There's an interesting paradox at the heart of contemporary psychoanalytic writing. In acknowledging our participation in the process with our patients as what is more accurately described as embedded subjects rather than objective arbiters, we have relinquished many of the old ideas about what the analyst can know (Bion, Lacan, Ogden, S. Mitchell, Benjamin, D.B. Stern, among others). So how do we write well and usefully from a place of not knowing? In this course we'll explore how writers in psychoanalysis have grappled with this question and consider ways in which we write psychoanalysis that do and do not reflect this and other developments within contemporary theory and practice. We'll think metacritically about writing in the field, especially clinical material, and about the positionality of authorship in the specific context of being writing analysts. And we'll look at some approaches to writing that have been emerging more recently within psychoanalysis to better engage with these complexities-for example, uses of autotheory, with all its promise and its perils; depicting vs enacting as modes for clinical storytelling (Ogden, Naiburg, McGleughlin); and more generally parsing what I've been thinking about as grammars of certainty and uncertainty.

Class time will include periods of writing that we will use as a resource to enhance discussion, just as we will use discussion to enhance further writing.

Total credit hours: 6

Kim Bernstein, Ph.D., LP, NCPsyA is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York. She is faculty and supervisor at the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center and the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, where she heads the writing component of the National Training Program. Prior to becoming a psychoanalyst, she worked as a professional editor for over 15 years in academic and commercial publishing; she is currently on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

In the language of economics, 'the invisible hand' refers to unseen forces of the free market economy of supply/demand. Current and historical imperialism and colonization in LATAM is obfuscated by the 'invisible hand of whiteness' in Latin America/Caribbean where white supremacy acts as an unseen force that subjugates an entire region and its people. As such, US foreign policy and immigration policy act as instruments of colonization and white supremacy. As we continue to witness the horror of undocumented immigrants being subjugated by white supremacy with mass deportations, how can we pivot in our clinical practice in the service of the subjugated?

We will follow clinical case examples and apply concepts of decolonial practice, community psychoanalysis and the analytic frame to consider the clinical concerns of a colonized subject, namely immigrants from LATAM.

Total credit hours: 4.5

Rossanna Echegoyén, LCSW is a Latina/Bilingual Psychoanalyst who is the first BIPOC Co-Director at Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis in New York City. Formerly the Director of the One Year Program in Psychoanalysis and the Sociopolitical World, she collaborated with CORE Committee on Race and Ethnicity to shape the current constellation of a program that intersects the sociopolitical context and psychoanalysis. She is founder and former Co-Chair of the Committee on Race and Ethnicity at MIP, Co-Founder of the Psychoanalytic Coalition for Social Justice (formerly the Inter-Institute Task Force on DEI - a collaboration of various institutes in NYC), serves on the Board of Division 39-Section 9 ("Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility") and is Co-Editor of The Psychoanalytic Activist. She has 18 years of clinical experience in community mental health clinics, hospitals and primary care in low-income neighborhoods and at detention facilities. Her activist work centers on community organizing within analytic circles, namely addressing structural racism in psychoanalytic training. She is Faculty and Supervisor at various institutes in New York and is Adjunct Faculty at the Smith School of Social Work. Her primary practice is in New York City and provides remote therapy to California residents.

Philip Bromberg's interest in relational trauma led him to develop his ideas about dissociation, the fluidity of the mind and the notion that the self is comprised of multiple self-states. This workshop will familiarize participants with Bromberg's contribution to psychoanalysis starting with his expansion of Sullivan's Interpersonal theory, to his relationship with Stephen Mitchell and what grew into the paradigmatic shift known as the Relational turn. We will then address his interest in trauma, the neurobiological structure underlying it and the impact of affect regulation in clinical work.

Total credit hours: 4.5

Velleda C. Ceccoli, PhD is in private practice in New York. She is on the faculties of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, The Stephen Mitchell Center, the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and the Institute for Relational and Self Psychologies in Milan, Italy. Dr. Ceccoli is on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She has published a number of journal articles on language, trauma, dissociation, sexuality, gender and erotic experience. She also writes the ongoing psychoanalytic blog Out of My Mind.

In Stephen Mitchell's ground breaking book, Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity, the first part is dedicated to explicating the writings of Hans Loewald. For Mitchell, Loewald was one of the great ancestors or grandfathers of Relational Psychoanalysis. Through careful readings of a few of Loewald's seminal papers you will come to understand why Mitchell felt this way. And why Lew Aron's last directive to students of psychoanalysis was to study Loewald. In Ego and Reality, a paper written in 1949 you will be introduced to his developmental thinking, where he visualizes development of the mind that extends from birth throughout life. His major tenet being that interaction with others is constitutive of mind. Unlike many psychoanalytic writers and scholars Loewald gives very few clinical illustrations yet his writing is quite evocative. You will first read in its entirety a Loewald paper then we will carefully go over passages as a group with participants remarking on the meaning it evokes for them.

Total credit hours: 4.5

Robin Young, Ph.D.: Private Practice of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Individuals and Couples NYC. Training analyst, Supervisor and Faculty National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis; Supervisor Metropolitan Center for Mental; Supervisor Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy; Faculty and Supervisor the former New York Center for Psychoanalytic Training; Studied with Lew Aron for 10 years; Studied with Jessica Benjamin for 9 years; Ongoing Loewald Study Group; Assorted publications in psychoanalysis; Member APA Div 39; Member IARPP.

This seminar will provide both a dream space and critical thinking space for participants concerning our present day and its impact on dream interpretation. The notion of universal symbolism will be challenged and expanded on, while increasing concrete tools in the consulting room concerning ways in which to engage with patients who give meaning to/lack giving meaning to their dream states.

Total credit hours: 4.5

Shari Appollon, LCSW is a Haitian-American psychoanalyst in private practice in Brooklyn New York. She is a 2024 graduate of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and a 2019 graduate of the One Year Program at The Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center. She currently serves as the Associate Director of Clinical Services at NYC Affirmative Psychotherapy group practice. Shari is the recipient of NIP's 2020 Educator's Award for her paper 'The Triple Entendre' and runner-up for Division 39's 2020 Candidate Essay Contest for her paper 'The Parable of the Sower'. She writes primarily about culture, psychoanalytic theory and enjoys engaging in herbalism in her free time.

Over the past few decades psychoanalysis has steadily been theorizing about trauma transmissions affecting multiple generations. These traumas are individual, familial, cultural and political. Unmourned and unknown, these histories remain open wounds passing from one generation to the next in search of recognition and repair. Until they are mourned and repaired, they will continue to occupy every generation in problematic ways. In families, transmissions are absorbed by young children through their early attachment relationships, while racial, sexual/gender, class and historical pain is inflicted on our psyches, our interpersonal relationships, and it is powerfully re-enacted in our politics. This unconscious history can transmit resilience, resourcefulness, and care for the other. But all too often, the here-and-now is inscribed with darker transmissions: hopelessness, terror, despair, hostility towards the Other.

In this seminar, we will examine clinical processes through the lens of history, social critique, psychoanalytic theory, and attachment theory. As clinicians and as citizens, living in a time of chaos and uncertainty, we understand that the violence of trauma fractures our experience of being in the world; it ruptures human bonds and damages the fabric of attachment. Repairing history means knowing, and mourning, our unknown histories, and the histories of others.

Total credit hours: 6

Jill Salberg, Ph.D. is faculty and supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies, and a member of IPTAR. She is on the Editorial Board of Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and a Reviewer for The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Her books are: Editor of and contributor to two books: Good Enough Endings: Breaks, Interruptions and Terminations from Contemporary Relational Perspectives (2010) and Psychoanalytic Credos: Personal and Professional Journeys of Psychoanalysts (2022). She has co-edited with Sue Grand, The Wounds of History: Repair and Resilience in the Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma, and Transgenerational Trauma and the Other: Dialogues Across History and Difference, (2017), both books won the Gradiva Award (2018). Their co-written book Transgenerational Trauma: A Contemporary Introduction (2024) published by Routledge. She is in private practice in Manhattan and online.

In this workshop we will explore the nature of the psychotherapy relationship, using Ferenczi's concept of a "dialogue of unconsciouses" as a point of departure for the experience. We will explore the fundamental role of imagination in the psychoanalytic project, and consider the obstacles that inhibit it, and ways of freeing it. We will deepen our grasp of unconscious dimensions of therapeutic relating through our engagement with difficult treatment moments.

Along with Dr. Bass, participants in the workshop may present material themselves or work with others' clinical vignettes. They will gain experience using emotional responses to patients to identify and work through enactments, impasses and other challenging countertransference obstacles at the heart of psychotherapy. Implications for how we make use of ourselves, the way we respond to our patients, and how this contributes to our therapeutic intentions and sense of 'technique' will be explored.

We will focus on patients with whom we have felt especially emotionally affected, i.e., those who have evoked intense, disturbing or arousing reactions: patients about whom one dreams at night, or becomes preoccupied by day, or who evoke anxious or counter-resistive responses, such as fighting sleep, or falling asleep or becoming bored; patients who arouse us to anger, disgust, shame, or sexual or other body experiences. Such experiences, often at the heart of enactments in psychotherapy, provide special opportunities for gaining access to the ways in which the unconscious life of patient and therapist emerge and interact, creating special challenges and special opportunities for deepening and furthering the work. Please come prepared to share some clinical moments if possible.

Total credit hours: 4.5

Anthony Bass, Ph.D. is an associate professor and clinical consultant at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and faculty, training and supervising analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. In addition, he is on the faculty and a supervisor at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies National Training Program, the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is a founder and president of the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. He was a founding editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, the International Journal of Relational Perspectives, and a founding director of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He leads clinical study groups and workshops around the US, Europe and Israel.

This course will look at our assumptions about what is transformative in analysis by contrasting those assumptions with their counterparts in Zen Buddhist practice. This will entail exploring our psychoanalytic theories of the self along side Buddhist concepts of no self, emptiness and interdependence. We will also look at ways in which meditation practice can go awry, colluding with our "curative fantasies" in ways that exacerbate dissociation, masochism, and the avoidance of intimacy and dependence and how these tendencies need to be recognized and dealt with when meditators seek therapy.

Total credit hours: 4.5

Barry Magid, MD is a psychoanalyst and Zen teacher, having received Dharma Transmission from Charlotte Joko Beck. He has taught Zen for 30 years at the Ordinary Mind Zendo in New York City. He is the author of three books on the intersection of Zen and psychoanalysis: Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychoanalysis (2002), Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, (2008) and Nothing is Hidden: The Psychology of Zen Koans (2013). He is the author of numerous papers on Relational Self Psychology and was the editor of Freud's Case Studies: Self Psychological Perspectives (1993).

The Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center, LLC is recognized by the New York State Education Department's State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0261.
The Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center, LLC 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-0055.
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Total available credits earned is between 4.5 and 6 depending on the seminar. Full attendance and evaluations are required to be completed within one week of the end of seminar to receive certificates.