PSP celebrates its 50th anniversary beginning this Fall 2021 and through Spring Semester 2022. To commemorate this milestone, PSP has planned a series of free virtual events that focuses attention not only on our psychoanalytic past but on the critical challenges and opportunities facing institutes of psychoanalysis and our profession moving forward. The series schedule is as follows:
PSP 50th Anniversary Lecture Series Theme:
Modern Psychoanalysis: Adaptations & Advances
Events throughout 2021-2022 academic year:
September 7, 2021- 7:30-9:30pm
Repositioning Therapies of Depth, Insight and Relationship
Presenters: PsiAN Leaders Nancy Burke, PhD; Linda Michaels, PsyD, MBA; and Janice Muhr, PhD
In this presentation, the three co-chairs of Psychotherapy Action Network will discuss the place of therapies of depth, insight, and relationship in the contemporary social and professional world and present a model of activism intended to preserve our profession and to promote its value in both personal and social healing.
October 13, 2021- 7:00-9:00pm
“Let’s Never Ask Him What to Do”: The Life and Work of Clare WInnicott
Presenter: Joel Kanter, MSW, LCSW
This presentation will focus on the life and work of Clare Britton Winnicott, a social worker who became the second wife of Donald Winnicott. Their relationship began during the Second World War when they collaborated on helping evacuated children with special needs. After the war, Clare became a leader in Britain’s child welfare system, completed analytic training at the British Institute and established a private psychoanalytic practice. Although overshadowed by her husband’s accomplishments, there is ample evidence that many of Donald’s lasting contributions emerged from their collaboration. In this presentation, we will explore how Clare’s ideas and experiences enhance our appreciation of Donald’s work as well as our clinical practice with children and adults.
November 17, 2021- 7:00-9:00pm
Spanning Domains: Applied Psychoanalysis for Varied Professions
Presenter: Wally Fletcher, D Min, NCPsyA
From early on followers of Psychoanalysis and Freud himself recognized that Psychoanalysis could have potent applications in a wide range of helping professions. This webinar will focus on ways helping professionals from diverse fields can expand and enrich their practices by applying ten key psychoanalytic principles and practices. Dr. Fletcher will describe these key applications, their wide-ranging utility and the rich opportunities they offer to helping professionals for diversifying and deepening their work. By way of example, he will share how he employs psychoanalysis in his organizational development, consulting and leadership practices as well as his role as an educator.
January 13, 2022- 7:00-9:00pm
Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: A Marriage Destined to Last
Presenter: William J. Lorman, PhD, MSN, PMHNP-BC, NCPsyA, FAAN
Freud’s initial attempt of linking psyche and brain in 1893 has been the foundation and growing development between neuroscience and psychanalysis. The future of psychanalysis as an evolving, progressively more empirically based discipline and set of therapeutic approaches should develop not in opposition to, but synergistically with, brain science to provide a deeper understanding of the functioning of the human mind. This presentation will provide an overview of how psychoanalysis and neuroscience complement each other by identifying brain structures which seem to demonstrate the mechanisms of psychoanalysis.
February 25, 2022- 1:00-3:30pm
The Future of Psychoanalytic Supervision
Presenter: Nancy McWilliams, PhD, ABPP
Psychoanalytic supervision has evolved organically from over a century of complex and diverse clinical experiences. It cannot easily be formulated in terms of the specific, measurable competences or progressive skill sets that are currently being emphasized by professional groups such as the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association. This talk will highlight the critical importance of maintaining a traditional analytic focus on the supervisee’s overall professional and personal growth, marked by increasing emotional honesty and the capacity to balance internal freedom with clinical discipline. It will note some contemporary obstacles to a psychoanalytic supervisory sensibility and offer some ideas about how to ensure adequate supervisory support for future generations of psychodynamic practitioners.
April 8, 2022- Time?
Use of Self and Care of Self: New Directions For Working With Countertransference
Presenter: Ellen Wright, PhD, NCPsyA
One of the major contributions of Modern Analysis is the recognition that the therapist’s ability to experience and utilize negative feelings is critical to the healing process. Reflecting on the years since PSP’s founding, Modern Analysts still struggle to understand how to use the person of the analyst for therapeutic benefit while sustaining the emotional vitality and energy necessary to fuel this intimate process. One of the tasks of individual and group analysts is to identify and repair the many painful and traumatic experiences that continue to determine the course of our patients lives. To accomplish this, we have to be willing to experience the “bad-analyst-feeling” and the shaming and self-recriminating introjects it enlivens. Building on the work of Lawrence Epstein, this talk will discuss how the process of working with countertransference involves not only an “experiencing self” and an “observing self” but also must involve “the self-valuing self.” This significant addition is what enables therapists to tolerate and then utilize the demanding feelings induced during the therapeutic process.