Psychic pain – often described as unbearable, overwhelming emotional suffering – has been increasingly recognized as a core contributor to suicide risk, yet its clinical contours and empirical significance have only recently begun to be clarified. This talk will review the concept of psychic pain within the broader landscape of suicidology, psychoanalysis, and clinical science and highlight emerging findings that illuminate its structure, correlates, and role in the unfolding of suicidal crises. Across both clinical and nonclinical populations, recent work has demonstrated that psychic pain is not a diffuse or monolithic experience but reflects distinct dimensions of affective overwhelm and perceived loss of emotional control. These facets of psychic pain show robust links with well-established suicide-related vulnerabilities, including trauma exposure, greater severity of psychopathology, diminished psychological resilience, and pathological personality traits. Together, these associations underscore psychic pain as a meaningful marker of heightened vulnerability rather than a nonspecific emotional state. In this presentation, the presenter will review findings from recent studies which show that psychic pain is not only associated with chronic risk but also exerts a powerful moment-to-moment influence on both affective and interpersonal experiences. Taken together, these converging findings position psychic pain as a dynamic, clinically actionable construct that may help identify both who is at risk and when risk is likely to emerge. Implications for assessment and intervention will be discussed, with attention to how recognizing and targeting psychic pain may support more precise and timely suicide prevention efforts.

Educational Events

Where the Mind Suffers: Understanding Psychic Pain and Suicidal Crisis

This talk will review the concept of psychic pain within the broader landscape of suicidology, psychoanalysis, and clinical science and highlight emerging findings that illuminate its structure, correlates, and role in the unfolding of suicidal crises.

New tools using artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies with applications for health care and specifically mental health care are increasingly being developed. While clinicians and treatment settings vary with respect to their adoption, the rapid and pervasive development of these technologies suggests a need for all mental health care providers to have a basic understanding to navigate potential ethical pitfalls. This presentation will describe some of the more common types of technology-based tools available to mental health providers and how they are developed with a focus on how to ethically incorporate their use in clinical practice.

Ethical and Responsible use of Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies in Mental Health Care

Dr. Grus describes some of the more common types of technology-based tools available to mental health providers and how they are developed with a focus on how to ethically incorporate their use in clinical practice.

2025-26 Friday Night Guest Lecture Series

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.

Austen Riggs Center on Main Street in Stockbridge, MA

When Additional Treatment Is Needed, Understanding Your Options Matters

When outpatient therapy, hospitalization, PHP, IOP, or residential treatment has not led to lasting change, determining the next step can be difficult.

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.

Hosted by Director of Admissions and Associate Medical Director 

, and Associate Director of Admissions and Director of Psychological Testing 

, this session will provide an overview of:

How our open setting differs from locked or highly structured programs

How we approach safety, responsibility, and relational treatment

Participants are welcome to ask general questions. Please note that this is an open forum, and attendees should avoid sharing identifying medical information.

Free to attend. No registration required.

https://austenriggs.zoom.us/j/94732641062

Additional dates in this series: Wednesdays, March 25, April 1, and April 8, 2026.

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: Understanding the Austen Riggs Center Treatment Approach

Erikson Institute, Yale Child Study Center, Anna Freud Centre logos

A virtual conference presented by the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center, Yale Child Study Center, and the Anna Freud Centre

Mentalization—the capacity to understand one’s own and others’ behavior in terms of underlying thoughts, feelings, and intentions—is fundamental to emotional well-being, learning, and effective interpersonal functioning. Yet, how mentalization develops and operates can vary widely across age, culture, and context.

This day-long virtual conference brings together clinicians and researchers, from three internationally recognized institutions—the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center, the Yale Child Study Center, and the Anna Freud Centre—for a rich exploration of 

Through six presentations, participants will explore how mentalization can be fostered and supported from childhood to adulthood. The program integrates theoretical insights with practical applications, offering depth and relevance for both clinical and educational professionals.

Designed for mental health professionals and educators, this collaborative conference offers an opportunity to deepen understanding of the mentalizing process and its implications for treatment, research, and wider applications.

Conferences

Mentalizing Across Contexts

A virtual conference presented by the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center, Yale Child Study Center, and the Anna Freud Centre to explore how mentalization can be fostered and supported from childhood to adulthood. 

2026 Society for Personality Assessment (SPA) Workshops & Convention

, being held March 25 - 29, 2026 at the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel in Toronto, Ontario.

1:05-2:50 p.m. (Eastern)
Teaching a New Dog Old Tricks: Idiographic Interpretation of EMA Data through the Lens of Performance-Based Measurement
Speaker: 

Part of the Presidential panel: Assessing Personality as it is Lived: Integrating Context and Daily Life Through Technology


Using the Sentence Completion Method to Inform Ratings within the AMPD Framework


Using the Thematic Apperception Test to inform AMPD Ratings

Performance-Based Assessment of the DSM-5 Alternative Model of Personality Disorders


Relationships Between Personality Organization, Attachment, and Likelihood of Future Self-Harm in a Depressed Inpatient Sample


Preliminary Development and Psychometric Properties of the Adoption-Related Issues Narrative Codes (ARINC)

Riggs Staff to Present at 2026 Society for Personality Assessment Convention 

Riggs staff members Mark Hayden; Katie Lewis, PhD; and John Rucker, PsyD, will present at the 2026 Society for Personality Assessment (SPA) Workshops & Convention.

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)

"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.

This Workshop will provide opportunities for deeper psychological exploration of the role Large Group Identity plays in societal conflict and for application of the learning to members’ cases.

It explores how shared identity narratives, collective emotions, and group-level dynamics can shape polarization, escalation, and resistance to dialogue—especially in divided or rapidly changing social contexts.

7th IDI Case Conference: The Role of Large Group Identity in Understanding and Intervening with Societal Conflict

$485 (10% off for two members of the same organization; 20% off for groups of more than two; 30% off for students)

This workshop, presented by the International Dialogue Initiative, will provide opportunities for deeper psychological exploration of the role Large Group Identity plays in societal conflict and for application of the learning to members’ cases.

Conference given by the Austen Riggs Center

This conference, designed for advanced psychiatric residents (PGY2s, PGY3s, PGY4s, and Fellows), is intended to enhance participants’ capacities to work effectively with difficult-to-treat patients through the integration of psychodynamically-informed and patient-centered perspectives into diverse aspects of the patient’s care. The knowledge, skills, and attitudes of psychodynamic psychiatry are not only useful in the psychotherapy of patients, but also foster leadership skills for addressing systems enactments in relation to challenging patients, and can markedly enhance effectiveness of pharmacotherapy.

10:30-11:00 Introduction, David Mintz, MD

11:00-12:00 Taking Charge of the Treatment Frame, Edward Shapiro, MD

12:10-1:10 Seeing the Whole Patient: Integrating Psychodynamic Insights into Case Formulation and Treatment, Jane G. Tillman, PhD, ABPP

2:00 -3:00 Impasse in Psychotherapy, Daniel Knauss, PsyD, ABPP

3:10-4:00 Small Groups–applying our learning

11:00-12:00 The Uses of Countertransference, Erin Seery, MD

12:00-1:00 A Psychodynamic Systems Approach to Working with Complex Patients: System Enactment, Samar Habl, MD

2:00-3:00 Psychodynamic Psychopharmacology, David Mintz, MD

3:10-3:50 Small Groups–applying our learning

3:50-4:00 Lessons Learned, Concluding Remarks, and Feedback

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

Education and Training at Austen Riggs

7th Annual Residents' Conference on Working with Complex, Difficult-to-Treat Patients 

A virtual conference designed specifically for advanced psychiatric residents (PGY2s, PGY3s, PGY4s, and Fellows). 

The deployment of racialized fear as a political strategy has a profound impact on the individuals and communities who are targeted as objects of fear. In our current climate the use of fear as a tool of racialization is an important site for practitioners to consider in their work not solely with clients who are targets, but also when considering the work of clinical practice. 

This presentation will consider the framework of fear and racialization as conceived in the historic work of Frantz Fanon through the work of Afro Futurists who offer language and framing for holding sites of possibility in the Black imaginary in the midst of oppressive conditions of the present. While Blackness is an origin site of this discussion of fear, understanding the application of these concepts may be of significant utility in our current climate to individuals, practices, and spaces who may be targeted as objects of fear. 

This presentation will center the significance of understanding what fear can do to people, while identifying the necessity of holding autonomous sites of possibility for both the client, practitioner, and communities in which people reside.

Race, Fear, and the American Way

Dr. Moore considers the framework of fear and racialization as conceived in the historic work of Frantz Fanon through the work of Afro Futurists who offer language and framing for holding sites of possibility in the Black imaginary in the midst of oppressive conditions of the present.

The Freud Foundation US, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, and the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center

Save the Date (Time TBD) - Registration information to come. 

The final roundtable examines how digital technologies are reshaping psychic life within the context of place and its disembodied absence. What becomes of presence, intimacy, and therapeutic containment in virtual space? Panelists will consider how teletherapy, online rituals, and screen-mediated relationships challenge and extend traditional psychoanalytic concepts, including transitional space, the container-contained, and the skin ego.

This session offers a space for reflection on disembodiment, connection, and the symbolic potential of virtual environments—inviting new ways of thinking about psychic life in the digital age.

Rooted & Displaced: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meaning of Place. An International Roundtable Series

", a collaboration between the Sigmund Freud Museum, the Freud Foundation US and the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center.

Dislocated Presences: Technology, the Psyche, and the Meaning of Virtual Space

This roundtable examines how digital technologies are reshaping psychic life within the context of place and its disembodied absence.

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

Online Information Series: Understanding the Austen Riggs Center Treatment Approach

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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