This weekend conference will be held online using the Zoom platform. HOW DID IT GET THERE? WHAT’S TO BE DONE? November 3-6, 2022 This weekend will explore the notion of mentalization, the developmentally-achieved capacity to recognize that what is in our minds is a product of our experience and to know that others have minds […]
This weekend conference will be held online using the Zoom platform. February 2-5, 2023 “…that strange being, the Creative Writer.” -S. Freud in Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming (1908) The enormous creativity of the unconscious mind is the raw material of both poetry and psychoanalysis. Ever since Freud began to publish his startling new ideas about the existence […]
May 5-7, 2023 Before women had access to capital in the public sphere, powerful sibling bonds and deep female friendships were captured in the literary imagination. Now, on the streets and in blog communities, feminist collectives of all genders inspire resistance projects that are reshaping the meaning of sisterhood. This conference will consider the representation […]
November 3 – 5, 2023 There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died. (Rose, 2021, p. 4) The majority of Covid deaths have occurred in the isolation of the hospital room, not in a home. We– none of us — are allowed to touch the dying for […]
February 2-4, 2024 Many, curious about their ancestry, turn to 23 and Me searching for answers to the complicated question, “Who am I?” Yet, what happens when a mere globule of saliva, the extraction of DNA strands from cells, brings into question a person’s basic identity? How do we, as therapists and writers, begin to consider the […]
May 3, 2024 Freud understood the power of stories, captivating the world with his case histories of Dora, Little Hans, the Rat Man and the Wolf Man. Stories fire the imagination. Yet over the years, psychoanalytic writing grew obscure, bogged down in complicated jargon and theory. Writers utilize psychoanalytic ideas not only to fully develop […]
Weekend Conference November 1 @ 8:00 am - November 3 @ 5:00 pm The history of psychoanalysis demonstrates a profound mixture of struggles with race and racism. Founded in the hotbed of late Victorian racism and antisemitism, Freud made the then-radical argument that blood and genetics do not determine intellectual, moral, or emotional character. At the same […]
Weekend Conference This weekend will explore the obstacles that stand in our way when we try to talk together about difficult topics. When strong pent-up emotions rise to the surface, whether anger, fear, grief, anxiety or rage, we easily get overheated, defensive or shut down. We turn away, defeated, shamed or vengeful. At this moment […]
Weekend Conference Maternity — from pregnancy, to childbirth, to parenting a newborn introduces psychic dislocation and strain in the mother and upheaval in the couple. Idealizations of pregnancy and early […]
Weekend Conference We are living in a time of great dying. Climate change is drying up our water and destroying vulnerable species; a pandemic is claiming the lives of over […]
Weekend Conference What happens in the therapeutic dyad when regular reciprocal conversations are not possible, when our patients communicate with us in strange and at times incomprehensible ways? How we […]
