designed to orient the new participants to the work of the Program. We will meet with two analysts who have experience as editors and as members of editorial boards who will bring for our consideration both published papers and manuscripts which have been submitted to their journals (these will be precirculated). These manuscripts will cover a variety of topic areas. With their help, we will focus on the project of developing a critical sensibility about psychoanalytic writing, addressing the questions: what constitutes psychoanalytic evidence, what constitutes clear explanation, and what constitutes coherent theory building?

Coordinators: David Cooper, Ph.D., Martha Dupecher, Ph.D., M.S.W., Kerry Malawista, Ph.D. , Evelyn Schreiber, Ph.D., and Robert Winer, M.D.

Guest Faculty:

• Judith F. Chused, M.D. - Editorial Board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly and The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association; Reader for Psychiatry and The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis; Washington Psychoanalytic Institute.
• Jane V. Kite, Ph.D. Editorial Reader for The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. Editorial Board for North America, IJP. Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East; San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute.

October 22-24, 2010

Singing (and Writing) With Tongues of Wood: Bringing the Unsayable Into Words

This weekend explores the complexities of rendering the inexpressible or unsayable into words. In striving to communicate memories, dreams, feelings, experiences, and other aspects of the human condition, people are often at a loss for words. Wordlessness might be the product of suppression, censorship, grief, or dread; words are not merely absent, but forbidden, imprisoned, suspended, or unformed.

The imperatives to express and connect are powerful; we create personal dialects of sounds, gestures, images, symbols, actions, and symptoms. Our impulse to communicate private experience can catalyze the many forms and media of art and, as psychoanalysis understands, intricate systems of symbolization.

A multidisciplinary panelwriters, artists, scholars, and psychoanalysts, each also a specialist in theatre, cinema, art, and musicwill address these exquisitely nuanced issues, paying particular attention to the unique challenges writers face in giving language to non-linguistic states.

Coordinator: Alexander Stein, Ph.D.

Guest Faculty:

• Leo Rangell, M.D. is Honorary President of the International Psychoanalytic Association, having previously served as President of the International, the American, and three times of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society. Now approaching his own centenary, Dr. Rangell's prolific contributions encompass the entire landscape of psychoanalytic thought and practice. Among his nearly 500 publications, including 8 books, are seminal and pioneering works on a unified theory of anxiety, intrapsychic conflict, psychic trauma, and unconscious decision-making functions of the ego, "The Path toward Unity in Psychoanalytic Theory." He has also written a series of iconic papers on Friendship, The Psychology of Poise, and Transference to Theory. His most recent book is "Music in the Head."
• Andrea Sabbadini, C. Psychol., is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and its current Director of Publications. He is a Senior Lecturer at UCL, a trustee of the Freud Museum, and a member of the IPA Committee on Psychoanalysis and Culture. He was the founding editor of Psychoanalysis and History and is the Film Section editor of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He has published extensively in the major psychoanalytic journals, and has edited Time in Psychoanalysis (1979), Even Paranoids Have Enemies (1998), and Projected Shadows (2007). He is also the chairman of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival and of a regular programme of films and discussions at the ICA in London.
• Ellen Handler Spitz, Ph.D. [http://www.ellenhandlerspitz.net/] holds the Honors College Professorship of Visual Arts at University of Maryland. She is the author of six books, including Art and Psyche and Image and Insight. Her most recent book is Illuminating Childhood, forthcoming from University of Michigan Press. She also writes regular columns for The New Republic Online ("The Book") and for American Imago ("Apropos the Arts"). Her focus as a writer, lecturer, and scholar is the cultural lives of young people, and the relations between aesthetics and psychology.
• Alexander Stein, Ph.D. [http://www.boswellgroup.com/] is a clinical and business psychoanalyst, essayist, journalist, and social entrepreneur. He has published extensively in the leading psychoanalytic journals, and is an Editorial Board member of The Psychoanalytic Review and American Imago. He is a former monthly columnist for Fortune Small Business and currently writes a blog for BNET/CBS Interactive on the psychology of entrepreneurship. A conservatory-trained pianist, Dr. Stein is a leading authority on the conjoined study of music and psychoanalysis. His many published works include "Well-Tempered Bagatelles: A Meditation on Listening," "Music, Mourning and Consolation," "Music and Trauma in Polanski's 'The Pianist'" and "The Sound of Memory." He is a Principal in the Boswell Group, and his consulting practice is based in New York.

February 4-6, 2011

What Can Neuroscience Teach Us About the Conduct of Therapy?

"At long last, psychoanalysts and neuroscientists are together in the same forum, as they were in some manner in Freud's own person." (Antonio Damasio, cited by Mark Solms). In the late 1800's, psychoanalysis and neuroscience were both emerging disciplines. Freud was beginning his explorations of the psychology of the mind and the neuron had only recently been described. Freud tried to link the two in his "Project for a Scientific Psychology," but was eventually forced to abandon this venture, turning his attention to what would become the field of psychoanalysis proper.

Both disciplines have made remarkable strides over the past century, and in the more recent past contributors from both sides have been interrogating their intersection. Both, after all, share a common pursuit: understanding the workings of the mind. This weekend conference takes up one side of that conversation: what can our current understanding of the structure and operations of the brain teach us about working as psychotherapists and psychoanalysts? A faculty of clinicians and neuroscientists will address this question.

The study of neuropsychology has helped us, on the one hand, to appreciate the indelible effects of experience on the brain, particularly notable in the fields of attachment and trauma, and this has shaped our clinical technique. But it is also true that neuroscience has revealed that the brain is a more plastic and adaptive organ than we had realized, capable of rewiring new connections throughout the life-span, and this also has shaped our practice. Our new understandings of attention, the seeking system, the various forms of memory, the successes and failures of retrieval, the operation of motor neurons, and the neurobiology of affect all inform our work. Well be seeing how much progress weve made in this brokered courtship in 2011.

Coordinators: Elizabeth Hersh, M.D., Karyne Messina, Ph.D., and Marjorie Swett, MSW.

Guest Faculty:

• Frances Champagne, Ph.D. Dr. Champagne is studying how genetic and environmental factors interact to regulate maternal behavior, and how natural variations in this behavior can shape the behavioral development of offspring through epigenetic changes in gene expression in a brain-region-specific manner. Dept. of Psychology, Columbia University.
• Regina Pally, M.D. Dr. Pally writes and teaches about the interface between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Author of The Mind-Brain Relationship; The Neurobiology of Borderline Personality Disorder: The Synergy of Nature and Nurture; A Neuroscience Perspective on Forms of Intersubjectivity in Infant Research and Adult Treatment; and The Predicting Brain: Unconscious Repetition, Conscious Reflection, and Therapeutic Change. New Center for Psychoanalysis (Los Angeles).
• Stephen J. Suomi, Ph.D. Author or Co-Author of over 400 articles related to his research on social factors that influence the psychological development of nonhuman primates, including Attachment in Rhesus Monkeys; Chief of the Laboratory of Comparative Ethology at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Additional faculty will be announced at a later date.

April 29 - May 1, 2011

Time and Money in the Therapeutic Setting

Time and money are two framing elements of the clinical encounter, and both are taken a bit for granted in our professional dialogues. Money and expertise are the quid pro quo of the therapeutic relationship: we clinicians offer our skilled efforts and our time, and the patient pays us for our services. That's the fundamental contract. Questions arise. What does it mean to us, and to our patients, when we negotiate a fee arrangement? What does it mean to maintain therapeutic neutrality when our self-interest is at stake? Do we hold onto patients longer than necessary out of a financial motive? How does our ego ideal of helping to allay our patients suffering clash with our own fiscal needs? Where does self-interest end and greed (or masochism) begin? After all, the fee is the one place where our interests and our patients interests are fundamentally at odds.

"Our time is up for today." This commonplace ending captures both limitation (our time is up) and cyclic continuity (for today). We struggle with our patients, and with ourselves, to bear the pain of times arrow, to try to sustain the depressive position, all the while resisting the pull of our omnipotent longings, and of the timeless unconscious. How do we negotiate the paradox that we must keep a close eye on the clock and the calendar, in every sense, while we aim to sink into the unbounded and limitless primary process world of depth analysis? Through clinical examples, as well as theoretical dialogue, we will examine how character traits and attitudes (conscious as well as unconscious) on both sides of the therapeutic dyad come to bear on our dealings with time and money.

Coordinator: Sylvia Flescher, M.D.

Guest Faculty:

• Muriel Dimen, Ph.D. Author of Sexuality, Intimacy, Power, Surviving Sexual Contradictions and The Anthropological Imagination. Her co-edited books are Gender in Psychoanalytic Space: Between Clinic and Culture with Virginia Goldner and Storms in Her Head: Freud and the Construction of Hysteria with Adrienne Harris. NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.
• Irwin Hirsch, Ph.D. Author of Coasting in the Countertransference: Conflicts of Self-Interest between Analyst and Patient. William Alanson White Institute and the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.
• Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Ph.D. Author of The Family Interpreted: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Family Therapy and Schopenhauers Porcupines. Founder and director of IFA (Insight For All), a group that connects formerly homeless adults with psychoanalysts willing to work pro bono. Clinical faculty, Dept. of Psychiatry, U. of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
• Robert Winer, M.D. Host of film series, Bending Times Arrow, American Psychoanalytic Assoc. Author of Close Encounters: A Relational View of the Therapeutic Process. Co-chair of New Directions. Washington Psychoanalytic Institute.

Additional guest faculty will be announced at a later date.

November 4-6, 2011

The Bereft Therapist, The Grieving Writer

Writers and analysts share in common the task of interpreting and mediating experience through language. The work of psychotherapy is to understand, contain and help patients, often as they are going through difficult experiences of pain and loss. This is mirrored in the writers work as well, where the writing serves to deepen the reader's appreciation of complex aspects of human experience. This weekend will examine the impact on the analyst and the writer of personal, unexpected loss - whether within or outside of the consulting room. We will explore how therapists and writers process and work through the impact of unanticipated loss, with consideration of how it affects the work we do and, conversely, how our work may help us navigate through these experiences.

Coordinators: Anne Adelman, Ph.D. and Kerry Malawista, Ph.D.

Guest Faculty:

• Salman Akhtar is a professor of psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and Scholar-in-Residence at the Inter-Act Theater Company in Philadelphia. He is the recipient of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association's "Best Paper of the Year" Award. Dr. Akhtar's extensive writing includes Immigration and Identity, the inspiration for the play Parinday (Birds), recently broadcast on the BBC. He has published six volumes of poetry in English and Urdu.
• Jody Bolz is a poet and the author of A Lesson in Narrative Time (2004). Her work has appeared in such publications as The American Scholar, Indiana Review, JAMA, Ploughshares, and The Womens Review of Books and in many anthologies. She is an editor of Poet Lore, America's oldest poetry journal.
• Sandra Buechler is the author of Clinical Values: Emotions that Guide Psychoanalytic Treatment and Making a Difference in Patients Lives: Emotional Experience in the Therapeutic Setting. William Alanson White Institute; Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy.
• Ann Hood is the author most recently of Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time (1999), An Ornithologist's Guide to Life (2004), and The Knitting Circle (2007), an attempt to deal with her own grief at the death of her daughter Grace from a virulent form of streptococcus. She is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the Best American Spiritual Writing Award, and the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction.

February 2012

The Voice of the Analysand

When analysts prepare case studies of patients for professional publication, they necessarily depend upon ventriloquial representations of the Otherthe analysand in order to produce their disciplinary texts. Patients become "characters" in a written text. With the advent of powerfully persuasive contemporary critical theories of narrative, and with the increasing presence of relational ideas in clinical analysis, this largely unexamined practice of the analyst-as-writer is a natural site of inquiry for those interested in the connections between writing and psychoanalysis. During this conference, we will ponder the role of representation and performance from the perspective of the analysand. How are analysands "heard"? What are analysts concerns and patients' fears when analysands are disguised or masked in order to enter the clinical literature? What is the difference for the analysand between being a "patient" and being a character in a text? Is the voice of one different from the other? What is required for different types of analysands to "feel heard"? How do analysts feel about their patients' writing about them? What are some of the differences between the analysands voice-on-the-couch and the analysands own voice-on-the-page? In order to consider these questions, this conference will gather poets and novelists who have written about their experience of analysis, as well as analysts who are particularly interested in the issues of textual representation of patients in the clinical literature.

Coordinator: Kate Daniels, M.F.A., M.A.

The guest faculty will be announced at a later date.

Spring 2012

Inspiration in our Writing: Who Are Our Heroes?

This conference will examine the personal heroes that provide inspiration for our writing. Analysts and writers will tell their own personal stories of the people who influenced their work. They will describe in detail the ideas of their valued thinkers, writers and teachers, and reflect on what it was about their own dispositions that drew them to these men and women. They will then reflect on how their own work has changed in response to these influences. The goal of the conference is to explore the role of identification, idealization, conflict and defense in our professional development as writers and analysts. Coordinator: Angela Martin, MSN, CS-P

The guest faculty will be announced at a later date.

October 12-14, 2012

Queering the Couch

Psychoanalysis' history of pathologizing non-normative expressions and experiences of gender, sexuality, and sexual orientation is well known. However, in its current view, psychoanalytic theorists and clinicians have been shoring up the gap between psychoanalysis and the critical insights about gender and sexual diversity that are coming from philosophy and gender studies. Often labeled queer theory, the writings of Ken Corbett, Eve Sedgwick, and Judith Butler, among many others, are indicative of this paradigm shift, which is changing the psychoanalytic landscape. In our view, the very essence of psychoanalytic thinking - its cherishing the diversity of lives and desires, as opposed, for example, to DSM-IV classifications - makes for a strong fit between queer theory and contemporary psychoanalytic practice.

This weekend, we will consider gender and sexual diversity from a queer perspective. We will explore the ways that queer theory offers two useful streams of thought for our lives as analysts/therapists and as writers. Queer theory offers new and important ways of thinking about gender and sexuality for each of us, regardless of orientations or object choices. And it offers new ways of thinking about these issues for those who are relegated to positions of non-normative gender or sexuality. Join us as we explore the fundamental queerness of the analytic couch.

Coordinators: Gail Boldt, Ph.D. and Don Chiappinelli, MSW.

Guest Faculty:

• Ken Corbett, Ph.D. Author of Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities. Assistant Professor, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.

Additional guest faculty will be announced at a later date.

February 8-10, 2013

The Mind of the Child in the Adult

Freud first made the case for elements of the mind of a child influencing the life of an adult with publication of the case of the Wolfman where an infantile neurosis held partial sway over the adult who never really outgrew it. These days we all accept the influence of infancy and childhood on the formation of the adult mind, but is an "influence on formation" all that's left over from those early years? What about the persistence of psychic equivalence and pretend modes of thinking highlighted by the work of Fonagy, Target, and colleagues in their work with borderline personality disorder? What about the patterns of attachment established between 12-18 months of life that are still visible in adulthood in several longitudinal studies? What about the old concept of regression in the service of the ego? What is regression, really, in a person who is not psychotic? What is a "child personality" in an adult with dissociative identity disorder?

Coordinator: Richard Chefetz, M.D.

Guest Faculty:

• Mary Sue Moore, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and educator in Colorado. She has taught and participated in a variety of clinical research projects in the U.S., U.K., and Australia over the past 25 years. Her research has focused on attachment theory and the impact of trauma on the developing brain. In 1999, she helped found Boulder Institute for Psychotherapy Research, where she is pursuing long-standing educational, research and clinical training interests. She is also completing a book for the Analytic Press, Reflections of Self, on the impact of trauma in childrens drawings.
• Mary Target, Ph.D., a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist, Professor of Psychoanalysis at UCL, and Director of the MSc in Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies. She is Professional Director of the Anna Freud Centre, London, where she is also Academic and Research Organiser of the Doctorate in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, and holds an associate clinical professorship at Yale University (New Haven, CT). She is Joint Series Editor of the Karnac Series in Psychoanalysis, and of the Yale Series on Developmental Science and Psychoanalysis.

Additional guest faculty will be announced at a later date.

DR. TARGET WILL ALSO CONDUCT AN OPTIONAL FULL DAY WORKSHOP ON THE THURSDAY BEFORE THE WEEKEND.

Spring 2013

HOME

Donald Winnicott reminds us that home is Where We Start From and Thomas Wolfe warns us that We Can't Go Home Again. Home - whether a physical reality set in place and time, or an image experienced in our internal world - is populated by persons, experiences and memories, real and imagined, that may lead us towards transformation - or not. In this weekend, we will use the widest and most personal definitions for HOME to explore from within, from without, and from in-between. According to Jacques Lacan, we are touched and spoken about long before we are fed by our mothers and others, and, as we know, the world - the HOME - we come into is beyond our making. We may enter a world at war or at peace and into a particular place, caste, or class that informs what we do and say and think as well as what we pass along to our children.

This weekend will explore the multifold meanings of home for both the analytic session and the writer's space and this weekend's discussions will explore interpretations and variations on this theme.

Coordinators: Sharon Alperovitz, M.S.W. and Evelyn Schreiber, Ph.D.

Guest Faculty:

• Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Ph.D. is on the Clinical Faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. She is the author of three books: Child Custody, The Family Interpreted: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Family Therapy, and Schopenhauer's Porcupines: Intimacy and its Dilemmas. She founded IFA - Insight for All - which connects psychoanalysts in the community in pro bono work with formerly homeless adults at Project H.O.M.E.
• Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of English at The George Washington University in Washington, D. C. She is a co-chair of the New Directions Program. Her book Subversive Voices: Erotizing the Other in William Faulkner and Toni Morrison examines subjectivity and race via the theory of Jacques Lacan and Cultural Studies. It received the Toni Morrison Society Book Prize for best book on Morrison in 2000-2003 and it was nominated for the MLA prize for best book in 2003. Her current manuscript, forthcoming this fall, is Race, Trauma and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison. It is an interdisciplinary study of trauma in Morrisons fiction.

Additional guest faculty will be announced at a later date.