Please join us at the Austen Riggs Center for a screening of a work in progress, the filmed stage performance of the new play 

, with music by Ben Moore and stars Juliana Sass and Antoinette LaVecchia. The story follows Christiane, a young woman drawn to Heidelberg by a cryptic message from her dying mother. As she uncovers hidden truths about her German father, the play delves into intergenerational trauma, Jewish identity, and the enduring bonds between mothers and daughters. The play features musicians Jack Kessler on viola, Ben Moore on piano, and Todd Palmer on clarinet.

After the screening, there will be a discussion with Shira Nayman, PsyD; lead actress Juliana Sass; and 

, Medical Director/CEO of the Austen Riggs Center.

“An emotion-drenched stunner” – Jon Sobel, Chief Critic, 

“Delivers a pungent and powerful punch.” – David Walters, 

“Antoinette LaVecchia . . . brilliantly convey a gamut of feeling.” – Jon Sobel, Chief Critic, 

"Juliana Sass in the central role of Christiane turns in a chillingly focused and emotionally wrenching performance." – Jon Sobel, Chief Critic, 

Special Events

Awake in the Dark screening of a work in progress.

Awake in the Dark

 screening of a work in progress, the filmed stage performance of the new play by Shira Nayman, PsyD, 

, that examines intergenerational trauma, Jewish identity, and the enduring bonds between mothers and daughters.

Image with event information - Loyola University and PsiAN logo

; Brian Hufford, Esq; Linda Michaels, PsyD, MBA; Andrea Nutt, LCSW

This webinar will be moderated by Institute for Advanced Psychotherapy (IAP) Academic Director, Dr. Patricia Gianotti, PsyD

During this informative and timely webinar, experts in the field will provide participants with the skills needed to navigate working with insurance companies while still providing impactful depth therapy. Clinicians will leave this webinar with an understanding of the role insurance companies play within therapy, including how to work with them, how to push back when necessary, and how to document insight-oriented therapy in a way that meets insurance standards. Templates and step-by-step instructions will be provided.

For any questions, please contact Katelyn Tippett: ktippett@luc-iap.com

Educational Events

Navigating Insurance Issues as a Depth Therapist

Live virtual attendance (with CEUs), $75; Live virtual attendance (no CEUs), $25; Recording only (no CEUs), $25

in this webinar that provides participants with the skills needed to navigate working with insurance companies while still providing impactful depth therapy.

It is widely accepted that psychiatric medications exert their effects through a broad range of mechanisms, some mediated biologically through their actions at various receptor sites, and others mediated symbolically, through the meanings they carry. While most clinicians are aware of the potential benefits of meaning-based placebo effects, the field of psychiatry is considerably less focused on its harmful counterparts. It is only recently that the phenomenon of the nocebo response has begun to enter into the psychiatric literature. As the mirror image of the placebo response, nocebo responses occur when expectations of harm result in physical or psychiatric symptoms.

The nocebo response is only one of many ways that medications cause meaning-based harm. Other forms of harm may not be as straightforward as nocebo side-effects and may not be limited to the period of time that is contemporaneous with the administration of the medication. Medications, for example, may become a concrete symbol of defect that is incorporated into a patient’s personal identity in ways that prove harmful. The prescription of a medication can be assigned a range of destructive interpersonal meanings (e.g., “I am intolerable”) that may prove developmentally problematic. Medications and associated diagnoses can be used defensively in a range of ways that can interfere with self-knowledge, agency, or growth. Medications can also substitute for the development of important affect management skills and other ego functions in ways that leave lasting deficits.

This presentation will review the evidence base for harmful meaning effects in psychiatry and some of the common dynamics by which the meanings of medication cause harm. We will explore some of the ethical dilemmas posed by mechanisms of harm and efforts to avoid harm. We will also consider the role of an empowering, patient-centered alliance and of basic psychotherapeutic skills in ameliorating harm that is mediated by meanings assigned to medications.

David Mintz, MD

Meaning-Based Harm from Medications: Clinical and Ethical Implications

Approved for AMA PRA Credit™ risk management study

David Mintz, MD, reviews the evidence base for harmful meaning effects in psychiatry and some of the common dynamics by which the meanings of medication cause harm.

Join us for a meaningful weekend of reconnection, inspiration, and celebration.

Engaging Presentation Panel with Alumni (hybrid)

Discussion Groups (including a Zoom group)

Making Meaning: Exploring Art and Expression in the Activities Program - A special exhibition featuring artwork by former and current patients, along with a historical perspective of 100+ years of the Activities Program and the 75th Anniversary of the Nursery School.

3-5 pm Open Registration and Light Refreshments

4-5 pm Transitions Meeting in CCLR (former and current patients only)

5-7 pm Alumni Reunion Welcoming Reception - All Reunion Registrants Welcome to Attend

8:30 am Check-in (for those alumni who didn’t already check in on Friday.)
For all Registrants: Coffee and pastries/bagels – MOB Small Conference Room

9-9:45 am Opening Remarks 
     Welcome by Alum & Board Member, Nina Gutin, PhD
     State of Riggs Presentation, Dr. Ed Shapiro, Medical Director/CEO
     Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) Introduction by Spencer Biel, Director of the IOP
     Alumni Weekend art project presentation by Cornelia Kalischer

10-11:30 am Choice of patient-led tour or Riggs history tour

11 am Art & Activities Program Exhibition Opening

12-1 pm Lunch (for all reunion registrants)

1-3 pm Panel Presentations (with Zoom for virtual attendees)

3:15-4:15 pm Small Group Discussions (with Zoom for virtual attendees)

4:15-5:45 pm Screening of Alumni Michele Beck’s film, 

, in which she explores her life before, during, and after treatment at Riggs. Film (50min) with Q&A discussion (40min) (streaming on Zoom for virtual attendees)

6:30-8:30 pm Dinner for Former Patients & Current and Former Staff

11 am-12:30 pm Brunch & Social Time (for all reunion registrants)

For alumni artists wishing to display a piece of your artwork, please contact Jodi ASAP to discuss details on how this will work.

For questions, contact Jodi Shafiroff at 

 or 413-931-5333. We can't wait to see you here.

Alumni Events

Looking back and moving forward is the theme of the 20205 Austen Riggs Alumni Reunion.

2025 Austen Riggs Alumni Reunion

Former patients, staff, and Board members are invited to the 2025 Austen Riggs Alumni Reunion to reconnect with old friends, make new connections, and celebrate the impact of our shared experiences.

The most destructive force waylaying development in children comes from failures in mourning that leave parents unreliably available to attend to the needs of the child, the type of small-t trauma that impedes growth. Parental failures invite overwhelming experiences of helplessness that become precursors for later feelings of shame, humiliation and alienation. As Symington (1993) notes: “Narcissism is nearly always the product of trauma” (p. 73).

In his early work, Freud was not thinking about trauma but rather theorizing about how we move from a preliminary self-focus towards appreciating our inherent need for others that underlies both resilience and the capacity to care. That capacity, as Winnicott highlights, requires our ability to stand as a separate self in relation to others who can also keep their own grounding.

Recent psychoanalytic explorations shift from ideas of primary narcissism to focus on Freud’s later ideas regarding life and death drives, distinguishing between libidinal and destructive aspects. Whereas the libidinal focus is on humiliation at dependence, the destructive focus is on envy. Destructive envy can be highly organized and difficult to discern, presenting particular clinical challenges because any change is seen as weakness, and resisted. Maintaining the self-idealization requires vigilance and deception.

Narcissism has become a catch-all phrase, referring to an almost sociopathic lack of care. The psychoanalytic literature, however, helps us distinguish between individuals who lead with their grandiosity and those who lead with their vulnerability. Whether the presentation is libidinal or aggressive, narcissistically-organized individuals pose particular problems in the treatment because of their difficulty in tolerating or even imagining an actual relationship with the analyst as a separate person because of the threat to their own subjectivity. Clinical illustrations will highlight some of the complexities of working with individuals whose development has been waylaid by the trauma of insufficient parental attunement.

Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP

Trauma, Identity, and Development

Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP, explores what happens when development has been waylaid by the trauma of insufficient parental attunement. Clinical illustrations will be provided. 

2025-26 Friday Night Guest Lecture Series

The role of the father, both flesh-and-blood and symbolic, is explored in a subset of families of patients with anorexia nervosa. In these families the mother’s narcissistic investment in her child makes separation-individuation difficult. A factor potentially influencing whether the child goes on to develop anorexia nervosa is the strength of the paternal function, which optimally helps the child learn how to appropriately deploy his aggression in the service of separation-individuation and as a means of developing “the experience of agency”: the phenomenological experience of oneself as having an intentional impact. The role of the paternal function in developing the experience of agency is illuminated by the metaphor of rough-and-tumble play, which encapsulates the kind of experience with early objects that facilitates or forecloses the child’s capacity for experiencing agency. In the families of these patients, the father is frequently described as passive or absent and the paternal function as compromised, which arguably leads the anorexic-to-be to relegate his experience of agency to his body, which he subjugates through omnipotent control.

Tom Wooldridge, PsyD

The Paternal Function in Anorexia Nervosa

Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, FIPA, CEDS-C, explores the role of the father, both flesh-and-blood and symbolic, in a subset of families of patients with anorexia nervosa. 

Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center Conference.

The Austen Riggs Center invites you to join an interdisciplinary conference, "Rebuilding Trust in Institutions: Bridging Generational Insights.” This gathering expands Erik Erikson’s foundational insights on basic trust and mistrust, extending them into today's complex social and institutional landscapes.

We are living through a moment where institutions responsible for our social wellbeing—education, government, and healthcare—face unprecedented scrutiny and skepticism. At the Austen Riggs Center we are invested in the study of relationships between individuals, families, groups, and social institutions; many of our patients grapple profoundly with intergenerational mistrust across these different domains and communities. Understanding these multidetermined dynamics requires an approach that integrates individual psychology with historical, cultural, and social dimensions.

This conference convenes clinicians, scholars, and community leaders to explore critical questions about trust and mistrust, particularly as experienced differently across generations. Through a thoughtful blend of panels, interactive breakout sessions, and a reflective plenary, participants will delve deeply into the psychological, historical, ethical, and social factors influencing institutional credibility.

Friday, September 19, 2025 | 6:30-8:00 p.m. (Eastern)

Roundtable: Trust, Betrayal, and Epistemic Vigilance

Chloe Campbell, PhD | Deputy Director, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London

Carly Lingenfelter, PhD | Assistant Professor, School of Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University

Angela Coombs Mumuni, MD | Associate Medical Director, Alameda County Behavioral Health Care Services; Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine

Moderators: Daniel Knauss, PsyD, and Katie Lewis, PhD

Saturday, September 20, 2025 | 9:00 a.m.-4:30 p.m. (Eastern)

Roundtable: The Perspective of the Senior Generation

Medria Connolly, PhD | Clinical Psychologist, Private Practice

Retired Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson | U.S. Air Force

Michael Roth, PhD | President, Wesleyan University

Moderators: Jane Tillman, PhD and Edward Shapiro, MD

Roundtable: The Perspective of the Younger Generation

Steven Rathje, PhD | Postdoctoral Fellow, NYU; Incoming Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University

Nic Westrate, PhD | Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Chicago

Christina Wusinich, MS | Doctoral Student, Counseling Psychology, NYU

Moderators: Katie Lewis, PhD, and Dan Knauss, PsyD

Roundtable: Intergenerational Discussion - Legacy, Change, and the Future

Includes all panelists from the Saturday morning generational roundtables

Moderators: Dan Knauss, PsyD and Jane Tillman, PhD

 (for all participants, grouped by generation)

Moderators: Katie Lewis, PhD and Edward Shapiro, MD

Conferences

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

Education and Training at Austen Riggs

Rebuilding Trust in Institutions: Bridging Intergenerational Insights

2025 Fall Conference on Rebuilding Trust in Institutions.

Freud Lacan institute International Research Symposium 2025 graphic

 Eve Watson, PhD (2022), present at the Freud Lacan Institute (Fli) International Research Symposium, 

Chronic Depression and Trauma in Childhood: The Role of Long-Term Psychotherapy – Evidence and Effectiveness

Dr. Tillman presents "When Psychoanalysis Works in the Psychiatric Setting" and Dr. Watson offers the response "Observations on Time Spent at Austen Riggs."

Freud Lacan Institute International Research Symposium

Jane Tillman, PhD, ABPP, and former Erikson Scholar Eve Watson, PhD, present at this annual research symposium in Dublin, Ireland. 

The AI revolution is here—and by “here,” I mean right here in our consulting rooms. Interactive self-help tools are now marketed as AI psychotherapy, and for many, they’ve become a viable treatment option. Augmentation technologies for clinicians are readily available, reshaping aspects of clinical practice in real time. Meanwhile, patients are forming relationships with AI entities that range from instrumentally useful, to emotionally resonant and companionable, to psychologically destabilizing—even destructive. This Grand Rounds will explore the clinical state of play amid these rapidly accelerating developments, with a focus on how psychoanalytic sensibilities can help us think, feel, and act in response.

The AI Pharmakon in Psychoanalytic Care: Ambivalence, Augmentation, and Psychoanalytic Futures

Todd Essig, PhD, explores the clinical state of play amid the rapidly accelerating developments with AI, with a focus on how psychoanalytic sensibilities can help us think, feel, and act in response.

As a field that names the discovery of sexuality as among its principal contributions but that has, for the past forty years, become primarily focused on such non-sexual topics as attachment, relationality, and personality disorders, psychoanalysis has lately found itself on the defensive as a younger generation of clinicians accuses it of abandoning sex, and with it, the radical emancipatory project that psychoanalysis once promised. According to this emerging body of work, psychoanalysis has betrayed its founding sexual radicalism by giving in to a culture of normativity that pathologizes perversion, privileges mature relationships over pleasure, and prioritizes the ego’s control over the body’s anarchic ecstasy. How do we understand this clash between clinical psychoanalysis and a growing contemporary interest in queer and critical theories? As someone whose training is in psychoanalysis as well as academic queer theory, Dr. Ashtor views current uses of queerness to be simplistic and sensationalist. Instead, she will draw on queer theory’s expansive tradition to introduce the concept of queer relationality which aims to rethink relationality with enlarged sexuality at its center.

Queer Relationality

Gila Ashtor, PhD, LP, draws on queer theory’s expansive tradition to introduce the concept of queer relationality which aims to rethink relationality with enlarged sexuality at its center.

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.

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. 

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

Featured

Alumni Events

2025 Austen Riggs Alumni Reunion

Past Presentations

CE/CME Courses

Contact Us for More

For answers to any questions about events, conferences, or CME courses, please feel free to contact us.

© 2025 The Austen Riggs Center

Privacy Policy

Follow us: