FRIDAY NIGHT GUEST LECTURE SERIES 2023-24

In this presentation, Sebastian Leikert describes the therapeutic path with a young male adolescent patient suffering from emotional instability, suicidality, and self-injury. Establishing therapeutic contact with his perception of disorganized bodily states led to relief from suicidal pressure. Working through these bodily sensations in a resonant presence of the therapist who privileges perception over interpretation in these episodes, played an important role in alleviating the intense fear of annihilation and helped him overcome states of autoaggression leading to self-injury in the past. Leikert will describe the inner dynamics and structure of the bodily unconscious and the ways in which somatic narration and verbal interpretation can be brought into a fruitful relationship.

View the rest of the 2023-24 Friday Night Guest Lectures in the series.

Educational Events

Working with the Bodily Unconscious: Somatic Narration as a Method to Anchor the Working-Through in the Body-Self

Free, virtual Friday Night Guest Lecture with Sebastian Leikert. 

Experiences of feeling haunted and of being in the presence of ghosts are prominent in narratives of patients/people of color in the United States and of mixed-race identity. A creative reading of Hans Loewald’s evocative statement on therapeutic action, the process of transforming “ghosts into ancestors,” is used to explore a way of being with and healing patients with mixed-race identities who are imprisoned in melancholic states. An extended case vignette of an Indian American psychoanalyst working with a patient with a mixed racial identity highlights racialized components of melancholia and illuminates specific countertransference states and enactments that can both impede and allow for the gradual and partial witnessing of racialized ghosts and their transformation into ancestors.

When Racialized Ghosts Refuse to Become Ancestors: Tasting the “Blood of Recognition” in Racial Melancholia and Mixed-Race Identities

Free Virtual Grand Rounds with Dhwani Shah, MD. 

, and selected authors from the book, Psychoanalytic Intersections: Selected Writing of the Austen Riggs Center Erikson Institute Visiting Scholar Program. 

This virtual event should be of interest to clinicians who know of Riggs' reputation as a unique psychiatric facility, to academics interested in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, and to scholars of applied psychoanalysis.


Teaching Assistant Professor of English at Sienna College


Director of the Program for Public Humanities and Senior Fellow for the Humanities at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts


Poet, Essayist, Translator, and Cultural Critic

Special Events

Psychoanalytic Intersections Book Launch Event

A conversation with editor Elise Miller, PhD, and selected authors from the book, Psychoanalytic Intersections: Selected Writing of the Austen Riggs Center Erikson Institute Visiting Scholar Program.

Washington Post Staff Picture of William Wan. (Sarah L. Voisin The Washington Post)

2023 Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media was awarded to William Wan

, "Dying for Help: How America’s mental health system is failing mentally vulnerable and suicidal youths.” 

This virtual event will feature remarks by and conversation with William Wan along with remarks by Austen Riggs Center Medical Director/CEO Eric M. Plakun, MD, and Director of the Erikson Institute for Education, Research, and Advocacy, Jane G. Tillman, PhD. In addition, attendees will be invited to ask questions.

William will be speaking about why he has chosen to write specifically about mental health and what his approach is, including:

How he often thinks about the work he’s doing as helping others turn their pain into power.

How he deals with ethically difficult situations like interviewing suicidal people without worsening their condition or causing contagion in suicidal thinking.

How he manages his own mental health while immersing himself in the trauma and pain of others.

Dying for Help: A Virtual Event Featuring Washington Post Enterprise Reporter William Wan

A virtual event to celebrate the recipient of the 2023 Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media.

Part of the 2024 Virtual Roundtable Series,

Minding the Gaps: Addressing Mental Health Through the Life Cycle

 Paula Pietromonaco, PhD; Blessing Ojembe, PhD, MSW, RSW; Niobe Way, PhD

In 2021, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy described experiences of loneliness as “a dark thread through our nation’s most pressing public health challenges” (Murthy, 2021, Public Health Reports, 136[6]). Rates of loneliness across the globe have increased across age and demographic groups steadily over the past two decades, despite concomitant changes in communication technology and virtual interconnectedness. How do we account for the growing prevalence of feelings of isolation, disconnect, longing, and loss, which contribute not only to mental health challenges but also basic experiences of stability and safety within our families, communities, and sense of being a person in the world?

In this panel, three experts in the field of social (dis)connection will share their perspectives on the rise of loneliness as a public health crisis. Dr. Niobe Way has devoted her career to examining social connectedness conceptualized through developmental, cultural, and psychological lenses, with a particular focus on how adolescent identity development. Her presentation will explore the roots, consequences, and solutions to loneliness as a crisis of connection. Dr. Paula Pietromonaco brings decades of expertise in the study of close family and other interpersonal relationships, examining how social perceptions, behaviors, and physiological responses to conflict and stress influence the capacity to experience social connection and emotional intimacy during adulthood. Dr. Blessing Ojembe will share her interdisciplinary expertise and perspective on loneliness and social isolation in Black older adults, highlighting the interplay between time, place and interaction, the contributing and contextual factors of race, age, disempowerment, marginalization, health, and immigration status. Each presenter will discuss factors which affect loneliness across the lifespan and engage in a moderated discussion with attendees about potential pathways towards addressing social disconnection at both individual and community levels.

Katie Lewis, PhD, is the director of research at the Austen Riggs Center.

Katie Lewis, PhD

Roundtable #1 - Loneliness Across the Life Cycle - Moderated by Katie Lewis, PhD

Roundtable #1 in the 2024 Virtual Roundtable Series,

 Minding the Gaps: Addressing Mental Health Through the Life Cycle.

SAVE THE DATE for the 2024 Riggs-Yale Conference!

, Inaugural Associate Dean for Health Equity Research, Yale School of Medicine

, Senior Director, Community Health Transformation at Connecticut Hospital Association

, Director of Research Interpretation for the Culture Change Project at the FrameWorks Institute

CE/CME and registration information coming soon. 

Conferences

2024 Riggs-Yale Conference: Building Community Partnerships to Address Strains in the Social Safety Net

The Erikson Institute for Education, Research, and Advocacy of the Austen Riggs Center along with the Yale Child Study Center present a 2024 conference.

The Psychotherapy Center of Albert-Prévost Mental Health Hospital

Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux du Nord-de-l’Île-de-Montréal

Is proud to provide healthcare professionals with a continuing education program in psychotherapy

During this presentation, David Mintz, MD, will review the historical and theoretical tensions between biomedical and psychodynamic models of mental illnesses and will explore possibilities of integration. He will examine the evidence base connecting meaning, medications, and outcomes, and will explore the dynamic meaning of medications and common dynamics contributing to treatment-resistance, with special reference to treatment-resistance in pharmacotherapy. He will review psychodynamic concepts relevant to the practice of psychopharmacology, and explore a model (Psychodynamic Psychopharmacology) that aims to enhance pharmacotherapy outcomes through the integration of psychodynamic attitudes and skills. More broadly, he will consider approaches to optimize the integration of pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy, in both combined (only one provider) and split treatments (2 providers).

Integrating Meaning and Medication event flyer

To register please use the following links: In-person: 

lepointdevente.com/billets/psychopap-colloque2024 

lepointdevente.com/billets/psychopap-colloque2024virtuel

Integrating Meaning and Medication: Psychotherapeutic Perspectives

David Mintz, MD, presents at The Psychotherapy Center of Albert-Prévost Mental Health Hospital.

The Tao of K-drama: Reflections on Displacement, Trauma, and Recovery

In this presentation, Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, HON AIA, DLFAPA, will focus on South Korean television series known as “K-drama,” a genre that tells stories in 16-20 one-hour episodes. The stories focus on individuals in crisis, who resolve their issues in several steps that lead to a deeper engagement with their friends and family. This “team” then is able to tackle larger problems of the society. This optimistic drama form offers insight, drawn from the syncretic philosophical and religious traditions of Korea, into the recovery of individuals and groups, from an array of traumas and social upheavals. Implications for cross-cultural understanding and considerations for US mental health systems will be discussed.

Free, virtual Friday Night Guest Lecture with Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, HON AIA, DLFAPA.

Climate Emergency, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics with Donna Orange, PhD

Donna Orange, PhD, PsyD, notes that despite a tendency to avoid the warnings, times of crisis summon clinicians to emerge from comfortable consulting rooms. Daily engaged with human suffering, they now face the inextricably bound together crises of global warming and massive social injustices. Considering historical and emotional causes of climate unconsciousness and of compulsive consumerism, we argue that only a radical ethics of responsibility to be “my other’s keeper” will truly wake us up to climate change and bring psychoanalysts to actively take on responsibilities. Linking climate justice to radical ethics by way of psychoanalysis, we here consider relevant aspects of psychoanalytic expertise, referring to work on trauma, mourning, and the transformation of trouble into purpose.

Climate Emergency, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics

Free, virtual Friday Night Guest Lecture with Donna Orange, PhD, PsyD. 

The Vanishing of Culture in Psychoanalysis: History and New Directions with Chris Christian, PhD

In this presentation, after revisiting the decline of cultural psychoanalysis in the United States, Chris Christian, PhD, will discuss the treatment of a patient presenting with a culture bound syndrome known as ataque de nervios. The treatment serves as a challenge to biases within psychoanalysis and about psychoanalysis. The presentation will conclude by arguing for a new paradigm of cultural theorizing.

The Vanishing of Culture in Psychoanalysis: History and New Directions

Free, virtual Friday Night Guest Lecture (Yasmin Roberts Memorial Lecture) with Chris Christian, PhD. 

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.

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.

Events

Featured

Educational Events

Roundtable #1 - Loneliness Across the Life Cycle - Moderated by Katie Lewis, PhD

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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