12:30 - 4:30 p.m. Friday / 9:30 a.m. - 4:20 p.m. Saturday (Eastern)

$40 with 7.5 CE/CME credits; FREE without CE/CME credit

How does moral injury occur and what steps can we take to understand and repair the damage it does to individuals and institutions?

Hear from experienced scholars and clinicians at this year’s Erikson Institute Fall Conference as we examine moral injury and repair related to:

Moral injury happens at the intersection of the individual, the institution, and society. Often it leaves a lasting wound to the psyche and the soul that is suffused with the experience of perpetration and betrayal.

First associated with war and military practices, we now know moral injury occurs in other social catastrophes such as the pandemic, the lasting destructive damage of the institution of slavery in the United States, and in various institutional contexts including healthcare, governance, and education.

The growing prevalence of moral injury calls for changes at the level of the community that require cultivating moral practices in leadership and policy.

Participants can expect to come away from this conference with a better understanding of moral injury in multiple contexts and practical actions they can take to aid in efforts at repair.

Conferences

2022 Virtual Fall Conference - Moral Injury: Individual and Collective Trauma, and Its Repair

Register now for our annual Fall Conference - October 14-15, 2022. This year's topic is 

Moral Injury: Individual and Collective Trauma, and Its Repair. 

The start of the fall semester can be a stressful time for college students, many of whom struggle with their mental health.

Mental health professionals, college administrators and students, and family members are invited to learn more about a new source of help for college students in Massachusetts: Austen Riggs Center’s Remote Access Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP).

Join IOP Director Spencer Biel, PsyD; IOP Associate Director Seth Pitman, PhD; and IOP Program Coordinator Jessi Nolet for a brief presentation and an opportunity to have your questions about the IOP answered.

Special Events

Virtual Open House: Remote Access Intensive Outpatient Program for College Students in Massachusetts

Learn more and have your questions answered about the new Austen Riggs Center Remote Access Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) for College Students in Massachusetts.

A longstanding clinical conviction is that people with anxiety disorders must directly confront their feared object or situation in order to reduce fear of it. This dogma is the basis of exposure therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapies. Challenging this belief, my collaborators and I have repeatedly shown that repeated, unconscious exposure to phobic stimuli -- what we term very brief exposure (VBE) -- reduces avoidance and self-reported fear of a live tarantula in highly spider-phobic persons. VBE is based on both the neuroscience of fear and psychoanalytic theory, specifically Freud’s (1932) proposal that “inside of every phobic, there is a counter-phobic”: phobic people are actually unconsciously conflicted about their fears. I will present a series of randomized controlled tests (RCTs) of VBE, including RCTs conducted during fMRI scanning and psychophysiological monitoring, which provide a window into the dynamic mechanisms of unconscious exposure. I will also present our current and future research directions, which include using VBE to treat combat-related, Post-traumatic stress disorder in recent U.S. combat veterans, and to reduce phobia-based, COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

Educational Events

Getting Unconscious Conflict to Work For, Rather than Against, Us: The Therapeutic Effects of Unconscious Exposure

1 CME/CE Credits. Free Virtual Grand Rounds with Paul Siegel, PhD.

Serious mental health struggles among college students are rising in the nation, increasing the need for access to treatment that can help them remain in school. College is a time of developmental transition as students work to establish themselves as adults in the world. This presentation will highlight a novel 

 that goes beyond mere crisis stabilization to help students grasp the meaning and achieve mastery of their struggles to lead more self-directed lives. Presenters will use a case vignette to demonstrate a treatment model that integrates individual and group therapy, skill discovery and building, psychodynamic psychopharmacology, family work, and collaboration with college counseling centers.

Toward a Self-Directed Life: A Psychodynamic Systems Approach to Treatment of College Students

Spencer Biel, PsyD; Jacquelyn Harden, PsyD; and Eric M. Plakun, MD, present a virtual Grand Rounds highlighting a novel remote access IOP that goes beyond mere crisis stabilization to help students grasp the meaning and achieve mastery of their struggles to lead more self-directed lives.

Leading from Experience: Developing the Consultative Stance

The Center for the Study of Groups and Social Systems

 is pleased to announce the next in its series of weekend training workshops on the consultative stance.

The workshop will be offered IN PERSON at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, MA, as we pursue the primary task of using the consultative stance to understand and provide leadership in work groups.


Times are approximate and may be modified slightly.

: Donna Elmendorf, Jerry Fromm, Dannie Kennedy

We anticipate opening registration in early August

For questions, or to be placed on an email update list, please contact Lori at

Leading From Experience

The Center for the Study of Groups and Social Systems is pleased to announce the next in its series of weekend training workshops on the consultative stance to happen IN PERSON at Austen Riggs.

FRIDAY NIGHT GUEST LECTURE SERIES 2022-23

This presentation considers the nature of psychoanalytic treatment for children where there is severe developmental delay in the context of intergenerational trauma. From a variety of theoretical positions, the author discusses a case of a young child for whom psychoanalytic treatment was not originally intended but who, for institutional reasons concerned with the training needs of a trainee, was seen in three times per week psychoanalytic child psychotherapy for a number of years. The paper examines the notion of the child analyst as a new developmental object to such a child, locating its origin within the Anna Freudian tradition but making links both to Winnicottian concepts and also post Bionian elaboration of the nature of the analyst’s mental functioning in the analytic setting.

The Child Analyst as a ‘New Developmental Object’ to a Developmentally Delayed Young Child

1.5 CME/CE Credits. Free Virtual Friday Night Guest Lecture with Angela Joyce.

This talk will explore the social and psychic lives of Asian American students and patients that David L. Eng, PhD, and his co-author (Shinhee Han) have encountered over the course of twenty years in the classroom and the clinic. It is based on their recently published book, 

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans

1.5 CME/CE Credits. Free Virtual Friday Night Guest Lecture with David L. Eng, PhD.

Jonathan Sklar, LRCP, MRCS, MBBS, FRCPsych, TQAP 

The tradition of Apocalyptic prophecy developed in the Middle Ages, first by Jewish and later Christians ‘consoles, fortified and asserted themselves when confronted by the threat.' Messianism and debates about the Antichrist were further developed during the Crusades. Later the good-bad dichotomy was enacted by the thousands of penitents masochistically scourging themselves across Europe as well as the Torquemadian sadistic persecutions. Yet all the major European powers used such cruel displays as it was socially, politically, and economically expedient to those in power. Unconscious manifestations of human cruelties find expressions in society and very often such matters are reframed, covered over, and even believed to be ideal states of humanity–such as ‘religious goodness.'

Apocalyptic Times and the Missing Debate

1.5 CME/CE Credits. Free Virtual Friday Night Guest Lecture with Jonathan Sklar.

This lecture takes up the question of what a social psychoanalysis might look like in the clinic, in our psychoanalytic institutions, and in our society. Drawing on some earlier psychoanalysts’ concepts that have connected the social world and the psychic world, I introduce the concept of normative unconscious processes, which addresses the ways that racism, heterosexism, classism, and other social inequalities are unconsciously replicated in the clinic. The talk then explores how therapists can resist unconsciously replicating such cultural inequalities. We will then look outside the clinic at how cultural inequalities manifest in the wider circles of contemporary institutional and sociocultural life. Here, too, we will explore how we, as citizens and therapists, both unconsciously replicate and can resist replicating harmful, unequal relations. We will think together about how to address the places in our different subjective and communal worlds where harm has been done, and engage together on how to make repair.

Social Psychoanalysis, Normative Unconscious Processes, and an Ethic of Repair

1.5 CME/CE Credits. Free Virtual Friday Night Guest Lecture with Lynne Layton, PhD.

Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Unsplash

Race and Racism in Psychoanalytic Thought: Shaking Our Analytic Frame

Beverly J. Stoute, MD, FABP, DFAPA, DFAACAP gives the 2023 Yasmin Roberts Memorial Lecture. This is a free virtual Friday Night Guest Lecture.

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.

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2022 Virtual Fall Conference - Moral Injury: Individual and Collective Trauma, and Its Repair

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