Scientific Conferences
Multiple topics, perspectives, and organizations.
About
We host conferences each year for WBCP members and interested clinicians, with CME/CE credits available. We also collaborate with other organizations to co-sponsor events.
Events are scheduled throughout the year, focusing on: Cultural Competency, hosted by COWAP to increase a clinician’s competency within various cultural topics; A variety of issues within the LGBTQ communities are presented at the LGBTQ Conference; Ethics Conferences discuss various issues around ethics from a psychoanalytic viewpoint; Restricted to members of WBCP, Colloquium presents original papers by members of the WBCP community; The Raphling Conference presents various topics within psychoanalytic technique; Community Psychoanalysis Colloquium considers topics related to community psychoanalysis.
Continuing Education Units are not issued for partial attendance of one day programs
Contact
For more information about the Scientific Conferences please contact Archana Varma Caballeo, MD at archana@archanavarmamd.com.
Upcoming
February
Saturday, February 1, 2025 | 9:00 am – 11:30 am
The Thomas and Julia Saltz Annual Adult Seminar Workshop featuring Dr. Anton Hart
The Thomas and Julia Saltz
Annual Adult Seminar Workshop
Time: 9:00 am – 11: 30 am
Live Presentation
Where: University Club of Washington DC
1135 16th Street NW, Washington, DC 20036
This event qualifies for required DEI credits for WBCP Faculty
2.5 CME/CE
Registration Link: HERE
Program Flyer: HERE
Registration Deadline: January 29, 2025
Seating is limited. We recommend registering early to guarantee your spot.
Presentation:
Racial and other diversities-related enactments in psychoanalytic and other organizations that convene, and train, psychotherapists can be observed to occur regularly, exposing schisms that are carried and caused by personal, relational, and social-structural elements. Our collective good intentions and “diversity trainings” fail to avert this. This experiential presentation proposes a framework for being in dialogue about differences when such dialogue becomes difficult, and impasse seems inevitable.
Alertness to emergent enactment, and receptivity to the possibility of our unwitting, unconscious participation in such enactment—called “radical openness” by the presenter—is seen as key to finding our way out of oblivious, polarized, and entrenched, positions.
A framework is offered for understanding the challenges and promises of addressing enactments involving race, class, culture, sex, gender, and other forms of divisive difference. This will involve placing attention to security and self-esteem concerns (of self and other), and a corresponding need for openness to discovery of unconscious implication, at its center. We will use compelling, hypothetical vignettes derived from psychoanalytic institute life to explore the idea that setting out to lose what we already know could be a useful strategy for being in and tolerating the anxieties of “impossible” conversations.
Tuesday, February 4, 2025 | 8:00 am – Sunday, February 9, 2025 | 5:00 pm
2025 APsA National Meeting
2025 National Meeting, February 4 – 9, 2025
Palace Hotel, San Francisco
Visit https://apsa.org/meetings-events/ for more information.
Saturday, February 22, 2025 | 11:00 am – 12:30 pm
COWAP: “Women, The Longest Revolution”: Session 5: Material Body
Session 5: The Female Body: Passion and Peril
Participants: Rosemary H. Balsam, MD, Rachel Boué-Widawsky, PhD, Jeri Isaacson, PhD, Chair
Date: February 22, 2025
Time: 11:00 am – 12:30 pm ET
Registration Link: https://wbcp.memberclicks.net/registration_cowap_women_revolution_2024-2025
Click Here to View the Program Flyer
Registration Deadline: February 19, 2025
Description: Why do we pay so little attention to the role that the female natal body plays in the development of the psyche? This contrasts with how the birthing body holds psychic meaning that resonates throughout society. A graphic example is the fight for legal control over the female body in recent conflicts about abortion. Yet the procreative body remains relatively unexplored in psychoanalytic literature. In this discussion, Drs. Rosemary Balsam and Rachel Boué-Widawsky will consider ways of thinking psychoanalytically about the female body. Dr. Balsam will talk about the meaning of this absence in our field, and its impact for our understanding of psychological development. Dr. Boue-Widawsky will elaborate on this topic by discussing Julia Kristeva’s ideas about the maternal body as an object that is often experienced unconsciously – and consciously – with horror. What might we add to our understanding of internal, interpersonal, and sociocultural dynamics if we were to more fully incorporate these ideas into the larger body of psychoanalytic thought? We will consider societal dynamics that reflect internal psychic experience, particularly in light of the burgeoning misogyny we face today.
March
Saturday, March 8, 2025 | 11:00 am – 12:30 pm
COWAP: “Women, The Longest Revolution”: Session 6: Women and Literature
“Women’s Lives in Transition: Novelists Amy Bloom and Lisa Gornick in Conversation”
Date: March 8, 2025
Time: 11:00 am – 12:30 pm ET
Registration Link: https://wbcp.memberclicks.net/registration_cowap_women_revolution_2024-2025
Click Here to View the Program Flyer
Registration Deadline: March 5, 2025
Description: The presentation “Women’s Lives in Transition: Novelists Amy Bloom and Lisa Gornick In Conversation” provides a unique opportunity for participants to gain insights from two authors who are also psychotherapists. Their conversation offers dynamically rich and complex perspectives on women’s lives across various developmental stages, encompassing themes such as family dynamics, love, work, and mental health. By exploring the intersection of literature and psychology through the lens of these authors’ works, participants can deepen their understanding of women’s experiences over time and across the developmental spectrum, including birth and death, love and loss, work and home, and the complexity of women’s mental health concerns.
Anne Adelman, PhD, will facilitate a conversation between authors/psychotherapists Amy Bloom (In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss, 2022; I’m Right Here, forthcoming Summer 2025) and Lisa Gornick (Ana Turns, 2023). As therapists and authors, they each have unique, dynamically rich and complex perspectives on women’s lives across the developmental spectrum, navigating the pulls of family, love, work, body and mind.
April
Saturday, April 12, 2025 | 11:00 am – 12:30 pm
COWAP: “Women, The Longest Revolution”: Session 7: Juliet Mitchell
Session 7: Conversation with Juliet Mitchell
Juliet Mitchell, Margarita Cereijido, and Jill Gentile
Date: April 12, 2025
Time: 11:00 am – 12:30 pm ET
Registration Link: https://wbcp.memberclicks.net/registration_cowap_women_revolution_2024-2025
Click Here to View the Program Flyer
Registration Deadline: April 9, 2025
Description: Juliet Mitchell will reflect on her iconic book, “Women “Women: The longest revolution,” considering the ongoing changes in different feminine scenarios in conversation with Margarita Cereijido and Jill Gentile. Notions of woman and the feminine have changed dramatically over the last decades and this is reflected in how women perceive themselves, how they are perceived by society, and how they are understood from a psychoanalytic perspective. Inspired by the title of her book, Juliet Mitchell will reflect on the impact of feminism, and the ongoing changes in different feminine scenarios. The audience will reflect with the presenters about how our thinking has changed.