MPS Psychopharm Conference brochure cover

, presents "The 16-Minute Hour: Integrating Focal Psychotherapy Interventions into Routine Pharmacotherapy" at the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society (MPS) 2025 Annual Psychopharmacology Conference. 

Conferences

Massachusetts Psychiatric Society (MPS) 2025 Annual Psychopharmacology Conference

David Mintz, MD, presents "The 16-Minute Hour: Integrating Focal Psychotherapy Interventions into Routine Pharmacotherapy."

, is a consultant on the conference staff for the international group relations online conference, 

Psychoanalysis In Transition: Exploring the Vista from Couch to Collective

Riggs staff members Jerry Fromm, PhD, ABPP; Samar Habl, MD; and Megan Kolano, PsyD, ABPP, serve on the conference staff for this international group relations online conference. 

, present at the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ISSPD) International Congress. 

Targets and Timescales of Change in the Psychodynamic Treatment of Personality Disorders

 (chaired by Katie Lewis, PhD; and Matthew Baity, PhD): 

Steven Ackerman, PhD, MBA, ABPP, presents "

The Impact of Psychoanalytic Residential Treatment on Individual Change

Assessing Changes in Social Cognition as an Outcome of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Psychic Pain as a Person-Centered Target of Therapeutic Change for Individuals Diagnosed with Personality Disorders

Digital Depth: Engagement and Alliance in a Virtual IOP for Young Adults with Personality Disorders

Advances in the Assessment and Treatment of Pathological Narcissism

Using the Sentence Completion Method to Advance Assessment of Pathological Narcissism

The Eye of a Tornado: Two Case Studies of Emptiness Amidst Personality Pathology

International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ISSPD) International Congress

Several Austen Riggs Center staff members present at the ISSPD's International Congress. 

2025-26 Friday Night Guest Lecture Series

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.

Educational Events

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.

When purchasing tickets, choose "Screening - Block K"

As part of the Meliora International Film Festival, documentary filmmaker Michele Beck will be screening her film 

at the Quad Cinema (34 West 13th Street New York, New York 10011). 

She describes the film as "a personal documentary that chronicles the filmmaker's journey from emotional breakdown, through treatment, to self-discovery. Following the death of her father, she revisits the open psychiatric hospital where she spent three and a half years after a suicide attempt in her early twenties, seeking to understand its impact on her life and make sense of the fragments of her past. The film delves into the challenges she faced in finding her voice and expressing her inner world, revealing how art ultimately became a means of communication and self-discovery."

Special Events

"Learning to Speak" Film Screening

Golzar Naghshineh, MS, LP, CGP, and Nancy Kaufman, LCSW, LP

While addressing behavioral needs and surface level fears and anxieties is crucial in helping patients who struggle with infertility, it is also crucial that we help patients process their deeper unconscious (and often conflicting) feelings around treatment, failure, loss, inadequacy, and successful pregnancy. This presentation will address (i) the important role the unconscious plays in infertility patients’ mental health (and how the therapy needs to be a safe place for the patient to say everything without restraint); (ii) new theories that explore how infertility, Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) and loss impact the psyche of this specific population; (iii) the role transference and countertransference play in helping our patients explore all of their feelings around ART and how the therapist can be helped to tolerate those feelings. Case presentation will be used to illustrate seven psychoanalytic concepts in practice with ART patients.

Working with Infertility Patients through a Psychoanalytic Lens

Golzar Naghshineh, MS, LP, CGP, and Nancy Kaufman, LCSW, LP, explore (among other things) new theories on how infertility, Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) and loss impact the psyche of this specific population. 

SAVE THE DATE – REGISTRATION INFORMATION COMING SOON

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

1560 Sherman Ave.
3rd Floor Auditorium
Evanston, IL

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

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

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.

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

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

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Special Events

"Learning to Speak" Film Screening

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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