The Austen Riggs Center is proud to be one of the sponsors for Yellowbrick’s 19th Annual Conference

Hybrid – Attend Online or In Person
Friday, December 5, 2025
8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. (Central Time)

1560 Sherman Ave.
3rd Floor Auditorium
Evanston, IL

Liftoff! is a call to action for mental health professionals to shift the paradigm—from pathologizing stagnation to cultivating launch readiness. This year’s conference explores how clinicians, family systems, and treatment programs can better equip emerging adults to thrive, not just survive, in the transition to adulthood.

, Founder, CEO and Chief Medical Officer at Yellowbrick

, Clinical Assistant Professor at Rosalind Franklin University/The Chicago Medical School

, Director of Group and Therapeutic Community Services at Yellowbrick

, Director of Family Services & Systems at Yellowbrick

, Medical Director of McLean’s 3East Residential DBT Programs and Founder & Director at Boston Precision Neurotherapeutics

, Inpatient Services Coordinator and a staff psychologist at The Menninger Clinic and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine

, Director of the Austen Riggs Center Online Intensive Outpatient Program for college students and emerging adults in Massachusetts

, Staff Psychologist at the Lindner Center of HOPE in the adult residential program

Conferences

Liftoff! Facilitating Successful Launch for Emerging Adults – Yellowbrick’s 19th Annual Conference

Yellowbrick's 19th annual conference - virtual and in-person options for attendance. 

, presents "Understanding and Treating Suicidal Thoughts and Behavior in Older Adults" as part of the Harvard Medical School / 

 day-long program "Mental Health in Older Adults." 

Faced with managing the mental health needs of a growing aging population, it's critical that health professionals stay current in the key domains affecting mental wellness in older adults. Improving clinician awareness, diagnosis and treatment of mental health conditions among older adults, particularly in light of the complex social, medical and cognitive challenges that many patients experience, will ensure the best possible outcomes and prolong functional healthspan.

This course will review recent research findings on effective treatments and new innovations in the care of older adults with mental health disorders and major neurocognitive disorders. We'll also explore brain health and cognitive aging, retirement and extended workforce participation, driving safety, alcohol use, and suicide. Attendees will improve their confidence and ability to treat mental health conditions in older patients as well as provide patients with a framework for successful aging."

Registrants can earn up to 7.00 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s) ™

Educational Events

Jane G. Tillman, PhD, ABPP

Understanding and Treating Suicidal Thoughts and Behavior in Older Adults

Jane G. Tillman, PhD, ABPP, presents as part of the Harvard Medical School / Cambridge Health Alliance day-long program "Mental Health in Older Adults." 

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.

Psychological assessment is typically viewed as something one does to diagnose psychological disorders or to plan for or evaluate an intervention. In this Grand Rounds, Dr. Finn will discuss Therapeutic Assessment, a brief intervention during which psychological testing is used collaboratively with clients to help them develop new self-narratives that are more coherent, accurate, useful, and compassionate. Dr. Finn will summarize more than 30 years of research on Therapeutic Assessment and its implication for other forms of psychological interventions. He will also discuss the core values underlying Therapeutic Assessment. He will also present a case with a video of an actual client.

Therapeutic Assessment: Using Psychological Testing as Brief Therapy

Stephen E. Finn, PhD, discusses Therapeutic Assessment, a brief intervention during which psychological testing is used collaboratively with clients to help them develop new self-narratives that are more coherent, accurate, useful, and compassionate.

2025-26 Friday Night Guest Lecture Series

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. 

, presents the virtual grand rounds "Daily Social Interactions and Suicide Risk: A Close Look at Momentary Dynamics and Their Implications for Assessment and Treatment" for the Jacobs School of Medicine at the University at Buffalo. 

Katie Lewis, PhD

Daily Social Interactions and Suicide Risk: A Close Look at Momentary Dynamics and Their Implications for Assessment and Treatment

Katie Lewis, PhD, presents a virtual grand rounds for the Jacobs School of Medicine at the University at Buffalo

2026 American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) National Meeting

 in San Francisco, CA, from January 27-February 1.

Film Workshop: Learning to Speak: A Documentary Film and Discussion About Creativity and Recovery


Presenter: Michele Beck, MFA (New York, NY)

This session features the screening of Learning to Speak, a 50-minute autobiographical documentary by artist, psychoanalyst, and filmmaker MicheleBeck, who, as a young adult, survived a suicide attempt and spent three and a half years in an open psychiatric hospital. The film explores the filmmaker’s return to the hospital decades later, following the death of her father, as she seeks to make sense of her early adult experiences and understand the therapeutic elements of that environment. Blending personal narrative, archival materials, and interviews with former patients, the film offers a deeply human and clinically relevant exploration of healing, memory, creativity, and the power of the therapeutic community.

Discussion Group 33: Treatment Resistance: Application of Psychoanalytic Ideas to Psychiatric Dilemmas 

Co-chairs: Eric M. Plakun, MD; Elizabeth F. Weinberg, MD

This discussion group addresses the application of psychoanalytic concepts to “treatment resistance,” defined as treatment nonresponse, focusing on work with high-risk patients. The session is targeted towards clinicians and clinical researchers. This small group activity supports improved competence through demonstrating specific approaches to working with highly complex, high-risk patients. The utility of psychoanalytic ideas in improving outcomes will be demonstrated, with discussion of how such concepts can improve management of high-risk behaviors and support the treatment alliance.

Discussion Group 45: Treating the Suicidal Patient 

Presenter: Martin E. Teising, Prof. Dr. Phil.

This session is intended for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists who are interested in understanding the complexity of work with suicidal patients. The format will be a case presentation of an intensive treatment of a suicidal patient, which is then discussed by experienced clinicians to gain a better understanding of the destructive and curative factors involved in such treatments. Attendees' participation in the discussion is encouraged as a way to further one’s thinking about self-attack, suicidal desperation, and life-sustaining interventions.

Clinical Conference for Residents, Psychology and Social Work Trainees, and Students, Presented by APsA Fellows: Eriksonian Integrity vs. Despair Struggles in an Obsessive Patient with Moral Rigidity and Somatic Symptoms 

This case conference will discuss the psychotherapy of a man facing profound emotional suffering in the wake of retirement, chronic medical illnesses, and unresolved early conflicts. Struggles with integrity vs. despair are complicated by obsessive tendencies, somatic symptoms, and core narcissistic vulnerability. Establishing authentic therapeutic engagement was hindered by false-self adaptations marked by compulsive and excessive agreeableness and moral rigidity. A prolonged hiatus unexpectedly served as a catalyst for growth by inviting reflection, autonomy, and deeper internalization. Developmental thinking of Erikson, Winnicott and Kohut are used to elucidate the treatment process.

Austen Riggs Center Clinicians Presenting at 2026 APsA National Meeting 

Daniel Knauss, PsyD, ABPP; and Jane Tillman, PhD, ABPP, present at the 2026 American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) National Meeting in San Francisco, CA, from January 27-February 1.

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.

Learning to Speak - a film by Michele Beck

Registration opens: Monday, February 23rd, 2026

, joins filmmaker Michele Beck for a virtual screening her film 

as part of the 2025-2026 Explorations in Mind Courses offered by the 

Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (BPSI)

Special Events

"Learning To Speak" Documentary Screening

Ed Shapiro, MD, joins filmmaker Michele Beck for a virtual screening her film 

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

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Educational Events

Therapeutic Assessment: Using Psychological Testing as Brief Therapy

Past Presentations

CE/CME Courses

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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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