Location: 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011

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COSTS for Clinical, Study Groups, and Scientific Programs:

NPAP members and students – No Cost; 90-minutes courses are $30 for non-members; 2-hour course are $40 for non-members.

Refunds for Clinical, Study Groups, and Scientific Programs – Professionals who are unable to attend a program for which they have registered may obtain a partial refund if they notify the Registrar in writing, no later than one week before the program. An administrative charge of $10 will be incurred.
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The National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, is recognized by the New York State Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers. #SW-0139.
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National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychoanalysts. #P-0010.
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2023

• The Transitional Father-Therapist Relationship: The Pre-Oedipal Father’s Role on His Daughter’s Early Stages of Development and Personality Integration

Presenters: Hanna Turken, LCSW and Michael De Simone, PhD, LCSW
Moderator: Alice Entin, LCSW
Chair: Alice Entin, LCSW, Continuing Education Program Committee
Live Online: Lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011
Date: Sunday, April 23, 2023, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT
CE: 2 Contact Hours
Cost: NPAP Members: $25; Other Professionals: $40; Other Candidates/Students: $15

Hanna Turken will begin the presentation by re-examining the pivotal role of the transitional father during his daughter’s early phases of development. Issues related to the importance of the attachment for the child to the pre-oedipal father in her striving towards separation and individuation, first from mother and then from father, will be discussed. Through the therapeutic process, patients will arrive at a more realistic assessment of themselves and others, a consolidation of ego ideal and superego introjects. The place of the transference to the father-therapist as a factor in treatment and as a pathway to personality integration for the patient will be illustrated with a case by Michael De Simone.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Identify key dynamics related to the importance of the preoedipal child’s relationship to her father.
– Discuss how a preoedipal transference experience with the transitional father-therapist can foster personality development and integration at a later stage of life.
– Describe the role of the preoedipal father in the child’s attachment and separation process of development.

• The Edith Laufer Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center

Facilitator: Ann Rose Simon
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, April 7, 2023, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. During the academic year 2022-23, we will be reading selected chapters of the book Affect Regulation Theory: A Clinical Model by Daniel Hill (2015) W.W. Norton & Company, New York. This book is a readable, clinically-based compilation of contemporary research and theory related to affect regulation – how humans regulate their emotions. As a central element of optimal human development and functioning, affect regulation is a central focus of psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy. While this book draws heavily on the theories of Allan Schore, it integrates attachment theory, affective neurobiology, cognitive neurobiology, mother-infant studies, and developmental psychoanalysis.

The following section of this book will be discussed:

Chapter 7: “Modern Attachment Theory: The Development of the Primary Affect- Regulating System”, pp. 112-131

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe the development of the human capacity to regulate the Sympathetic Nervous System
– Describe the development of the human capacity to regulate the Parasympathetic Nervous System.
– Explicate the neurobiology of Secure Attachment.

• On The Deep Woman and the Modeled Woman: Two Versions of The Feminine Uncanny in Hitchcock’s, Vertigo

Presenter: Gavriel Reisner, PhD,
Moderator: Alice Entin, LCSW
Live Online via Zoom: Lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Sunday, March 19, 2023, 5:00PM – 7:00PM
Total = 2 CE Contact hours

In his nuanced discussion of “The Uncanny” Freud’s strongest example of Das Unheimliche is the secret body of woman, man’s estranged home. That desired/feared source and goal goes back to Oedipal longing. Love-relationships are, therefore, often based on two derivatives of Oedipal longing: The Deep Woman (return to original connection) and The Modeled Woman (return to original passion). Alfred Hitchcock, always Freudian, illustrates these two kinds of love-objects through Midge (as Deep Woman) and Madeline (as Modeled Woman) in his much-admired masterpiece, Vertigo. 

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Identify the female gaze as having a vitalizing or castrating effect on men who are far more vulnerable than feminist theory, with its emphasis on the objectifying “male gaze,” acknowledges.
– Discuss how the whorl in the bun in Carlotta Valdez’s seductive hair style represents the hidden female body, the whirling circle at the center of the film’s cinematic image-making.
– Describe how to untangle the intricate web of truth and fiction that weaves together in the film’s complicated narrative presentation.

• Theodor Reik Guest Lecture (E803-I): History and Science of Psychedelic Research and Implications of Psychedelic Psychotherapies

Guest Lecturer: Anthony P. Bossis, PhD
Sponsored by: The Members-in-Training Organization, The Training Institute of NPAP, Continuing Education Program Committee
In-Person (limited capacity) and Live Online (zoom)
Date: Saturdays, March 18 & 25, 2023, 12:30 – 5pm (each day)
Total 9 CE Contact Hours
Fees: NPAP Members & Candidates (register as usual for coursework): $225; non-members: $285; student guest rate: $125 (Email [email protected] to confirm)
Contributions: Encouraged

Separating the science from hype: What does the research evidence show? This two-day course will review the history and scientific findings of psychedelic research, current FDA-approved clinical trials, and the therapeutic implications of psychedelic psychotherapies’ utility in mental health. Additional topics include the implications of psychedelics for studying meaning-making, spirituality, and consciousness research. The course will primarily focus on classic psychedelics, a class of serotonergic compounds that includes psilocybin and LSD and will also review research with other compounds. A detailed review of the history and research with psychedelics for end-of-life existential and psycho-spiritual distress will be presented, along with an overview of psychedelic research in other clinical disorders.

Note: This course does not provide instruction on how to use psychedelics, provide instruction or training on how to be a psychedelic therapist, or will discuss the use of psychedelics outside of academic clinical research and the history of psychedelics. Most psychedelic drugs are federally identified as Schedule 1 and will be referenced only regarding FDA clinical trials.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Identify the primary psychedelic (hallucinogens) used in psychedelic clinical research.
– Demonstrate general knowledge of the scientific findings from psilocybin cancer-anxiety research and other contemporary research findings.
– Identify common features of existential and psychological distress observed in cancer and end-of-life patients.
– Describe and identify the primary components of the psychedelic psychotherapy treatment model including an understanding of set and setting.
– Describe the features of a psychedelic-generated mystical experience (shown to be correlated with enhanced outcomes in some psychedelic therapies).

• The Edith Laufer Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center

Facilitator: Ann Rose Simon
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, March 3, 2023, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. During the academic year 2022-23, we will be reading selected chapters of the book Affect Regulation Theory: A Clinical Model by Daniel Hill (2015) W.W. Norton & Company, New York. This book is a readable, clinically-based compilation of contemporary research and theory related to affect regulation – how humans regulate their emotions. As a central element of optimal human development and functioning, affect regulation is a central focus of psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy. While this book draws heavily on the theories of Allan Schore, it integrates attachment theory, affective neurobiology, cognitive neurobiology, mother-infant studies, and developmental psychoanalysis.

The following section of this book will be discussed:

Chapter 6: Mentalization: The Secondary Affect-Regulating System”, pp. 98-111

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe the work of Bowlby and his concept of “The Internal Working Model.”
– Define what is meant by “the assimilative function” and how that is adaptive.
– Explain what Mary Main’s Adult Attachment Interview is and how it measures “metacognition.”

• This Is Me, Is That You? My Work With Schizophrenic Patients

Presenter: Steven Poser, PhD
Moderator: Claire Steinberger, LP
Live Online via Zoom: Lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Sunday, February 19, 2023, 5:00PM – 7:00PM
Total = 2 CE Contact hours

As part of the presenter’s training to become a psychoanalyst, nearly 30 years ago, he secured a clinical internship at one of the grand old 19th century mental hospitals in upstate New York, now, sadly, gone, as are most of these old-fashioned, idealistic “insane asylums.” He was given the key to a locked ward of 40 chronically psychotic women and proceeded to sit with them for one day a week over the course of two years, 1994-1996. He never set out to “cure” them of their madness, but rather to become a meaningful presence in their lives that might have some therapeutic impact. This presentation will offer a personal introduction to that experience and the theoretical orientation that supported his approach to these patients.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe the hallmarks of chronic schizophrenia.
– Explain the psychoanalytically informed approach to the psychotherapy of schizophrenic patients.

• The Edith Laufer Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center

Facilitator: Robert Wolf, DPsa
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, February 3, 2023, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. During the academic year 2022-23, we will be reading selected chapters of the book Affect Regulation Theory: A Clinical Model by Daniel Hill (2015) W.W. Norton & Company, New York. This book is a readable, clinically-based compilation of contemporary research and theory related to affect regulation – how humans regulate their emotions. As a central element of optimal human development and functioning, affect regulation is a central focus of psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy. While this book draws heavily on the theories of Allan Schore, it integrates attachment theory, affective neurobiology, cognitive neurobiology, mother-infant studies, and developmental psychoanalysis.

The following section of this book will be discussed:

Chapter 5: “The Classical Attachment Theory,” pp. 85-97

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe the work of Bowlby and his concept of “The Internal Working Model.”
– Define what is meant by “the assimilative function” and how that is adaptive.
– Explain what Mary Main’s Adult Attachment Interview is and how it measures “metacognition.”

• The Edith Laufer Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center

Facilitator: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, January 6, 2023, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. During the academic year 2022-23, we will be reading selected chapters of the book Affect Regulation Theory: A Clinical Model by Daniel Hill (2015) W.W. Norton & Company, New York. This book is a readable, clinically-based compilation of contemporary research and theory related to affect regulation – how humans regulate their emotions. As a central element of optimal human development and functioning, affect regulation is a central focus of psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy. While this book draws heavily on the theories of Allan Schore, it integrates attachment theory, affective neurobiology, cognitive neurobiology, mother-infant studies, and developmental psychoanalysis.

The following section of this book will be discussed:

Chapter 4: “The Right Brain, Implicit Processes, and the Implicit Self” pp. 68-82

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Differentiate the primary characteristics of right brain processing and left-brain processing.
– Explicate the “adaptive advantage” of right brain/left brain integration and flexibility.
– Explain the difference between Implicit and Explicit Memory.

2022

• Issues Around the Frame: A Dilemma for Psychoanalysis

Presenter: Charlotte Schwartz, LCSW
Moderator: Alice Entin, LCSW
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Sunday, December 11 , 2022, 5:00PM – 6:30 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

In Part 1, the author examined theoretical and clinical perspectives about frequency of sessions, 3-5 times a week, for an effective change in psychic structure. She discussed Freud and Post-Modern theories on transference and resistance as a basis for evaluating the working through process in relation to the role of frequency of sessions. In Part 2, we will look at frequency of sessions as well as other issues around the frame. Vignettes will be discussed.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Discuss the re-examination of our thinking about issues around the frame and their role in psychic change.
– Describe how we calibrate psychic change as it pertains to many issues around the frame.

• The Edith Laufer Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center

Facilitator: Joel Gold, PhD
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, December 2 , 2022, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. During the academic year 2022-22, we will be reading selected chapters of the book Affect Regulation Theory: A Clinical Model by Daniel Hill (2015) W.W. Norton & Company, New York. This book is a readable, clinically-based compilation of contemporary research and theory related to affect regulation – how humans regulate their emotions. As a central element of optimal human development and functioning, affect regulation is a central focus of psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy. While this book draws heavily on the theories of Allan Schore, it integrates attachment theory, affective neurobiology, cognitive neurobiology, mother-infant studies, and developmental psychoanalysis.

The following section of this book will be discussed:

Chapter 3: The Neurobiology of the Primary Affect-Regulating System, pp. 49-67

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe five principles of the Complexity Theory as it relates to the Brain.
– Define the role of the various parts of the Limbic System in Affect Regulation.
– Explain how the Limbic Systems regulates the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

• Frequency of Sessions: A Dilemma for Psychoanalysis

Presenter: Charlotte Schwartz, LCSW
Moderator: Alice Entin, LCSW
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Sunday, November 13 , 2022, 5:00PM – 6:30 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The author attempts to examine from a theoretical perspective the value of frequent sessions, 3-5 times a week for an effective change in psychic structure. She discusses Freud and Post-Modern theories on transference and resistance as a basis for evaluating the working through process in relation to the role of frequency of sessions. Three vignettes will be discussed.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Discuss re-examination of our thinking about frequency of sessions and its role in psychic change.
– Discuss if an “in depth holding environment,” as postulated by Winnicott, can succeed in one time a week treatment.
– Describe how we calibrate psychic change in frequency of sessions.

• The Edith Laufer Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center

Facilitator: Robert Wolf, PhD, LP
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, November 4 , 2022, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers, by distinguished authors and researchers, that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. Readings for 2022/2023 are selected from Affect Regulation Theory: A Clinical Model by Daniel Hill (2015) W.W. Norton & Company, New York. It contains clinically-based compilation of contemporary research and theory related to affect regulation – how humans regulate their emotions. As a central element of optimal human development and functioning, affect regulation is a central focus of psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy. While this book draws heavily on the theories of Allan Schore, it integrates attachment theory, affective neurobiology, cognitive neurobiology, mother-infant studies, and developmental psychoanalysis.

The following sections of this book will be discussed:

Chapter 2: Self States, pp. 27-48
Chapter 3: The Neurobiology of the Primary Affect-Regulating System, pp. 49-67

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe the role of the orbitofrontal cortex and its role in the workings of affect regulation.
– Discuss the importance of a well-organized limbic system.
– Explain how Allan Schore’s understanding of the primary affect-regulating system illuminates the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the impact of affect on perceptions in the present, self-representations, accessible memories, attention and cognitive functioning.

• The Edith Laufer Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center

Facilitator: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, October 7 , 2022, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers, by distinguished authors and researchers, that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. Readings for 2022/2023 are selected from Affect Regulation Theory: A Clinical Model by Daniel Hill (2015) W.W. Norton & Company, New York. It contains clinically-based compilation of contemporary research and theory related to affect regulation – how humans regulate their emotions. As a central element of optimal human development and functioning, affect regulation is a central focus of psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy. While this book draws heavily on the theories of Allan Schore, it integrates attachment theory, affective neurobiology, cognitive neurobiology, mother-infant studies, and developmental psychoanalysis.

The following sections of this book will be discussed:

Foreward by Allan Shore, pp. xiiv-xxv
Introduction: Affect and Its Regulation, pp. 1-12
Chapter 1: Affect Regulation and the Attachment Relationship, pp. 15-26
Chapter 2: Self-States, pp. 27-48

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe the difference between a Primary Affect and a Categorical Affect.
– Discuss what is meant by implicit communication of affect.
– Explain what is meant by dyadic regulation of affect.

• How We Work (Differently) — One Case. Five Perspectives.

Presenter: Edgard Francisco Danielsen, PhD, LP (“Mixed model” perspective)
Discussants: Neil Herlands, LCSW (Contemporary Freudian), Stefanie Teitelbaum, LP (Contemporary Kleinian/British Object Relations), Maggie Zellner, PhD (Neuropsychoanalysis), LP, Peter Zimmermann, PhD, LP (Intersubjective/Self Psychology)
Moderator: Loveleen Posmentier, LP
Sponsored by: NPAP Continuing Education Program Committee, Alice Entin, Chair
Live online: Panel discussion
Date: Saturday, October 1, 2022, 11:00am-1:30 pm
Total: 2.5 CE Contact Hours
Fees: NPAP Members/Candidates: No charge; Other professionals: $50; Other candidates: $25

The case presentation of a long-term analysis offers us glimpses of process in which both patient and analyst are challenged to move beyond fixed and rigid positions. Perennial theoretical and clinical questions such as – what is the therapeutic value of interpretation, what is neutrality, what is the role of transference, and how does theoretical openness allow the work to deepen – are explored by four discussants from different schools of thought. From the intrapsychic to the relational to the political, we know that accepting difference is one of our greatest current challenges. Can we then acknowledge our differences while still remaining open to one another’s perspectives?

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to:
– Identify, compare, and contrast different theoretical approaches to working with analytic impasses and stalemates.
– Apply different theoretical approaches to working with analytic stalemates and impasses in their clinical work.

• Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Theoretical foundations and technical implications

Presenter: Daniel José Gaztambide Nuñez, PsyD
Moderator: Thomas S. Taylor, LCSWR, PhD, President, NPAP
Live Online: Lecture
Dates/Times: Friday, August 12, 2022, 3:30 – 5:00 PM EDT
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 1.5 CE Contact Hours
Costs: Professionals I $35; Candidates I $25

Decolonial psychoanalysis has emerged as a vibrant new movement on the role of the socio-political in the consulting room. Gaztambide will thread how Freud, Ferenczi, and Lacan – as representatives of these three traditions that make up the decolonial movement – flowed into Frantz Fanon’s clinical thinking. Fanon will emerge as a psychoanalytic practitioner whose work challenges us to reimagine psychoanalysis as an integrated, socially embedded mode of treatment. As a result, attendees will learn how to put decolonial technique into actual practice.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Articulate the empirical support for psychoanalytic theory and treatment.
– Discuss an evidence-based model for mentalizing attachment in the context of power and identity.
– Describe psychological science to inform how to broach discussions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in clinical practice.

• Working with Suicidal Patients

Presenter: Gary Ahlskog, PhD
Moderator: Thomas S. Taylor, LCSWR, PhD, President, NPAP
Live Online: Lecture/Workshop
Date/Time: August 5, 2022, 3:30-5:00 pm
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 1.5 CE Contact Hours
Costs: Professionals $35; Candidates $25

When acute stressors prompt neurotic patients to contemplate suicide, these patients are being tempted, or driven, to act by one or more of 12 types of beliefs or assumptions. Regardless of the intensity of psychic pain, which may vary, these 12 pathological beliefs are the prompters of suicidal acts. Suicidal acts can be avoided when therapists engage patients in 12 types of interventions that neutralize the 12 pathological beliefs.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe personal fears in the face of the suicidal patient’s threats to act.
– Identify methods of establishing an agreement that the locus of responsibility to stay alive rests solely with the patient.
– Discuss 12 types of interventions, according to the therapist’s own language and style, commensurate with the suicidal patient’s 12 types of pathological beliefs.

• Queen of the Dead, Part III: Exquisite Corpse

Presenters: Melissa Daum, LMFT, and Kathryn Harrison, MFA
Moderator: Thomas S. Taylor, LCSWR, PhD, President, NPAP
Live Online: Lecture/Workshop
Date/Time: Friday, July 29, 2022, 3:30-5:00 pm ET
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 1.5 CE Contact Hours
Costs: Professionals $35; Candidates $25

In her article “Loving Them to Death: The Anorexic and Her Objects,” Marilyn Lawrence (2001) wrote, “Whenever one meets a patient in the grip of anorexia nervosa, one knows that some kind of catastrophe has taken place.” Queen of the Dead, Part III will consider this catastrophe not as a singular event but as a state defined by its ongoingness. As breast cancer claims the life of her mother, Kathryn’s relapse into anorexia delivers her to an underworld of her own devising, where psychic survival trumps the life of the body. We follow the girl into her nightmare to discover the surreal, and even surrealist, dimensions of eating disorders

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe how anorexia and bulimia function to manage relational dimensions.
– Identify the role of rivalry in the family system as it relates to eating disorders.
– Discuss eating disorders through the lens of surrealism.

• The Psychology of Christian Nationalism (a.k.a. White Religious Nationalism)

Presenter: The Rev. Pamela Cooper-White, PhD
Discussant: Gary Ahlskog, PhD
Moderator: Thomas S. Taylor, LCSW-R, PhD
Live Online: Lecture/Workshop
Date/Time: Friday July 22, 2022, 3:30 – 5:00 pm
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 1.5 CE Contact Hours
Costs: Professionals $35; Candidates $25

Who are Christian nationalists and what do they believe? Why is this movement so dangerous? How do people we think of as “good people” get drawn in to the irrational beliefs held by this movement, including outright lies and conspiracy theories? What are the psychological motivations that draw people into this movement? And what are some of the ways our clinical training can help us to talk across a widening political and religious divide?

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Identify the psychological motivations for people to adopt a Christian nationalist belief system.
– Delineate a psychodynamic understanding of the group’s power to blur critical thinking in favor of collective paranoia.
– Describe clinical skills that can be utilized to “talk across the divide” with white nationalists, if and when possible.

• The Edith Laufer Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center

Presenter: The Rev. Pamela Cooper-White, PhD
Discussant: Gary Ahlskog, STM, PhD
Moderator: Thomas S. Taylor, LCSW-R, PhD
Live Online: Lecture/Workshop
Date/Time: Friday July 22, 2022, 3:30 – 5:00 pm
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 1.5 CE Contact Hours
Costs: Professionals $35; Candidates $25

Who are Christian nationalists and what do they believe? Why is this movement so dangerous? How do people we think of as “good people” get drawn in to the irrational beliefs held by this movement, including outright lies and conspiracy theories? What are the conscious and unconscious motivations (including Freud’s prescient “Group Psychology”) that draw people into this movement? And what are some of the ways our clinical training can help us to talk across a widening political and religious divide.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Identify conscious and unconscious motivations for people to adopt a Christian nationalist belief system.
– Delineate a psychodynamic understanding of the group’s power to blur critical thinking in favor of collective paranoia.
– Describe clinical skills that can be utilized to “talk across the divide” with white nationalists, if and when possible. [Is this what you had in mind?]

• The Edith Laufer Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center

Facilitator: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, June 3 , 2022, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. We will read and discuss: Panksepp, Jaak and Lucy Biven (2012) The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, WW Norton & Company, New York – “Chapter 10: Playful Dreamlike Circuits of the Brain: The Ancestral Sources of Social Joy and Laughter, pp. 351-387”. Although Freud had strong conviction that human feelings and behavior were strongly determined by mental processes and brain functions, the limitations of neuroscience at the time did not allow him to demonstrate these connections definitively. In Archeology of Mind, Jaak Panksepp identifies, using contemporary methods of neuroscientific research, seven emotional systems located in deep areas of the brain. These systems are quite similar across all mammalian species.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe the behavioral, developmental and affective components that best define play.
– Understand why, from an evolutionary perspective, a play urge exists in mammals and humans.
– Discuss how play might be related to the functions of dreaming.

• A Culturally and Structurally Humble Approach to Patient-Provider Interactions

Guest Presenter: Helen-Maria Lekas, PhD
Moderator: Kerstin (Tine) Pahl, PhD, LP
Organized by: The Racial Justice Initiative
Live Online: Workshop
Dates/Times: May 22nd, 2022, 5:00-7:00 PM ET
CE: 2 Contact hours.
Fees: Free NPAP Members/Candidates; Other Professionals: $40; Other Candidates: $20

A review of the research and practice literature highlights the limited effectiveness of cultural competence trainings. However, the value of such training remains largely unchallenged, and it is institutionally mandated as a means of decreasing health disparities and improving quality of care. A plethora of trainings are designed to expose providers to different cultures and expand their understanding of the beliefs, values, and behaviors; thus, achieving competence. Although this intention is commendable, training providers in becoming competent in various cultures presents the risk of stereotyping, stigmatizing, and othering patients and can foster implicit racist attitudes and behaviors. Further, by disregarding intersectionality and its structural foundation, cultural competence trainings tend to undermine providers’ recognition that patients inhabit multiple social statuses that potentially shape their beliefs, values, and behavior. To address these risks, we propose training providers in cultural and structural humility (CSH), that is, an orientation to care that is based on self-reflexivity, appreciation of patients’ lay expertise, openness to sharing power with patients, and capacity to continue learning from one’s patients. We will also discuss the CSH training offered by the Center for Cultural and Structural Equity in Behavior Health (CCASE).

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to:
– Identify the features and significance of a culturally and structurally humble approach to interacting with patients/clients.
– Discuss ways to integrate a culturally and structurally humble approach in interactions with patients/clients.

• Trauma: A Psychopolitical Critique of the Concept

Presenter: Steven Reisner, PhD
Moderator: Gavriel Reisner, PhD, LP
Chair: Alice Entin, LCSW, Continuing Education Program Committee
Live Online: Lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011
Date: Sunday, May 15, 2022, 3:00 – 5:00 pm ET
CE: 2 Contact Hours
Cost: NPAP Members/Candidates – No Fee; Other Attendees $40; Other Candidates/Students: $20

“We are taught that one under duress is exempted by God, but this is only true when one actually desires not to be exempted.” – Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav.

In this presentation, the presenter makes the case for disambiguating the concepts of ‘trauma’ and ‘suffering’ in both cultural usage and trauma treatment. He will argue that the concept of ‘trauma,’ as distinct from suffering, has come to embody disruptions to presumed guarantees of privilege and safety; guarantees that have been reified in our capitalist and consumerist society. The traumatized aspire to inhabit a zone of exception, where narcissism is permitted thrive, and trauma treatment supports that position. As a result, trauma, and its social corollary, identity politics, have become a form of social currency, with concomitant competition for the value they confer. But this value reflects a retreat from political and therapeutic processes of mourning, desire, and the ethics that suffering spurs. As a result, trauma therapy colludes in our country’s neoliberal and capitalist redefinition of social ills as individual ills, offering solutions of narcissistic satisfaction rather than of ethical dissatisfaction. The presenter will draw from Freudian notions of narcissism and narcissistic injury, the life and death drives and the ego-ideal vs super-ego to help identify the therapeutic and political action psychoanalysis offers.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Disambiguate the underlying presumptions embedded in the concepts of ‘trauma’ and ‘suffering’ as they apply to both therapeutic and political action.
– Differentiate the comparative effects of avoidance of narcissistic injury (trauma) and experience of narcissistic injury (suffering) as these apply to therapy and social justice.

• The Edith Laufer Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center

Facilitator: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, May 6 , 2022, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. We will read and discuss: Panksepp, Jaak and Lucy Biven (2012) The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, WW Norton & Company, New York – “Chapter 8: Nurturing Love: The Care System, pp. 283-310”. Although Freud had strong conviction that human feelings and behavior were strongly determined by mental processes and brain functions, the limitations of neuroscience at the time did not allow him to demonstrate these connections definitively. In Archeology of Mind, Jaak Panksepp identifies, using contemporary methods of neuroscientific research, seven emotional systems located in deep areas of the brain. These systems are quite similar across all mammalian species.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe how, through the evolutionary steps of exaptation, the care system likely evolved from the lust system.
– Discuss the role of oxytocin and other hormones in the care system and in pregnancy.
– Identify the similarities between the dynamics of opioid dependence and key features of social attachments.

• The Complexity of Suicide: Can We Speak About It?

Sponsored by: Continuing Education Program Committee (CEPC)
Alice Entin, LCSW, Chair
Live online: Workshop
Date/Time: Sunday, May 1, 2022, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT
CE: None

Suicide is a heart-stopping subject. And yet, in our clinical work we need to understand it. A core theory views suicide as aggression turned against the self—murder as mastery with the self as its instrument. Frightening, painful, human, and intimidating. Yet, we found when our committee spoke about it, a more nuanced and humane picture emerged. Join our conversation to explore and expand our thinking on this topic.

• Self-Analysis Across the Life Span: A Moment When Analytic Thinking Appeared When Least Expected.

Presenter: Alice Entin, LCSW
Sponsored by: NPAP Continuing Education Program Committee, Alice Entin, Chair
Live online: Lecture/Workshop
Date: Sunday, April 10, 2022, 5:30 – 7:00 pm
Total 1.5 CE Contact Hours

A psychoanalyst could have spent decades on the couch and then have reached a moment when she has stepped off the couch – and into life. We have now, officially, stepped into one role – the one who presides in the chair – but what about the powerful life-changing role of the working analyst? We may now use it to analyze, teach, supervise, discuss, or write. But what happens with our personal psychoanalysis? Does it become a new structure? Is it at work all the time – or does it have a shelf life? The presenter will touch on a recent experience when to her surprise an early childhood experience had a chance to heal. Self-analysis came to the rescue. She has a complicated, but human, story to tell of a 5-year-old in a hospital who needed to get something understood. Others will talk about being an analysand either in memory or actuality in later stages of life. There is a reason psychoanalysts statistically live longer lives.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Discuss the role of self-analysis throughout the life span of an analyst.
– Describe the lifelong quest to know oneself and how it improves one’s clinical practice.

• The Edith Laufer Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center

Facilitator: Robert Irwin Wolf, DPsa, LP
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, April 1 , 2022, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. We will read and discuss: Panksepp, Jaak and Lucy Biven (2012) The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, WW Norton & Company, New York – Chapter 7: “Lustful Passions of the Mind: From Reproductive Urges to Romantic Love,” pp. 245-281. Although Freud had strong conviction that human feelings and behavior were strongly determined by mental processes and brain functions, the limitations of neuroscience at the time did not allow him to demonstrate these connections definitively. In Archeology of Mind, Jaak Panksepp identifies, using contemporary methods of neuroscientific research, seven emotional systems located in deep areas of the brain. These systems are quite similar across all mammalian species.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Discuss the similarities and differences between neuroscientific and classical psychoanalytic theories of psychosexual development.
– Describe the differences between sexual circuitry and sexual chemistry in the human brain.
– Identify the differences and interactions between sexual urges and romantic love.

• The Problems of and Remedy for Hope in the Anthropocene Age: A Psychoanalytic-Political Perspective

Presenter: Ryan LaMothe, PhD
Moderator: Claire B. Steinberger, Ed.D., LP
Sponsored by: NPAP Continuing Education Program Committee, Alice Entin, Chair
Live online: Lecture
Date: Sunday, March 20, 2022, 5:00 – 7:00 pm
Total 2 CE Contact Hours
Fees: NPAP Members & Candidates: No charge; non-members: $40; other candidates: $20

Millennia ago, the Greek poet Hesiod must have realized the problems of hope, since it was considered one of the evils, which had not escaped Pandora’s jar. While the problems of hope have existed since time immemorial, they become particularly evident in the Anthropocene Age. This article identifies and discusses from a psychoanalytic-political perspective the perennial and present clinical and political issues of hope as human beings face a dire future. It is this psychoanalytic-political perspective that also points to a remedy, namely radical care.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Identify the various aspects of hope.
– Explicate 3 fundamental problems of hope from a psychoanalytic perspective, given the political realities of the Anthropocene Age.
– Describe why radical care addresses the problems associated with hope.

• Theodor Reik Guest Lecture (E803-H): Fanon’s Psychoanalysis

Guest Lecturer: David Marriott, PhD
Instructor: Beverly Schneider, LCSW
Sponsored by: The Members-in-Training Organization and The Training Institute of NPAP
Live online: Lecture
Date: Saturdays, March 19 & 26, 2022, 12:00 – 4:30 pm (each day)
Total 2 CE Contact Hours
Fees: NPAP Members & Candidates: $225; non-members: $285; student guest rate: $125

In this lecture David Marriott argues that psychoanalysis is complicit with anti-blackness. From Freud to Lacan, the conceptualization of symptom and object, self and difference has been an exclusively white preoccupation Marriott maintains, and, as such, is unable to imagine or conceive of blackness clinically. Linking Fanon’s theories of group relations and analysis (of negrophobia) therefore allows us to reconsider the crucial connections between sex and difference or the difference that blackness makes (which is not purely sexual).

He discusses Fanon’s responses to Freud and Lacan, and he advocates for a new reading of what Fanon meant by ’sociogeny,’ a method that employs psychological models critically to help rethink the fundamental relations of blackness to psychoanalysis. He suggests that the Fanonian diagnostics of negrophobia pose a great challenge to psychoanalytic models of treatment, whether at the individual level or at the level of cultural groups.

‘Fanon’s Psychoanalysis’ will draw on material taken from two recent books: Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford, 2018) and Lacan Noir (Palgrave, 2021).

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Explain how Fanon reads Freud and Lacan to rethink the fundamental relations of blackness to psychoanalysis and construct a critique of anti-blackness on both a cultural and a clinical level.
– Discuss a new reading of Fanon’s concept of sociogeny as it relates to the relationship between blackness and psychoanalysis.
– Describe how Fanon’s diagnostic concept of negrophobia poses a challenge to contemporary psychoanalysis, both at the individual level and at the level of cultural groups.
– Apply Fanon’s theories of group relations and difference to clinical work.

• The Edith Laufer Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center

Facilitators: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, March 4 , 2022, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. We will read and discuss: Panksepp, Jaak and Lucy Biven (2012) The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, WW Norton & Company, New York – Chapter 9: “Born to Cry: The PANIC/GRIEF System and the Genesis of Life-Sustaining Social Bonds,” pp. 311-349. Although Freud had strong conviction that human feelings and behavior were strongly determined by mental processes and brain functions, the limitations of neuroscience at the time did not allow him to demonstrate these connections definitively. In Archeology of Mind, Jaak Panksepp identifies, using contemporary methods of neuroscientific research, seven emotional systems located in deep areas of the brain. These systems are quite similar across all mammalian species.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe the neural trajectory of the PANIC/GRIEF system in the brain.
– Describe the adaptive components of the PANIC/GRIEF affective system. 
– Describe the changes in the PANIC/GRIEF system that occur with maturation.

• My Father Invents Dual Therapy

Presenter: Sylvia Flescher, MD
Moderator: Penny Rosen, MSW, LCSW, BCD-P
Chair: Alice Entin, LCSW, Continuing Education Program Committee
Live Online: Lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011
Date: Sunday, February 13, 2022, 5:00 – 7:00 pm
CE: 2 Contact Hours
Cost: NPAP Members/Candidates – No Fee; Other Attendees $40; Other Candidates/Students: $20

The presenter will read from her memoir-in-progress, Googling for Ghosts. She will discuss details of a unique form of therapy that her father, Joachim Flescher, also a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, developed in the 1960’s. He called it “Dual Therapy,” as it consisted of alternating sessions with a male and a female therapist. Additionally, she will review her father’s life story and offer her analysis of why he came to develop “dual therapy.” The perennial ambivalence she has felt towards her father comes across in her writing. He was brilliant but narcissistic and controlling. He died when she was twenty-three, but he continues to cast a very long shadow. Her memoir aims to be at once a loving memorialization of his life and works, but also an exorcism.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe the process of disidentifying with a narcissistic parent.
– Describe how dual therapy was developed in reaction to the too-rigid classical analytic technique in the 50’s-60’s.
– Describe how the trauma of the Holocaust may have influenced Joachim Flescher’s theoretical orientation.

• The Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center’s Reading Group

Facilitators: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, February 4 , 2022, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. We will read and discuss: Panksepp, Jaak and Lucy Biven (2012) The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, WW Norton & Company, New York – Chapter 5: “The Ancestral Sources of Fear,” pp. 175-202. Although Freud had strong conviction that human feelings and behavior were strongly determined by mental processes and brain functions, the limitations of neuroscience at the time, did not allow him to demonstrate these connections definitively. In Archeology of Mind, Jaak Panksepp identifies, using contemporary methods of neuroscientific research, seven emotional systems located in deep areas of the brain. These systems are quite similar across all mammalian species.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe the neural trajectory of the FEAR system in the brain.
– Describe five symptoms that are induced by the stimulation of the FEAR system in the brain.  
– Describe the primary brain chemicals involved in both the inducement and the quelling of a FEAR response.

• Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Death Drive: A Dilemma for Psychoanalysis – A Clinical Case Discussion

Presenter: Charlotte Schwartz, LCSW, LP
Moderator: Claire Steinberger, LP 
Live Online: Lecture
Dates/Times: Sunday, January 16, 2022, 5:00 – 7:00 PM, EST
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 2.0 CE Contact Hours
Costs: NPAP Members/Candidates I No fee; Other Professionals I $40; Other Candidates I $20

Freud’s introduction of the Death Drive (1920) presented a conundrum for psychoanalytic theory. He shifted the theory of instincts from opposition between the Ego Instincts and the Sexual Instincts, uniting them into one unit. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he transformed this model into that of the Death Instinct and the Sexual Instinct – Eros and Thanatos. Aggression is now considered a component of the Death Drive. Freud’s contribution can enrich our understanding of our clinical work.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe the difference between the death drive as a primary instinct and as a regulatory principle of biological and genetic function.
– Discuss the way the aggressive instinct and sexual instinct impact individual and group behavior.

• The Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center’s Reading Group

Facilitators: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, January 7, 2022, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. We will read and discuss: Panksepp, Jaak and Lucy Biven (2012) The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, WW Norton & Company, New York.

Chapter 3: The SEEKING System: Brain Sources of Eager Anticipation, Desire, Euphoria, and the Quest for Everything, pp. 95-144

Although discussion will focus on the above chapter, it is strongly advised that all participants read the Preface (pp. ix-xxiii), the Forward by Daniel J. Siegel (pp. xxv-xxii), Chapter 1: Ancestral Passions (pp. 1-46), and Chapter 2: The Evolution of Affective Consciousness: Studying Emotional Feelings in Other Animals (pp. 47-94)

To participate in the discussion, please read entire chapter.

Although Freud had strong conviction that human feelings and behavior were strongly determined by mental processes and brain functions, the limitations of neuroscience at the time, did not allow him to demonstrate these connections definitively. In Archeology of Mind, Jaak Panksepp identifies, using contemporary methods of neuroscientific research, seven emotional systems located in deep areas of the brain. These systems are quite similar across all mammalian species. The group will begin the study with the SEEKING system, and moving on to the other six systems over the next several months: RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe how neuropsychoanalysis has relevance for psychodynamic psychotherapy in terms of the brain affecting the mind.
– Describe how primitive reflexes and biochemical systems jump-start the attachment process.
– Describe how early relationships shape the building of neural circuitry.

2021

 • Pandemics, Wars, Traumas, and Literature: Echoes from the Front Lines

Presenter: Gavriel Reisner, PhD, LP
Featured Guest: Francoise Davoine, PhD
Live Online: Lecture
Dates/Times: Sunday, December 19, 2021, 4:00 – 6:00 PM, EST
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 2.0 CE Contact Hours
Costs: NPAP Members/Candidates I No fee; Other Professionals I $40; Other Candidates I $20

Freud’s introduction of the Death Drive (1920) presented a conundrum for psychoanalytic theory. He shifted the theory of instincts from opposition between the Ego Instincts and the Sexual Instincts, uniting them into one unit. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he transformed this model into that of the Death Instinct and the Sexual Instinct – Eros and Thanatos. Aggression is now considered a component of the Death Drive. Freud’s contribution can enrich our understanding of our clinical work.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe the difference between the death drive as a primary instinct and as a regulatory principle of biological and genetic function.
– Describe “forward psychotherapy,” the working within the traumatic formation of symptoms, to conceptualizations presented in the works of significant psychoanalytic authors like Theodore Reik.

• The Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center’s Reading Group

Facilitators: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW and Mary Elow, PhD
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, December 3, 2021, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. We will read and discuss: Panksepp, Jaak and Lucy Biven (2012) The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, WW Norton & Company, New York.

Chapter 3: The SEEKING System: Brain Sources of Eager Anticipation, Desire, Euphoria, and the Quest for Everything, pp. 95-144

Although discussion will focus on the above chapter, it is strongly advised that all participants read the Preface (pp. ix-xxiii), the Forward by Daniel J. Siegel (pp. xxv-xxii), Chapter 1: Ancestral Passions (pp. 1-46), and Chapter 2: The Evolution of Affective Consciousness: Studying Emotional Feelings in Other Animals (pp. 47-94)

To participate in the discussion, please read entire chapter.

Although Freud had strong conviction that human feelings and behavior were strongly determined by mental processes and brain functions, the limitations of neuroscience at the time, did not allow him to demonstrate these connections definitively. In Archeology of Mind, Jaak Panksepp identifies, using contemporary methods of neuroscientific research, seven emotional systems located in deep areas of the brain. These systems are quite similar across all mammalian species. The group will begin the study with the SEEKING system, and moving on to the other six systems over the next several months: RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe how neuropsychoanalysis has relevance for psychodynamic psychotherapy in terms of the brain affecting the mind.
– Describe how primitive reflexes and biochemical systems jump-start the attachment process.
– Describe how early relationships shape the building of neural circuitry.

• Supervisory Relationships: “Vital Signs” and Individual Differences

Presenter: Nancy McWilliams, PhD, ABPP
Moderator: Judy Ann Kaplan, MSW, LCSW, BCD-P, FIP
Live Online: Lecture
Dates/Times: Sunday, November 14, 2021, 5:00 – 7:00 PM, EDT
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 2.0 CE Contact Hours
Costs: NPAP Members/Candidates I No fee; Other Professionals I $40; Other Candidates I $20

There has been comparatively little literature on supervision from a psychoanalytic perspective. Both psychoanalytic organizations and general professional groups in psychology, psychiatry, and social work have recently emphasized the value of mentorship and have urged training programs to offer courses in supervision. But most graduate courses on the topic have relied on models premised on the development of “competencies” or the acquisition of specific skills. This program will instead emphasize more foundational processes, including how to help therapists monitor certain vital signs of overall progress in their patients and how to welcome and make supervisory use of individual differences between therapist and mentor.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Distinguish between skills-training models and overall professional growth models.
– Enumerate five “vital signs” of overall therapeutic progress in patients that supervisors help therapists to monitor.
– Describe empirical findings documenting the high frequency of supervisees’ keeping secrets from supervisors.

• The Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center’s Reading Group

Facilitators: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW and Mary Elow, PhD
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, November 5, 2021, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will continue to read and discuss: Cozolino, Louis, (2018) Timeless: Nature’s Formula for Health and Longevity, WW Norton & Company, New York. This research-based book approaches the topic of Aging with a focus on brain development. With an evolutionary perspective, Cozolino focusses on the development of wisdom and compassion and helps mental health practitioners to understand and nurture the aging brain in their patients and in themselves. Cozolino upends the loss and decline stereotypes of aging and demonstrates the importance of relationships throughout the lifespan for optimal brain health.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe how neuropsychoanalysis has relevance for psychodynamic psychotherapy in terms of the brain affecting the mind.
– Describe how primitive reflexes and biochemical systems jump-start the attachment process.
– Describe how early relationships shape the building of neural circuitry.

• Murderous Racism as Normal Psychosis: The Case of Dylann Roof

Presenter: Alan Bass, PhD, LP
Moderator: Claire Steinberger, JD, LP
Live Online: Lecture
Dates/Times: Sunday, October 24, 2021, 5:00 – 7:00 PM, EDT
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 2.0 CE Contact Hours
Costs: NPAP Members/Candidates I No fee; Other Professionals I $40; Other Candidates I $20

In 2015 Dylann Roof murdered nine people in a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. This was an intentionally genocidal act. All the information available about Roof, and especially why he refused an insanity defense when facing the death penalty, allow formulations about the unconscious dynamics of murderous racism.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Explain why racist violence is intrinsic to the unconscious.
– Discuss how the mind can simultaneously function in a violently psychotic way, and appear normal at the same time.

• You Not a Racist

Presenters: Sue Mitchell, LP, and Beverly Schneider, LCSW
Organized by: NPAP Racial Justice Initiative
Live Online: Workshop
Dates/Times: Sunday, October 17, 2021, 5:00 – 7:00 pm, EDT
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 2.0 CE Contact Hours
Costs:NPAP Members/Candidates – No Fee; Other Professionals: $40, Other Candidates: $20

Critical Race Theory (CRT) does not call us racists; but we are not yet off the hook. The racist policies and structures which we inherited and recreate are part of our national inheritance. When the shame experienced on either side of the racial divide is defended against, then anger, fear, tension, and rage only increase. Contemporary psychoanalytic writers have begun to explore ways in which this shame can be turned into “generative shame” and thus enable us to work toward repair and reconciliation. With deference to Mary Watkins’ 2016 paper (“The social and political life of shame in the U.S. presidential election 2016”), we will explore these themes in Lynne Layton’s 2017 paper, “On Lying and Disillusionment,” and Sue Grand’s 2018 paper, “The Other Within: White Shame, Native-American Genocide.”

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Define Critical Race Theory (CRT).
– Describe structural and systemic racism.
– Discuss structural racism in the enslavement of African Americans and the genocide of Native Americans.
– Explain generative shame and its use in working through this past.

• The Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center’s Reading Group

Facilitators: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW and Mary Elow, PhD
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, October 1, 2021, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. We will read and discuss: Cozolino, Louis, (2018) Timeless: Nature’s Formula for Health and Longevity, WW Norton & Company, New York.

This research-based, but very readable book by Louis Cozolino, one of the Study Group’s favorite authors, approaches the topic of Aging with a focus on brain development. With his usual evolutionary perspective, Cozolino focusses on the development of wisdom and compassion and helps mental health practitioners to understand and nurture the aging brain in their patients and in themselves. Cozolino upends the loss and decline stereotypes of aging and helps his readers to appreciate the importance of relationships throughout the lifespan for optimal brain health. We are assigning this reading early for our October 1 meeting because we thought it would be good summer reading. We are asking that everyone read the entire book.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe how neuropsychoanalysis has relevance for psychodynamic psychotherapy in terms of the brain affecting the mind.
– Describe how primitive reflexes and biochemical systems jump-start the attachment process.
– Describe how early relationships shape the building of neural circuitry.

• Queen of the Dead, Part II: Body of Evidence

Presenter: Melissa Daum, LMFT
Featured Guest: Kathryn Harrison, MFA
Moderator: Elizabeth Singer, LP
Live Online: Lecture
Dates/Times: Friday, August 13, 2021, 3:30 – 5:00 PM EDT
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 1.5 CE Contact Hours
Costs: Professionals I $30; Candidates I $20

Anorexia touches down into every psychological diagnosis: trauma, hysteria, obsessive-compulsion, addiction, sadomasochism, narcissism, body dysmorphia, perversion. Yet within this kaleidoscope of dis-order, the anorexic patient has found, at last, a secret order, a religious order. But what happens when the anorexic’s formula gives way? This presentation follows Kathryn’s personal history from her perfect sanctuary into the chaotic underworld of an anorexic who is failing at anorexia. Theoretical considerations take an almost psychedelic turn as we investigate the warped mirrors of body dysmorphia, the trance states of Kathryn’s frenzied efforts toward body purification, and the anorexic wish to live outside of time.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe the internal psychic world of the patient who presents with anorexia.
– Apply theoretical concepts to attribute meaning to the wishes of the central anorexic imagination.
– Describe how an eating disorder can be a manifestation of internalized family dynamics.

• Befriending the Dark: Working Within and Between to Heal from Trauma

Presenter: Laura D’Angelo, MDiv, LP, and Pilar Jennings, PhD, LP
Live Online: Lecture
Dates/Times: Friday, August 6, 2021, 3:30 – 5:00 PM EDT
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 1.5 CE Contact Hours
Costs: Professionals I $30; Candidates I $20

A woman, whose 10-year therapy is marked by abrupt stops and starts, goes blind during the Covid-19 lockdown after her father breaks into her world and retraumatizes her. “There is something you are not wanting to see,” an emergency room doctor tells the woman who reconnects with D’Angelo, so that she can face the impact of childhood abuse. The patient returns with profound fear. She desperately wants to remember what she has not allowed herself to see, but to do so requires trust in a relationship with her therapist. This arouses her deepest dread, because she has learned to protect herself against relationships, at all costs. In this case presentation, D’Angelo and her patient work “within and between” themselves, so they both can see more clearly.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Identify certain relational traumas that may threaten the psychoanalytic relationship.
– Describe effective leading-edge strategies that help the patient develop internal relationships.
– Describe how the treatment of trauma is conceptualized from an intersubjective perspective.

• Give Me Permission to Remember: Judith S. Kestenberg and the Memory of the Holocaust

Presenter: Klara Naszkowksa, PhD
Moderator:
Live Online: Lecture
Dates/Times: Friday, July 30, 2021, 3:30 – 5:00 PM EDT
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 1.5 CE Contact Hours
Costs: Professionals I $30; Candidates I $20

At least sixty-six first and second-generation female psychoanalysts emigrated to the U.S. as Nazism came to dominate Europe. In Vienna, Berlin, Zurich, and Budapest—they had been at the forefront of the psychoanalytic movement; after emigrating, they shaped the development of Freudian theory and practice in the US. Today they are at risk of falling into oblivion. This presentation revives the individual and professional biography of Judith S. Kestenberg. Using her papers, archival historical materials, and personal-history documents, the presentation will bridge gaps in present knowledge on Kestenberg’s familial, religious, political, and professional backgrounds, and map her complex multiple identity as a Jewish New Woman of her milieu, a pioneer of psychoanalysis, German-speaking emigrant, daughter of Shoah victims, and mother. The main focus is on the shift Kestenberg made from resenting the traumatic experiences to devoting her work to Holocaust studies. By bringing attention to oral histories—an approach that remains quite new and underexplored, this woman’s voice will be heard.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Discuss the complex multiple identities of the first women psychoanalysts who emigrated to the US, using Judith S. Kestenberg as an example.
– Describe the contribution of Judith S. Kestenberg to the history of American psychoanalysis, Holocaust and memory studies.

• Freud and Kohut Walk into a Bar… (Wait! Who’s the Designated Driver?)

Presenter: Edgard Francisco Danielsen, PhD, LP
Moderator: Elizabeth Singer, LP
Live Online: Lecture
Dates/Times: Friday, July 23, 2021, 3:30 – 5:00 PM EDT
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 1.5 CE Contact Hours
Costs: Professionals I $30; Candidates I $20

Through clinical vignettes and reflections on the therapeutic process, the presenter offers glimpses of a long-term analysis in which both analysand and analyst continue to be challenged to move beyond rigid positions. Attention is given to the multiplicity of factors that led to the transformation of a young man from a narcissistically injured person – employing the usual defenses of grandiosity, splitting, idealization and devaluation – into someone who is able to acknowledge that it is in relationship with and to the Other where one becomes human. In a parallel way, other questions raised include what is therapeutic about interventions and interpretations, what is neutrality, and how theoretical openness may allow for both analyst and analysand to deepen their work together.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Compare and contrast different types of interpretations in the transference.
– Describe the differing therapeutic values of leading edge and trailing edge interventions.
– Appraise in what ways an expansive understanding of neutrality leads to a deepening of the psychoanalytic process.

• Ethics of Psychoanalytic Supervision: Managing the Complexities

Presenter: Nancy McWilliams, PhD, ABPP
Moderator: Judy Ann Kaplan
Live Online: Lecture
Dates/Times: Friday, July 16, 2021, 3:30 – 5:00 PM EDT
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 1.5 CE Contact Hours
Costs: Professionals I $30; Candidates I $20

This presentation is part of a forthcoming book on psychoanalytic supervision and consultation. The presenter addresses how clinical supervision transcends issues of effectiveness in the consulting room. It inevitably enters the territory of what is morally right: for the patient, the supervisee, and the larger community. In psychoanalytic therapy, we deliberately foster a powerful attachment that stimulates intense wishes and fears. Because we ask patients to trust us with their deepest shame, their darkest secrets, and their worst vulnerabilities to emotional pain, our consequent ethical obligations should weigh heavily on us as both therapists and mentors.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe ethical complexities involved in supervision including the ethical obligations for both therapists and mentors.
– Describe supervisory challenges involving the patient’s right to know treatment-relevant information.
– Identify the supervision of clinical choices affecting mostly the patient-therapist relationship.

• The Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center’s Reading Group

Facilitators: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW and Mary Elow, PhD
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: June 4, 2021, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. We will read and discuss an article by Mark Solms from the 2020 edition of the publication Neuropsychoanalysis. (This article will be available to participants through a link on the Program Announcement.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe how neuropsychoanalysis has relevance for psychodynamic psychotherapy in terms of the brain affecting the mind.
– Describe how primitive reflexes and biochemical systems jump-start the attachment process.
– Describe how early relationships shape the building of neural circuitry.

• Dances of Intimacy: Culture, Families, Couples (Part 3)

Googling for Ghosts: A Meditation on Writer’s Block, Mourning, and the Holocaust
Presenter: Sylvia Flescher, MD
Moderator, Claire Beth Steinberger, LP, LMFT
Chair: Alice Entin, LCSW, Continuing Education Committee
Live Online: Lecture/Workshop
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011
Date: Sunday, May 16, 2021, 2:00 -4:00 pm
CE: 2 Contact Hours
Cost: NPAP Members/Candidates – No Fee; Other Attendees $40; Other Candidates/Students: $20

The presenter describes her father’s experience as a Holocaust survivor and how his unfinished mourning contributes to her struggle with muteness and her own story of being dwarfed by the magnitude of her parents’ losses. When her non-Jewish mother is honored by Yad Vashem, the ceremony proves powerful. Witnessing by community and internet helps dissolve the shame and isolation, heal some of the trauma, and develop greater psychological freedom. The author memorializes her parents and her lost relatives and succeeds in working through much that had haunted her.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe one impact of intergenerational transmission of trauma.
– Describe one benefit of ceremonial and witnessing experience.
– Identify one way to transform psychic ghosts and inhibitions.

• Circling the Unthinkable: Death Anxiety Today (Part 2)

Presenters: Fanny Brewster, PhD, and Anthony P. Bossis, PhD
Moderator: Victoria Malkin, PhD, LP
Chair: Steve Yagerman, DMin, LP, NPAP Program Committee
Live Online: Lecture/Workshop
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Saturday, May 15, 2021, 10:00 AM – 12:30 PM EDT
CE: 2.5 Contact Hours [LMSW/LCSW, LP]
Costs: Candidates/Students: $30; Professionals: $65

Death: Honoring Our Sacred Rite
Presenter: Fanny Brewster, PhD
Invoking the rite of birth is actually a duality that includes the rite of death. Our cultural and existential anxiety regarding dying can shadow the sacredness of our passage from the physical life. The ego feels fear and the honoring of the rite and rituals of dying can become lost. This is especially true in our current collective state of heightened awareness of dying. This moment would seem to require a more attentive gaze, self-reflection, and honored remembrance of the conjunction of birth and death. Might this ease our anxiety?

The Utility of Psychedelics for the Treatment of Existential Distress Associated with Advanced Illness or at the End of Life
Presenter: Anthony P. Bossis, PhD
This lecture will present the history and scientific findings from FDA-approved psychedelic research to relieve the suffering associated with terminal illness and end of life. Features of a mystical experience include unity, sacredness, transcendence, ineffability, and an enhanced awareness of positive emotions including that of love. Mystical experience offers a novel therapeutic approach to promote an openness to the mystery of death and to a deeper understanding of the study of meaning and spirituality.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Identify the presence of death anxiety as a contributing and complicating factor in treatment.
– Explain different ways in which death anxiety can be moved from latent dread to symbolized content by clients as they face their mortality.

• The Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center’s Reading Group

Facilitators: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW and Mary Elow, PhD
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, May 7, 2021, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. We will read and discuss: Jeremy Holmes (2020) The Brain has a Mind of its Own: Attachment, Neurobiology, and the New Science of Psychotherapy, Confer Books, London.

Chapter 6: Energy Principle (FEP) and Attachment, pp. 113-122
Chapter 7: Therapeutic Conversations, pp. 123-144
Chapter 8: Practical Implications for Psychotherapists, pp. 145-162
Epilogue: pp 163-168

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe how neuropsychoanalysis has relevance for psychodynamic psychotherapy in terms of the brain affecting the mind.
– Describe how primitive reflexes and biochemical systems jump-start the attachment process.
– Describe how early relationships shape the building of neural circuitry.

• Dances of Intimacy: Culture, Families, Couples (Part 2)

Technology-stirred Projective Processes in Couple Tele-therapy
Presenter: Carl Bagnini, LCSW
Moderator, Claire Beth Steinberger, LP, LMFT
Chair: Alice Entin, LCSW, Continuing Education Committee
Live Online: Lecture/Workshop
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Sunday, May 2, 2021, 2:00-4:00 pm
CE: 2 Contact Hours
Cost: NPAP Members/Candidates – No Fee; Other Attendees $40; Other Candidates/Students: $20

The increase in tele-health and tele-therapy during the COVID pandemic raises many ethical, clinical, and situational concerns. Some have been in play long before the increased uses of tech approaches to psychotherapy, most recently due to the perils of office practice. This Workshop explores implications of technology on clinical work, including the projective process encountered with couples: the world of easy access to a therapist’s personal and professional identity, the influence of the non-office physical environment on couple and triangular field psychodynamics, and the meaning of multiple screen settings. Evocative vignettes convey the pitfalls and pratfalls of virtual work with couples.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Discuss some caveats of doing tele-therapy.
– Identify therapeutic opportunities arising from tele-therapy.
– Describe how the couple setting, technology, and pets influence interventive choices.

• Circling the Unthinkable: Death Anxiety Today (Part 1)

How can we understand Freud’s ideas about death anxiety today in a contemporary clinic flooded with the reality or death of those around us? 2020 was the year when our communal consciousness was pierced by the specter of death. Anxiety pervades our clinic, while social and personal catastrophes multiply. Can we hold out for a psychoanalysis that seeks for love and work to flourish? Or does the puncture of death make a larger, ethical demand that places the therapist in a new position?

Presenters: Josh Cohen PhD, and Robert Stolorow PhD
Moderator: Laura D’Angelo, MDiv, LP
Chair: Steven Yagerman, DMin, LP, NPAP Program Committee
Live Online: Lecture/Workshop
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Saturday, May 1, 2021, 2:00 – 4:30 PM EDT
CE: 2.5 Contact Hours [LMSW/LCSW, LP]
Costs: Candidates/Students: $30; Professionals: $65.
For Parts I & II: Candidates/Students: $50, Professionals: $100

Life, Death, and Psychotherapy in the Shadow of the Pandemic Presenter:
Josh Cohen, Ph.D.
From our consulting rooms, clinicians are experiencing the diverse effects of the compression of our patient’s (and our own) lives into increasingly tight physical and psychic spaces. Under these conditions, it can be very difficult to discern if the life drive or the death drive is at work. What is at stake in this apparent confusion of the drives?

Planet Earth: Crumbling Metaphysical Illusion
Presenter: Robert Stolorow, Ph.D.
What can help us face up to the horrors with which climate change threatens us? The presenter makes a case for emotional dwelling, an encounter that calls for language that meets the trauma head-on, articulating the unbearable and the unendurable. To tackle the overwhelming perils of climate change we must include in our dwelling on earth an emotional dwelling with one another that renders shared apocalyptic anxiety more tolerable.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Identify the presence of death anxiety as a contributing and complicating factor in treatment.
– Explain different ways in which death anxiety can be moved from latent dread to symbolized content by clients as they face their mortality.

• Clinical Circle Returns — Psychotherapists Reflect on the Pandemic (Part XI-Finale)

Presenter/Facilitator: Alice Entin, LCSW
Sponsored by: NPAP Continuing Education Committee, Alice Entin, Chair
Live online: Workshop
Date: Sunday, April 25, 2021, 5:00 – 6:45 pm
Total 1.75 CE Contact Hours
Fee: NPAP Members/Candidates – No Fee

What lies ahead, as the vaccine becomes widely available, and COVID-19 still has presence in our lives? During the first year of the pandemic, heightened attention was also pointed towards racism, climate change, social upheaval, healthcare, the economy? After practicing virtually for more than a year, what are reactions to returning to the consulting room? How is the therapeutic frame holding up over time? This forum aimed to provide a “holding environment” for our community for the past year.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Discuss clinical practice under adverse societal conditions.
– Identify how the therapeutic frame functions in a continually changing environment.

• Dances of Intimacy: Culture, Families, Couples (Part 1) 

Frozen Time: Cultural and Multigenerational Trauma in Bi-Racial Coupling
Presenter/Moderator: Claire Beth Steinberger, LP, LMFT
Chair: Alice Entin, LCSW, Continuing Education Committee
Live Online: Lecture/Workshop
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Sunday, April 18, 2021, 2:00-4:00 pm.
CE: 2 Contact Hours
Cost: NPAP Members/Candidates – No Fee; Other Attendees $40; Other Candidates/Students: $20

This presentation highlights the significant contributions to family and couple systems theory and practice. Workshops illustrate a “systems model,” reflecting the interface of cultural, interpersonal, and individual dynamics. Areas of focus will include: multigenerational transmission of trauma, the clinician’s location in a diverse (tri-personal) field, family-of-origin investigation for couples and individuals, the transformative role of dreamwork, the relational “birds of a feather” phenomenon, and surprises and quagmires of teletherapy.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Identify the relational phenomenon in couples.
– Evaluate the impact of couple treatment on individual change and growth.
– Describe the role of family of origin patterns in coupling dynamics.

• The Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center’s Reading Group

Facilitators: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW and Mary Elow, PhD
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, April 2, 2021, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. We will read and discuss: Jeremy Holmes (2020) The Brain has a Mind of its Own: Attachment, Neurobiology, and the New Science of Psychotherapy, Confer Books, London.

Chapter 3: Relational Neuroscience, pp. 56-70
Chapter 4: Free Energy and Psychopathology, pp. 71-84
Chapter 5: Uncoupling Top-down/Bottom-up Automaticity, pp. 85-112

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe how neuropsychoanalysis has relevance for psychodynamic psychotherapy in terms of the brain affecting the mind.
– Describe how primitive reflexes and biochemical systems jump-start the attachment process.
– Describe how early relationships shape the building of neural circuitry.

• Soaring in Time and Space: The Ghosts of Community in Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Presenter: Gavriel Reisner, PhD, LP
Moderator: Judy Ann Kaplan, LCSW, BCD-P, FIPA
Live Online: Lecture/Workshop
Dates/Times: March 21, 2021, 5:00 – 7:00 pm
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 2 CE Contact Hours
Costs: NPAP Members/Candidates: No fee; Others: $40; Other candidates: $20

The presentation applies Loewald’s distinction between “ghosts” and “ancestors” and Winnicott’s concept of “potential space” to Toni Morrison’s novel, Song of Solomon (1977). Morrison reworks African legend into a mid-twentieth-century fable as her protagonist, Milkman Dead, almost a black Hamlet, looks for a lost heritage in the woods of Pennsylvania and over a canyon in Virginia, turning the vast American continent into a Winnicottian stage. There he finds the deeper meanings of both love and being through the Loewaldian counselor-as-good-object, Pilate Dead, a mother-figure with no navel who creates liberating boundaries-within-deep-spaces. She is the one who indirectly leads him to his legendary-true ancestor: mythical Solomon, the slave who really knew how to fly. Altering the ghosts of racial history, Solomon bequeaths his lost ancestral heritage to the novel’s transformed hero.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Discuss Loewald (on time and inner experience) and Winnicott (on space and outer experience) to understand the achievement of selfhood in the protagonist of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
– Trace the Loewaldian movement from ghosts (disturbing inner objects) to ancestors (restorative inner objects) in the novel’s protagonist, Milkman Dead, and in the African-American community as a whole.
– Describe “haunting” as a subliminal process, with psychoanalytic, social, and political dimensions, that reveals a profound social repression of America’s racial history.

• The Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center’s Reading Group

Facilitators: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW and Mary Elow, PhD
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, March 5, 2021, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. We will read and discuss: Jeremy Holmes (2020) The Brain has a Mind of its Own: Attachment, Neurobiology, and the New Science of Psychotherapy, Confer Books, London.

Introduction: pp. 1-11
Chapter 1: The Free Energy Principle, pp. 12-45
Chapter 2: Psychoanalytic Resonances, pp. 46-55
Glossary of Terms: pp. 169-179

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe how neuropsychoanalysis has relevance for psychodynamic psychotherapy in terms of the brain affecting the mind.
– Describe how primitive reflexes and biochemical systems jump-start the attachment process.
– Describe how early relationships shape the building of neural circuitry.

• The Clinical Circle Returns in 2021 – Psychoanalysts Look Back & Ahead During the Pandemic (Part X)

Presenter/Facilitator: Alice Entin, LCSW Sponsored by: NPAP Continuing Education Committee, Alice Entin, Chair
Live online: Workshop
Date: Sunday, February 28, 2021, 5:00 – 6:45 pm
Total 1.75 CE Contact Hours
Fee: NPAP Members/Candidates – No Fee

What lies ahead, as the vaccine rolls out and the new government settles in? Will we be united or divided? Where are we in our understanding of racism, global warming, social upheaval, healthcare, the economy? After more than 10 months of sheltering in place and practicing virtually, what more have we discovered about the psychoanalytic process? What are reactions to returning to the consulting room? How is the analytic frame holding up over time, in the midst of shock and dislocation? The clinical encounter will be the focus through the “holding environment” of our analytic community.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Discuss the manifestation of transference, countertransference, dreamwork, and such, under adverse societal conditions.
– Identify how the analytic frame functions in a continually changing environment.

• Integrating Remote Technology, Photography, and Neuropsychoanalytic Research within Analytic Therapy: A Case Study

Robert Irwin Wolf, DPsa, LP, LCAT, Presenter
Alice Entin, LCSW, Chair
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Online In-Person: Lecture
Date/Time: Sunday, February 21, 2021, 5:00-7:00 pm
Total: 2.0 CE Contact Hours
Costs: No fee for NPAP members/candidates; $40 for non-members; $20 for other candidates/ students

This presentation is designed to demonstrate how photographs can promote a deepening of our understanding of unconscious material during clinical work. An overview of the use of photography in psychotherapy will be followed by an in depth case study exploring the ways photography can be integrated within depth oriented, remote, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy.

After attending is presentation, participants will be able to
– List two ways in which photographs may be used to communicate unconscious conflicts.
– Describe how photographs may be used clinically to explore transference.
– Describe how photographs can be used clinically to promote insight.
– Describe the difference between Explicit and Implicit brain function.

• The Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center’s Reading Group

Facilitators: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW and Mary Elow, PhD
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, February 5, 2021, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. We will read and discuss: Damasio, Antonio (2018) The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, Vintage Books, A Division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

Part III: The Cultural Mind at Work, pp. 163-244
Chapter 10: On Cultures, pp. 165-193
Chapter 11: Medicine, Immortality and Algorithms, pp. 194-210
Chapter 12: On the Human Condition Now, pp. 211-233
Chapter 13: The Strange Order of Things, pp. 234-244

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe how neuropsychoanalysis has relevance for psychodynamic psychotherapy in terms of the brain affecting the mind.
– Describe how primitive reflexes and biochemical systems jump-start the attachment process.
– Describe how early relationships shape the building of neural circuitry.

• The Clinical Circle Returns – Psychoanalysts Ahead During the Pandemic (Part IX)

Presenter/Facilitator: Alice Entin, LCSW
Sponsored by: NPAP Continuing Education Committee, Alice Entin, Chair
Live online: Workshop
Date: Sunday, January 31, 2021, 5:00 – 6:45 pm
Total 1.75 CE Contact Hours
Fee: NPAP Members/Candidates – No Fee

We are still under threat, patient and analyst alike. The invisible virus, racial inequality, global warming, and the socio-political impact post-election are ever-present. The analyst and patient are sharing a shocking and threatening environment. After more than 8 months of sheltering in place and practicing virtually, what else have we discovered about the psychoanalytic process? What are reactions to returning to the consulting room? What about hope and/or despair? Where are we in our understanding of racism, global warming, social upheaval? How is the analytic frame holding up over time, in the midst of shock and dislocation? The clinical encounter will be the focus through the “holding environment” of our analytic community.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Discuss the manifestation of transference, countertransference, dreamwork, and such, under adverse societal conditions.
– Identify how the analytic frame functions in a continually changing environment.

• In the Fishbowl: Supervising in Psychoanalytic Institutes

Nancy McWilliams, PhD, ABPP, Presenter
Judy Ann Kaplan, MSW, LCSW, BCD-P, FIPA, Supervision Class Instructor/Moderator
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Online In-Person: Lecture
Date/Time: Sunday, January 17, 2021, 5:00-7:00 pm
Total: 2.0 CE Contact Hours
Costs: No fee for NPAP members/candidates; $40 for non-members; $20 for other candidates/ students

This presentation is part of a forthcoming book on psychoanalytic supervision and consultation. It summarizes both the gratifications and the challenges of supervising candidates in analytic institutes, addressing dynamics involving boundaries, regressive pulls, issues of psychoanalytic identity, idealization and devaluation, splitting, fears about exposure, and systemic pressures that may compromise patient care. In the context of current controversies about psychoanalytic training, it depicts some complications of supervising at this level in the context of what is often an enmeshed professional community.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Discuss empirical findings on the degree to which candidates in institutes withhold information from supervisors.
– Name three aspects of supervision in psychoanalytic institutes that differentiate this process from other instances of psychodynamic supervision and consultation.

• Theodor Reik Guest Lecture (E803-F): Couples Therapy: Psychoanalytic and Socio-Political Sensibilities

Presenter: Orna Guralnik, PsyD
Co-sponsored by the Members-in-Training Organization, The Association, and The Institute of NPAP
Live Online: Lecture/Workshop
Dates/Times: Sundays — January 10, 2021 and January 24, 2021, 1:30-6:00 pm (each day)
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Total: 9 CE Contact Hours
Costs: $225 for NPAP members; $275.00 for non-members; $100 for student guest rate

Through a psychoanalytic lens, this min-course will examine working with couples, while paying special attention to socio-political and systemic dynamics that often underlie couples’ dynamics. The instructor will employ psychoanalytic concepts such as projective identification, in tandem with postcolonial race theory, and feminist and queer theory, and attend to other ideological factors that are often powerful sources of difference that couples and analysts do not always know how to engage. The course will utilize didactic theoretical material, case studies from instructor’s practice, film footage from the docu-series Couples Therapy, and participants’ cases, within a large and small groups format.

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe ways to employ a psychoanalytic lens to couples’ work.
– Discuss the importance of socio-political and systemic dynamics that underlie couples’ dynamics.
– Apply psychoanalytic concepts and ideological factors in couples’ therapy.

• The Neuropsychoanalytic Clinical Study Center’s Reading Group

Facilitators: Ann Rose Simon, LCSW and Mary Elow, PhD
Contributor: Walter Nieves, MD, Consulting Neurologist
Live Online via Zoom: Discussion, lecture
Location: NPAP, 40 West 13 Street, New York, NY 10011
Date/Time: Friday, January 8, 2021, 2:30PM – 4:00 PM
Total = 1.5 CE Contact hours

The group will read, study, and discuss books and papers by distinguished authors and researchers that explore some of the seminal concepts and clinical issues in neuropsychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. We will read and discuss: Damasio, Antonio (2018) The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, Vintage Books, A Division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

Part II: Assembling the Cultural Mind, pp. 69-161
Chapter 5: The Origin of Minds, pp. 71-83
Chapter 6: Expanding Minds, pp. 84-98
Chapter 7: Affect, pp. 99-116
Chapter 8: The Construction of Feelings, pp. 117-142
Chapter 9: Consciousness, pp. 143-161

After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
– Describe how neuropsychoanalysis has relevance for psychodynamic psychotherapy in terms of the brain affecting the mind.
– Describe how primitive reflexes and biochemical systems jump-start the attachment process.
– Describe how early relationships shape the building of neural circuitry.