Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is one of the most misunderstood and stigmatized diagnoses in the world of mental health. This talk presents a contemporary psychoanalytic overview of BPD's diagnosis and treatment, rejecting the stereotypical "outside-in" portrait of a wild and hard-to-manage patient for an "inside-out" view rooted in the patient's subjective experience. BPD is framed, at its core, as a condition of pathological diffusion occurring chronically and across multiple domains, from the cognitive and emotional to the relational and cultural. Drawing pluralistically from objective relational, relational, and attachment theory and research, the presentation seeks to show how borderline phenomena is a part of the human condition that is relevant to everyone, and how it becomes a disorder when the development of selfhood is severely disrupted beginning early in life. Specific treatment considerations for the BPD population are considered, highlighting the importance of individualized care while acknowledging major contributions from two manualized psychodynamic treatments, Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) and Mentalization-Based Therapy (MBT). Future directions for understanding BPD are also addressed, as we take up issues of reducing stigma and better integration of psychoanalytic ideas with the more mainstream perspectives from the cognitive-behavioral paradigm.

Educational Events

A Disorder of Diffusion: Contemporary Perspectives on Borderline Personality Disorder

Dr. Kriss explores borderline personality disorder (BPD) through a contemporary psychoanalytic lens, challenging stigma by focusing on the patient’s lived experience and developmental history. He also highlights key treatment approaches, including Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) and Mentalization-Based Therapy (MBT).

Austen Riggs Center on Main Street in Stockbridge, MA

These free online information sessions are designed for adults considering residential treatment, families exploring options for a loved one, and mental health professionals interested in referring a patient.

Sessions are offered from 5:00-5:50 p.m. (Eastern) on multiple dates throughout the year. Registration is required, but there's no cost to attend. Select a date that works for you and register in advance—a Zoom link will be sent to you directly.

Finding the right psychiatric treatment can be challenging, particularly when previous treatments have not led to lasting improvement.

Our Director of Admissions will explain what makes treatment at Austen Riggs different, who may benefit most from our approach, and how the admissions and evaluation process works.

Whether you're considering treatment for yourself, supporting someone you care about, or exploring a referral, these sessions offer an opportunity to learn more and ask questions, without pressure or commitment.

What makes Austen Riggs different from other psychiatric programs

The kinds of situations where Riggs-level care tends to make a difference

How we think about safety in an open, non-restrictive setting

What the admissions and evaluation process actually involves and what daily life as a patient looks like

Dr. Ridenour brings deep experience helping individuals and families determine whether Riggs is the right fit—and what to expect if it is.

Special Events

Patients walking around the open setting campus of the Austen Riggs Center on Main Street in Stockbridge, MA.

Voluntary Residential Treatment in an Open Setting

Online Information Series for Prospective Patients, Families, and Referrers

Join us for a free, live online information session about the Austen Riggs Center—our open therapeutic community, our approach to intensive psychiatric treatment, and how the admissions process works.

Drawing on empirical research on cross-cultural psychotherapy processes, this presentation examines moment-to-moment therapeutic interactions in which therapists' often unmarked cultural, professional, and sociopolitical assumptions, norms, and values are enacted. Particular attention will be given to how these interactions shape key therapeutic processes, including the therapeutic relationship, client self-disclosure, engagement, and, ultimately, treatment outcomes.

The presentation features transcripts from actual videotaped psychotherapy sessions conducted in outpatient community mental health and family counselling settings, as well as brief segments from publicly available psychotherapy videos. These examples highlight seemingly ordinary clinical interactions, such as supporting parents with child-rearing challenges, conducting mental status assessments, working with clients experiencing depression, and assisting with disability benefit applications.

Through detailed linguistic and social interactional analyses, the presentation illuminates how routine therapeutic exchanges can inadvertently reinforce, negotiate, or challenge the implicit values, assumptions, and biases of both therapists and clients. From a relational perspective, participants will be invited to consider how unspoken cultural expectations, professional norms, and power dynamics become enacted within the therapeutic encounter and influence engagement and meaning-making between therapist and client.

The presentation will encourage critical reflection on participants' own clinical practice and offer opportunities to explore ways of collaboratively negotiating cultural differences and power imbalances in therapy. Practical guidelines and discourse-based strategies for fostering therapeutic engagement across cultural differences will be presented and critically discussed. The discussion will also consider how therapists' implicit cultural and professional assumptions may shape relational dynamics within therapy and influence what becomes speakable, unspeakable, or therapeutically actionable in clinical work.

Eunjung Lee, PhD

Enactments of Cultural and Professional Beliefs, Values, and Biases in Therapy: Negotiating Difference, Power, and the Therapeutic Relationship Across Cultures

Dr. Lee explores how unspoken cultural and professional assumptions shape therapeutic interactions and offers practical strategies for navigating cultural differences and power dynamics in clinical work.

2026-27 Friday Night Guest Lecture Series

In this talk, taking a developmental approach, Dr. Sharp considers how disruptions in mentalizing may contribute to the development and maintenance of personality pathology. Using mentalizing-based approaches as a framework, the talk will explore how shifts in mentalizing within the serve-and-return between therapist and patient, and caregiver and child, may provide a window into understanding not only how personality develops, but how personality pathology is maintained, and how meaningful and lasting therapeutic change occurs.

Carla Sharp, PhD

Mentalizing: Cause, Correlate and Mechanism of Change in Personality Pathology

Dr. Sharp explores how disruptions in mentalizing contribute to personality pathology and how strengthening mentalizing can support lasting therapeutic change.

If you are a clinician, college counseling professional, parent, family member, or emerging adult wondering whether a higher level of care may be needed, we invite you to join us for a live online information session about the Austen Riggs Online Intensive Outpatient Program. These sessions offer a practical opportunity to ask questions about how the program works, whom it may be appropriate for, and how to begin the admissions process. 

Sessions are offered from 6:00-6:50 p.m. (Eastern) on multiple dates throughout the year. Registration is required, but there's no cost to attend. Select a date that works for you and register in advance—a Zoom link will be sent to you directly.

Choosing or recommending an intensive outpatient program can raise a lot of questions. Is IOP the right level of care? How is an online program structured? What kinds of young adults tend to benefit? How does Riggs think about treatment, symptoms, relationships, and lasting change? These free online sessions are designed to help referrers, prospective patients, and families better understand the Austen Riggs Online IOP and whether it may be a good fit. Dr. Spencer Biel, Director of Online IOP, will provide an overview of the program, explain the admissions process, and answer general questions from attendees. For referrers, this is a chance to explore whether the Riggs IOP may be appropriate for a patient whose outpatient treatment is not enough, whose progress has plateaued, or who is stepping down from a higher level of care. For prospective patients and families, this is an opportunity to learn more about the program in a low-pressure setting before deciding whether to take the next step.

Each session will include an overview of:

How the program supports college students and emerging adults

What makes the Riggs psychodynamic team approach different

How the program helps patients understand emotions, relationship patterns, coping, and resilience

Eligibility requirements for patients in Massachusetts and Vermont

When IOP may be appropriate—and when another level of care may be needed

How admissions, consultation, and referral work

How Riggs can collaborate with families, referring clinicians, school counseling centers, and other treatment providers

The Riggs Online IOP is designed for college students and emerging adults, ages 18-30, who are physically located in Massachusetts or Vermont and are struggling with the academic, work, social, emotional, and relational challenges of young adulthood.

Dr. Biel brings deep experience helping individuals and families determine whether the online IOP from Riggs is the right fit—and what to expect if it is.

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Online Information Series About Our Online IOP

Join our Online IOP Director for a live, open Q&A about our online IOP for MA & VT college students and emerging adults (18-30).

Dating violence is a significant problem among emerging adults and is associated with a wide variety of mental health concerns. While there has been considerable attention to dating violence among adolescents, less is known about dating violence among emerging adults. This presentation will argue that this developmental stage (ages 18 to 29) offers unique challenges that make dating violence of particular concern. This presentation will include information on the prevalence of dating violence in this population, risk and protective factors, and mental health correlates. In addition, a theoretical framework developed by the presenter’s research team will be presented. The framework identifies types of dating violence events, relationships, and patterns across time. Evidence-based interventions for dating violence will be discussed.

Claire Burke Draucker, PhD, RN, FAAN, headshot.

Claire Burke Draucker, PhD, RN, FAAN

Dating Violence Among Emerging Adults

Claire Burke Draucker, PhD, RN, FAAN, explores the topic of dating violence among emerging adults.

In this lecture, Dr. Neal Vorus discusses an area of convergence between Hans Loewald’s processive model of therapeutic action and a more recent perspective advanced by Italian Field Theorists (especially Antonino Ferro and Giuseppe Civitarese). In particular, he compares Loewald’s (1960, 1975) view of analytic change as occurring through a process of overcoming a differential within the “force field” of the transference to Ferro’s (2009) depiction of a “constantly expanding oneiric holographic field.” While originating from different traditions, both perspectives reflect the crucial influence of philosophical perspectives aimed at deconstructing the subject-object split in western metaphysics (Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, respectively). Relatedly, both perspectives advance what might be termed a “general field model,” wherein the centrality of interpretation is both retained and transformed to reflect a dialogic, processive model of analytic change (see Vorus, 2025). In this model, the elaborative function of therapeutic interaction is emphasized above approaches aimed at divining and naming unconscious contents. Dr. Vorus will end his presentation by presenting several clinical vignettes and discussing implications for psychoanalytic technique.

Interpretation and the Elaborative Function

In this lecture, Dr. Neal Vorus explores connections between Hans Loewald’s model of therapeutic change and contemporary Italian Field Theory, highlighting a relational, process-oriented view of psychoanalysis. Through theory and clinical examples, the talk examines how therapeutic interaction fosters analytic change beyond traditional interpretation-focused approaches.

Continuing education information to follow

In 1944 a team of military psychiatrists, led by Brigadier General William Menninger, set out to investigate an epidemic of "pouting, stubbornness, procrastination, inefficiency, and passive obstructionism” that had broken out among the soldiers. The results of their research were unveiled the following year, in U.S. War Department Technical Bulletin, Medical 203. Alongside "Psychogenic Asthenic Reaction” and “Involution Melancholia,” a new condition was identified: Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder. The idea of “passive aggression” very quickly escaped the confines of TB MED 203 to become one of the first fad diagnoses of the postwar era—a fixture, even a fixation point, in the way we make sense of any number of maddening situations. As for TBD MED 203, it went on to become the first version of the DSM. This talk will consider passive aggression as a historical phenomenon, as a theory of interpersonality, and as a transference/countertransference dynamic in the consulting room.

Ben Kafka, PhD, LP

Passive Aggression: History, Theory, and Practice

Dr. Kafka's presentation traces the history of passive aggression from its origins as a military diagnosis to its broader cultural and clinical influence, examining it as both an interpersonal pattern and a transference/countertransference dynamic in psychotherapy.

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.

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Educational Events

A Disorder of Diffusion: Contemporary Perspectives on Borderline Personality Disorder

Past Presentations

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

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