The most destructive force waylaying development in children comes from failures in mourning that leave parents unreliably available to attend to the needs of the child, the type of small-t trauma that impedes growth. Parental failures invite overwhelming experiences of helplessness that become precursors for later feelings of shame, humiliation and alienation. As Symington (1993) notes: “Narcissism is nearly always the product of trauma” (p. 73).

In his early work, Freud was not thinking about trauma but rather theorizing about how we move from a preliminary self-focus towards appreciating our inherent need for others that underlies both resilience and the capacity to care. That capacity, as Winnicott highlights, requires our ability to stand as a separate self in relation to others who can also keep their own grounding.

Recent psychoanalytic explorations shift from ideas of primary narcissism to focus on Freud’s later ideas regarding life and death drives, distinguishing between libidinal and destructive aspects. Whereas the libidinal focus is on humiliation at dependence, the destructive focus is on envy. Destructive envy can be highly organized and difficult to discern, presenting particular clinical challenges because any change is seen as weakness, and resisted. Maintaining the self-idealization requires vigilance and deception.

Narcissism has become a catch-all phrase, referring to an almost sociopathic lack of care. The psychoanalytic literature, however, helps us distinguish between individuals who lead with their grandiosity and those who lead with their vulnerability. Whether the presentation is libidinal or aggressive, narcissistically-organized individuals pose particular problems in the treatment because of their difficulty in tolerating or even imagining an actual relationship with the analyst as a separate person because of the threat to their own subjectivity. Clinical illustrations will highlight some of the complexities of working with individuals whose development has been waylaid by the trauma of insufficient parental attunement.

Educational Events

Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP

Trauma, Identity, and Development

Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP, explores what happens when development has been waylaid by the trauma of insufficient parental attunement. Clinical illustrations will be provided. 

2025-26 Friday Night Guest Lecture Series

The role of the father, both flesh-and-blood and symbolic, is explored in a subset of families of patients with anorexia nervosa. In these families the mother’s narcissistic investment in her child makes separation-individuation difficult. A factor potentially influencing whether the child goes on to develop anorexia nervosa is the strength of the paternal function, which optimally helps the child learn how to appropriately deploy his aggression in the service of separation-individuation and as a means of developing “the experience of agency”: the phenomenological experience of oneself as having an intentional impact. The role of the paternal function in developing the experience of agency is illuminated by the metaphor of rough-and-tumble play, which encapsulates the kind of experience with early objects that facilitates or forecloses the child’s capacity for experiencing agency. In the families of these patients, the father is frequently described as passive or absent and the paternal function as compromised, which arguably leads the anorexic-to-be to relegate his experience of agency to his body, which he subjugates through omnipotent control.

Tom Wooldridge, PsyD

The Paternal Function in Anorexia Nervosa

Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, FIPA, CEDS-C, explores the role of the father, both flesh-and-blood and symbolic, in a subset of families of patients with anorexia nervosa. 

Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center Conference.

The Austen Riggs Center invites you to join an interdisciplinary conference, "Rebuilding Trust in Institutions: Bridging Generational Insights.” This gathering expands Erik Erikson’s foundational insights on basic trust and mistrust, extending them into today's complex social and institutional landscapes.

We are living through a moment where institutions responsible for our social wellbeing—education, government, and healthcare—face unprecedented scrutiny and skepticism. At the Austen Riggs Center we are invested in the study of relationships between individuals, families, groups, and social institutions; many of our patients grapple profoundly with intergenerational mistrust across these different domains and communities. Understanding these multidetermined dynamics requires an approach that integrates individual psychology with historical, cultural, and social dimensions.

This conference convenes clinicians, scholars, and community leaders to explore critical questions about trust and mistrust, particularly as experienced differently across generations. Through a thoughtful blend of panels, interactive breakout sessions, and a reflective plenary, participants will delve deeply into the psychological, historical, ethical, and social factors influencing institutional credibility.

Friday, September 19, 2025 | 6:30-8:00 p.m. (Eastern)

Roundtable: Trust, Betrayal, and Epistemic Vigilance

Chloe Campbell, PhD | Deputy Director, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London

Carly Lingenfelter, PhD | Assistant Professor, School of Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University

Angela Coombs Mumuni, MD | Associate Medical Director, Alameda County Behavioral Health Care Services; Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine

Moderators: Daniel Knauss, PsyD, and Katie Lewis, PhD

Saturday, September 20, 2025 | 9:00 a.m.-4:30 p.m. (Eastern)

Roundtable: The Perspective of the Senior Generation

Medria Connolly, PhD | Clinical Psychologist, Private Practice

Retired Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson | U.S. Air Force

Michael Roth, PhD | President, Wesleyan University

Moderators: Jane Tillman, PhD and Edward Shapiro, MD

Roundtable: The Perspective of the Younger Generation

Steven Rathje, PhD | Postdoctoral Fellow, NYU; Incoming Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University

Nic Weststrate, PhD | Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Chicago

Christina Wusinich, MS | Doctoral Student, Counseling Psychology, NYU

Moderators: Katie Lewis, PhD, and Dan Knauss, PsyD

Roundtable: Intergenerational Discussion - Legacy, Change, and the Future

Includes all panelists from the Saturday morning generational roundtables

Moderators: Dan Knauss, PsyD and Jane Tillman, PhD

 (for all participants, grouped by generation)

Moderators: Katie Lewis, PhD and Edward Shapiro, MD

Conferences

Austen Riggs Center Centennial Conference attendees watching Dr. Eric Plakun's presentation.

Education and Training at Austen Riggs

Rebuilding Trust in Institutions: Bridging Intergenerational Insights

2025 Fall Conference on Rebuilding Trust in Institutions.

Freud Lacan institute International Research Symposium 2025 graphic

 Eve Watson, PhD (2022), present at the Freud Lacan Institute (Fli) International Research Symposium, 

Chronic Depression and Trauma in Childhood: The Role of Long-Term Psychotherapy – Evidence and Effectiveness

Dr. Tillman presents "When Psychoanalysis Works in the Psychiatric Setting" and Dr. Watson offers the response "Observations on Time Spent at Austen Riggs."

Freud Lacan Institute International Research Symposium

Jane Tillman, PhD, ABPP, and former Erikson Scholar Eve Watson, PhD, present at this annual research symposium in Dublin, Ireland. 

The AI revolution is here—and by “here,” I mean right here in our consulting rooms. Interactive self-help tools are now marketed as AI psychotherapy, and for many, they’ve become a viable treatment option. Augmentation technologies for clinicians are readily available, reshaping aspects of clinical practice in real time. Meanwhile, patients are forming relationships with AI entities that range from instrumentally useful, to emotionally resonant and companionable, to psychologically destabilizing—even destructive. This Grand Rounds will explore the clinical state of play amid these rapidly accelerating developments, with a focus on how psychoanalytic sensibilities can help us think, feel, and act in response.

The AI Pharmakon in Psychoanalytic Care: Ambivalence, Augmentation, and Psychoanalytic Futures

Todd Essig, PhD, explores the clinical state of play amid the rapidly accelerating developments with AI, with a focus on how psychoanalytic sensibilities can help us think, feel, and act in response.

There is a type of patient who haunts psychoanalysis from the margins, never settling into existing diagnostic categories but never completely disappearing either. Variously referred to as “normotic” (Bollas, 1987, McDougall, 1978, 1985), “false self” (Winnicott, 1960), and the “as if” personality (Deutsch, 1942), this patient confounds conventional classificatory schemas because while ostensibly high-functioning, verbal, cooperative, with reality-testing intact and not necessarily any major trauma history, it eventually emerges that something fundamental – the capacity to feel their feelings – is missing, dysfunctional, non-existent. It can be nearly impossible to detect the problem, not least because an “absence” is its defining feature, but also because the patient rarely complains about the problem (of not feeling their feelings) either. Whereas under ordinary circumstances, the patient’s emotional dissatisfactions are the engine propelling treatment forward, however ambivalently and inconsistently (Freud, 1937), in these cases, the patient suffers from a mechanical problem of precisely this kind – a disconnection from authentic feelings – that makes the awareness of dissatisfaction elusive and unlikely.

In what follows, Gila Ashtor, PhD, LP, focuses on the “pseudo-self” – a particular variation of dissociative organization in which normality and functionality camouflage the absence of emotional authenticity. Ashtor explores the connection between this unique personality organization and today’s neoliberal regime where disconnection, speed, and efficiency are hailed as the optimal features of successful personhood. Our field’s continued inability to reckon with the pervasive problems of the “pseudo-self” makes us complicit with a damaged culture that is dehumanizing and disconnected.

The Pseudo-Self

Gila Ashtor, PhD, LP, focuses on the “pseudo-self” – a particular variation of dissociative organization in which normality and functionality camouflage the absence of emotional authenticity.

2025-26 Friday Night Guest Lecture Series - Sheila Hafter Gray Memorial Lecture

The Sheila Hafter Gray Memorial Lecture is underwritten by ACPEinc and honors Dr. Gray's role in advancing the importance of psychoanalytic education.

The mechanisms of patient change have been described in detail by prominent psychoanalytic thinkers over the last 130 years. These descriptions form the basis for analytic training and are often grounded in the wisdom learnt from single case studies. Along with these papers on technique is a growing set of empirical research studies demonstrating psychoanalytic psychotherapy across multiple groups of patients is an effective treatment for mental health disorders. In parallel to these traditional therapy descriptions and outcome studies, has been another form of research: psychotherapy process research. Process-outcome studies aim to discover if patient changes observed in treatment can be understood in more detail using validated research measures applied to empirical data - usually transcripts of audio or video from therapy sessions. This talk overviews 30 years of studies from the author's and other research groups that includes studies of transference, attachment, mastery of self-understanding and self-control, and emotional and cognitive change. Recent work will be highlighted describing changes in Erikson's psychosocial maturity conflicts - particularly the resolution of Mistrust and Constraint and growth of Industry and Affiliation studied over five years of treatment for patients meeting criteria for borderline personality disorder. A final reflection will be learnings from a subsample of patients who do not improve over time.

Sun, Soil and Rain: Research on Patient Growth in Psychotherapy

Brin Grenyer, PhD, overviews 30 years of studies from his and other research groups that includes studies of transference, attachment, mastery of self-understanding and self-control, and emotional and cognitive change.

These days, the topic of intellectual disability seems frequently to function as a conversation stopper, and yet studying its history can teach us much we need to know about the seductive appeal of fascisms both past and present. The Question of Unworthy Life resituates the hundredthousandfold Nazi coercive “eugenic” sterilizations and “euthanasia” murders of people with cognitive impairments and psychiatric diagnoses in a longer history of lethal malice toward the vulnerable that was erotically charged already since the 1890s and inseparable from the promise of libidinal pleasures that facilitated the Nazi ascent to political power. On the basis of a wealth of rare archival evidence, Dagmar Herzog, PhD, revisits this grim history, exploring also the ambivalent enmeshment of those professionals in medicine, religious charity, and pedagogy principally responsible for provision of supports. But she recovers as well singularly courageous counter-voices at every step and, taking the story into the 2020s, chronicles the uneven, protracted battles to establish a revolutionary new image of the human and novel practices of education and care.

The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany's Twentieth Century

Dagmar Herzog, PhD, resituates the hundredthousandfold Nazi coercive “eugenic” sterilizations and “euthanasia” murders of people with cognitive impairments and psychiatric diagnoses in a longer history of lethal malice toward the vulnerable. 

This presentation begins with a summary of the theory of overwhelm, a way of conceptualizing working with intensity and excitation that is not about guarding the self (not about emotional regulation, not about protecting the ego from the drives) but which explores what becomes possible when one reaches the limit of what is bearable in oneself, when one follows the exigency of the unconscious. For the clinician, working with overwhelm is both a challenge and an art form: it requires us, as therapists, to make ourselves permeable to our patients in ways that make us exquisitely vulnerable and to take true risks the results of which cannot be guaranteed ahead of time.

To illustrate the difficulty, but also the extraordinary possibilities of such work, work that rends the self to allow something new to emerge, Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD, will discuss the analysis of a Jewish patient whose encounter with the Palestinian genocide raised considerable anxieties and revived questions of identity, trauma, and intergenerational transmission. The clinical work–and the presentation–raise questions of ethics, of rethinking questions of intergenerational transmission and the debts it incurs, and the relation of the political to the psychic.

Working Clinically with Overwhelm: The Cost and Growth-Inducing Possibilities of Undoing the Self 

Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD, talks about clinicians working with overwhelm as both a challenge and an art form: it requires therapists, to make themselves permeable to patients in ways that make therapists exquisitely vulnerable.

2025-26 Friday Night Guest Lecture Series - Yasmin Roberts Memorial Lecture

Racism, and otherness, continues to be contentious for psychoanalysts to consider as a psychic phenomenon. Unlike aggression and sexuality, racism is held in silence and resistance, inhibiting exploration of this aspect of mind. By closely examining how and where the analyst/psychotherapist locates themselves racially and working through our resistance and countertransference to this type of exploration, this paper invites us to include these aspects of mind for our analytic use. This paper expands on how we become raced by exploring the transgenerational transmission of racial trauma, and its intra-psychic, structuralizing components. Using examples from the creative arts and clinical vignettes to demonstrate how being raced, as a universal phenomenon, is embodied and symbolized in mind, opens a therapeutic aperture for clinicians who may benefit from a psychoanalytic, intrapsychic perspective on this aspect of our shared humanity.

Becoming Raced-Psychic Consequences of Transgenerational Racial Trauma

Dionne R. Powell, MD, expands on how we become raced by exploring the transgenerational transmission of racial trauma, and its intra-psychic, structuralizing components.

Explore a wide range of psychotherapy conferences, lectures, workshops, and educational events with Riggs clinicians, as well as online CE/CME courses. 

Therapy Conferences & Educational Events | Austen Riggs Center

For answers to any questions about events, conferences, or CME courses, please feel free to contact us.

In addition to wide ranges of published articles, interviews, and other materials featuring the work of Riggs clinicians, our Resource Center houses video excerpts and select full presentations from past academic conferences and educational events.

Educational conference given by the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center.

The Erikson Institute for Education, Research, and Advocacy of the Austen Riggs Center provides extensive psychoanalytic education and clinical training for professionals in all stages of their careers.

Educational Conference for Mental Health Professionals

An important part of the Erikson Institute's educational mission is providing online continuing education and continuing medical education courses with an emphasis on psychodynamic psychotherapy. Certificates and CE/CME credits are availabile for those with an MD, PhD, or PsyD, and for social workers.

Austen Riggs offers free CE/CME courses for mental health professionals.

Events

Featured

Conferences

Rebuilding Trust in Institutions: Bridging Intergenerational Insights

Past Presentations

CE/CME Courses

Contact Us for More

For answers to any questions about events, conferences, or CME courses, please feel free to contact us.

© 2025 The Austen Riggs Center

Privacy Policy

Follow us: