IPISLC's Past Conferences

IPI SLC's past conferences have included presenters whose work is highly influential in psychodynamic thought today. Please post comments about any of these conferences below.

Michael Stadter, Ph.D., September 23, 2011

Michael Stadter, Ph.D.

Dr. Michael Stadter is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Bethesda. His practice includes long-term and brief psychotherapy, clinical supervision and organizational consultation. His faculty appointments currently include positions at the Washington School of Psychiatry and at the International Psychotherapy Institute. He also serves on the International Advisory Board for the journal Psychodynamic Practice and is a reviewer for the journal Psychiatry. Formerly at American University, he was Director of the University Counseling Center and Psychologist-in-Residence in the Department of Psychology. Dr. Stadter is the author of a number of publications including the book, Object Relations Brief Therapy: The Therapeutic Relationship In Short-Term Work (1996/2009) and is the co-editor of the book, Dimensions of Psychotherapy/Dimensions of Experience: Time, Space, Number and State of Mind (2005). His new book, Presence and the Present: Relationship and Time in Contemporary Psychodynamic Therapy, is scheduled for publication in 2012. Additionally, he has been repeatedly recognized by the Washingtonian Magazine as one of the top psychotherapists in the Washington, DC area and is often invited to teach both nationally and internationally.

 In this conference, Dr. Stadter discussed the shaming and ashamed inner worlds and dialogues of both patients and therapists and described the various ways these are manifested in therapy. In doing so, he explored the physiology, development, regulation and subjectivity of shame, the psychodynamic conceptualization of shame, the varieties of shame and the types of shaming/ashamed dynamics, differences between shame and guilt, and the concept of interpersonal traumatization.

Relying on two central premises – that the awareness and management of shaming/ashamed states in both therapist and patient are crucial for successful outcomes, and the therapeutic relationship is key to the treatment of excessive shame states  – Dr. Stadter described how the various conceptualizations of shame can be used to formulate effective clinical interventions. Through numerous clinical examples and an extended case presentation by Audrey Rice, LPC (Division Director of Treatment Services for Volunteers of America, Utah), he illustrated the role of shame in transference and countertransference, the influence of culture in shame-related disorders, the possibilities of repair, and the importance of the termination process in the effective treatment of shame. In the final segment of the day, Dr. Stadter presented 16 considerations for therapists who are working with patients with difficult shame-based presentations.

Caroline Garland, PhD, March 11, 2011

Caroline Garland, PhD

Caroline Garland is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and a Consultant Clinical Psychologist who has worked in the Adult Department of the Tavistock Clinic for over 20 years. In 1987 she founded the Tavistock's Trauma Unit, which receives referrals from across the country, and whose members have recently worked with organisations traumatised by the bombings of London's public transport system on 7/7/05. Caroline Garland has written, taught and lectured both nationally and internationally on the subjects of trauma and group dynamics. This work has led to consultations with many traumatised organisations as well as in situations of conflict at home and abroad. She is currently engaged in the long-term Tavistock Outcome Study of treatment-resistant depression.

In this conference Dr. Garland explored the topical subject of trauma and its treatment through a combination of theoretical discussion and clinical examples. She began by discussing the value of the psychotherapeutic approach, which highlights the impact that the subject’s past history may have on the present traumatic event. She touched on the pitfalls for the therapist of dealing with severely traumatized patients, who often evoke the wish to provide overly sympathetic responses and “helpful” suggestions - both of which may inhibit the patient’s capacity to recover. She discussed the difficulties patients exhibit in the mental processing of trauma - difficulties which typically involve damage to the capacity to symbolize. In the place of symbolization, the risk for the traumatized individual is to resort to an identification, either with the traumatizing agent or individual or with the victim, which functions as a substitute for thought. Identification with the dead or damaged can lead to guilt about survival, leading to a chronic melancholic state (sometimes called ‘chronic PTSD') and an inability to mourn. Throughout the conference, Dr. Garland used several clinical examples to illustrate the kinds of treatment that have been found to be effective at the Trauma Unit at London’s Tavistock Clinic, while at the same time acknowledging the limits of recovery.

David Celani, PhD, December 3, 2010

David Celani is a licensed psychologist who practiced for more than twenty-five years in Burlington, Vermont. In treatment, he focused on his patients' 'attachment to bad objects,' which was manifested by their inability to separate from parents, friends, or marital partners who demeaned, criticized, or abused them. Celani now presents workshops throughout the United States on object relations theory. He is the author of numerous articles, chapters and books, including: The Illusion of Love: Why the Battered Woman Returns to Her Abuser (1996), Leaving Home: The Art of Separating from Your Difficult Family (2005), and Fairbairn's Object Relations Theory in the Clinical Setting (2010).

In this conference (Understanding the Mind of the Borderline Patient: Contributions of Fairbairn's Object Relations Theory), Dr. Celani reviewed the emergence of Object Relations Theory from classical psychoanalysis, and summarized five of Faribairn's foundational papers that outlined his model. Fairbairn's structural theory was described in detail as well as its application to the treatment of the borderline patient. Emphasis throughout Dr. Celani's presentation was on the process of integrating dissociated and intolerable memories, held in the patient's unconscious structures, into their central ego.

Couple, Child and Family Therapy Institute: How Did We Get Here and What Do I Do Now? Untangling Transference and Countertransference Dilemmas in Child, Couple & Family Treatment - July 12-17, 2010

Chair: Janine Wanlass, Ph.D.

Untangling, understanding, and making therapeutic use of transference and countertransference resonses in the treatment of children, couple, and families presents a challenge to even the most experienced clinicians. Object relations theory provides a framework for making sense of these often frustrating and confusing therapeutic entanglements. Grounded in theory and explored through clinical case vignettes, this IPI Summer Institute offered a series of experience-near presentations for clinicians working with children, adolescents, couples, and families. Participants were able to select presentations focused on their population of interest and joined IPI national faculty for an entire week of engaging clinical discussion.

Family, Couple and Child Psychotherapy Weekend Conference: Shifting Internal Objects: The Use of Couple and Family Treatment in the Development of the Self, March 12-14, 2010

The internal worlds of both therapists and patients are constructed by early family experiences, including representations of couple and sibling relationships. These object constellations dramaticallly influence our interactions with peers, choice of intimate partnerships, and formation of personal identity. Couple, child and family treatments provide a unique opportunity to shift problematic individual and systemic object relations, through examination of shared transferences, identifications, collusive defenses, intergenerational repetitions, and unconscious fantasies. Join us for a weekend where we discuss the value, theory, and craft of child, family, and couple treatments and their potential impact on the development and repair of the self.

Richard Billow, PhD, January 22, 2010

Richard M, Billow, PhD, ABPP, is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and an active contributor to the psychoanalytic and group literature. He has been associated with the Gordon Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies, Adelphi University, New York, since 1968, where he achieved doctorate and postdoctoral certificates in psychoanalysis, and individual and group psychotherapy. He is Clinical Professor and Director of the institute’s Postdoctoral Program in Group Psychotherapy, and practices in Great Neck, New York. He is the author of Relational Group Psychotherapy: From Basic Assumptions to Passion, and Resistance (2003, Jessica Kingsley Press), and the forthcoming Rebellion and Refusal in Group: The 3 R’s (2010, Karnac Books).

Richard Billow, PhD

Contemporary therapists tend to avoid conducting group psychotherapy, for a variety of reasons: it’s too much work, they can’t find the time, they don’t know how to do it. In this conference, Dr. Richard Billow, a world-renowned expert in psychodynamic approaches to group therapy, will describe the merits of group work - both in terms of its value for the practitioner, and its capacity to enhance treatment effectiveness for the patient. Dr. Billow will first discuss basic approaches to group therapy, from Bion’s theories through current relational views. He will then illustrate concepts and techniques using the ‘fishbowl’ technique, in which he conducts a group session with volunteers, while the rest of the audience observes. To facilitate participants’ learning of both the theory and the practice of group therapy, their engagement in, and active discussion of the group process will be encouraged.

Mark Epstein, PhD, September 18, 2009

Mark Epstein, M.D. is a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City and the author of a number of books about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy, including Thoughts without a Thinker, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart, and Open to Desire. A new work, Psychotherapy without the Self, published by Yale University Press, is now available in paperback and a revised version of his Going on Being is just out from Wisdom. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard University and is currently Clinical Assistant Professor in the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University.

Mark Epstein, M.D.

Before the Buddha became the Buddha he underwent a six-year self-analysis. While it is not often emphasized, a careful reading of the historical record suggests that the Buddha was struggling, in this analysis, to come to terms with early loss. Important parallels exist between the Buddha’s struggles and those described by D.W. Winnicott in his most important paper, “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications” (1969), in which he charted the path from object relating to object usage, from self-centeredness to a capacity for concern. This progression is one that Winnicott felt a therapist could facilitate for a patient whose own parenting was not ‘good-enough.’ In the Buddha’s case, he had to find his own path, and his own technique, creating favorable conditions for a psychic transformation that went beyond the conceptual standard of the day. An examination of the Buddha’s self-analysis reveals the underlying mechanism of therapeutic action in meditation, an action that is understandable in psychodynamic terms and of potential benefit to all still wrestling with the infantile residue. In this presentation Dr. Epstein described the Buddha’s self-analysis and presented the method of mindfulness, or bare attention, that he found to be the key agent of mental transformation. The relevance of the Buddha’s findings to contemporary psychotherapy was emphasized.

Audience at the Epstein conference.

Judith Mitrani, PhD, April 17, 2009

Judith L. Mitrani, Ph.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst at The Psychoanalytic Center of California and The Newport Psychoanalytic Institute. A full active member of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, Dr. Mitrani has published numerous papers in the area of primitive mental states in both international and American journals, and her work has been translated in six languages. She is the author of the books Framework for the Imaginary: Clinical Explorations in Primitive States of Being (1996) and Ordinary People and Extra-Ordinary Protections: a post-Kleinian Approach to the Treatment of Primitive Mental States (2001) and is also co-editor -- with her analyst/husband Dr. Theodore Mitrani -- of the book Encounters with Autistic States: A Memorial Tribute to Frances Tustin (1997) and the upcoming book Frances Tustin Today. Dr. Mitrani is also the founding and current Chair of the Frances Tustin Memorial Trust <http://www.frances-tustin-autism.org>. She supervises and lectures internationally – in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas -- on topics related to the treatment of autistic states in adults and the technique with the infantile transference. Her clinical and theoretical perspectives derive predominantly from the work of Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Donald Winnicott and of course Frances Tustin's work on autistic states. She is in private practice with adults in Los Angeles, California.

In the 1980s and 90s, Frances Tustin described psychogenic autism as 'a treaction to an infantile trauma associated with unbearably painful awareness of bodily separatedness from the suckling mother,' and went on to recognize that some of our more neurotic adult patients are 'haunted by these same primeval forces.' In this conference, Dr. Judith Mitrani offered her extension of Tustin's ideas to her own work with adults. Using extensive clinical material, Dr. Mitrani described the implications of Tustin's work for conceptualizing and treating adult patients who present with autistic and other primitive states of being, and focused in particular on how enactments in psychotherapy arise from such states.

Nancy McWilliams, PhD, September 26, 2008

Nancy McWilliams

Nancy McWilliams teaches at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology and has a private practice in Flemington, NJ. She is author of Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process (1994), Psychoanalytic Case Formulation (1999), and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner’s Guide (2004), all with Guilford Press, and is Associate Editor of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (2006). She is President of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association, and on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Psychology and the Psychoanalytic Review.

Dr. McWilliams has written on personality structure and personality disorders, diagnosis, sex and gender, trauma, intensive psychotherapy, and contemporary challenges to the humanistic tradition in psychotherapy. Her books have been translated into twelve languages, and she has lectured widely both nationally and internationally. Her book on case formulation received the Gradiva Award for best psychoanalytic clinical book of 1999; in 2004 she was given the Rosalee Weiss Award for contributions to practice by the Division of Independent Practitioners of the American Psychological Association; in 2006 she was made an Honorary Member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and in 2007 she was awarded the Robert S. Wallerstein Visiting Lectureship in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. A graduate of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, she is also affiliated with the Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy of New Jersey and the National Training Program of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City.

Dr. McWilliams conference focused on clients with narcissistic, psychopathic, and paranoid psychologies. Despite powerful evidence that individual personality factors account for the preponderance of variance in treatment outcome, and despite recent empirical work on attachment patterns and their implications for therapy, there has been little systematic attention in the clinical literature to how to develop an effective therapeutic relationship with people in whom attachment is associated with shame, weakness, and humiliation. Dr. McWilliams explored the inner experience of individuals with these dynamics and reviewed the therapeutic implications of their specific subjectivities. Drawing on both clinical and empirical literatures, she emphasized how effective work with these difficult clients differs from treatments in which the practitioner can assume more secure attachment patterns.

Randy Paulsen, M.D., and Sally Bowie, LICSW, Feb. 29 - Mar. 2, 2008

Randall Paulsen is the current President of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Boston, Massachusetts. Sally I. Bowie, LICSW, has been the Director of The Rape Crisis Intervention Program at Beth Israel Hospital and is currently in private practice in Boston and is on the faculty of The Psychanalytic Couple and Family Institute of New England.

This case discussion group focused on individual psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychotherapy and couple therapy. Eight clinicians from Salt Lake City presented case material to each other over the 2-1/2 days of seminars. Cases were both of individual or couple therapy. With each case, participants deepened their understanding of the therapeutic relationship in each treatment.

Case Discussion Group, back row, left to right: Robert Barth, Merritt Stites, Linda Price, Margo Miles, Janine Wanlass, Sally Bowie. Front fow, left to right: Penny Jameson, Jim Poulton, Randy Paulsen, Karl Seashore.

Richard Zeitner, Ph.D., December 7, 2007

Richard M. Zeitner completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Brigham Young University, and a clinical internship at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. After a four year stint in the Army he completed a post-doctoral training program in marital and family therapy at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, followed by a post-doctoral training program in psychodiagnostics, also at the Menninger Clinic, and finally entered the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis where he graduated in adult psychoanalysis. He has his ABPP in clinical psychology, is certified in adult psychoanalysis by the Board of Professional Standards of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and is currently a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Greater Kansas City Psychoanalytic Institute, where he is also in private practice. He has a number of publications and is currently authoring a book.

In this conference, Dr. Zeitner presented a fascinating case of a young woman patient who presented for treatment with apparent problems of anxiety and depression. Within the analysis, though, she developed a particular form of erotized transference, but which became manifested in a sadistic way, that is, with the intention of torturing the analyst, while also giving rise to her own masochistic wishes. Dr. Zeitner's presentation demonstrated how the analyst contributes to the development of intense transference-countertransference perverse enactments, and how these can be worked with toward an eventual resolution.

Richard Zeitner, Ph.D.

David Scharff, October 13, 2007

David Scharff, M.D. is the co-founder and co-director of IPI in Washington DC, and is one of the most internationally recognized figures in psychoanalysis today. He is the author/editor of 15 books, including Object Relations Couple Therapy, Object Relations Family Therapy, The Sexual Relationship, The Freud Century, and Refinding The Object And Reclaiming The Self.

David Scharff, MD

In this conference, David Scharff, a world-renowned psychoanalyst and expert in sex therapy, presented both theoretical and rich clinical material to describe the strategies with which therapists can help their patients manage sexual problems in their partnerships.

Sexuality and the Couple Conference Participants

Theodore Jacobs, April 13, 2007

Ted Jacobs’ influential work is widely followed by psychotherapists around the world. He is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City, a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Training and Supervising Analyst at the New York and New York University Psychoanalytic Institutes, and Former President of the Association for Child Psychoanalysis. He is the author of The Use of the Self: Countertransference and Communication in the Analytic Situation and co-editor of On Beginning an Analysis. He is much beloved by audiences at IPI in DC, and his presentations are marked by warmth, humor, insight and analytic sensitivity.

Jacobs presented both a videoconference and an afternoon conference in SLC. In the videoconference, he discussed unconscious communications and covert enactments, and the roles they may play in both sabotaging and facilitating progress in treatment. In the afternoon conference, he focused on ways in which themes from adolescence re-appear in therapy with adults. He discussed the therapist's countertransferences (continuing the theme of his morning videoconference), and the ways in which forgotten aspects of the therapist's own life may block opportunities for the patient to work through adolescent experiences.

Ted Jacobs and Penny Jameson

Katherine Fraser, December 8, 2006

Katherine Fraser, DMH, is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in private practice in San Francisco and Sacramento, a faculty member of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and the Department of Psychiatry at UCSF, and a Co-Chair of the Committee for New Psychoanalytic Centers of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She has lectured widely on adolescent development and identity formation.

Dr. Fraser visited Salt Lake City on December 8, 2006. In a videoconference presentation, and an afternoon conference, she discussed multiple aspects of the psychoanalytic treatment of adolescents, including: the neuropsychology of adolescent development, the application of attachment theory in the treatment of adolescents, and the relevance of traditional analytic approaches to adolescents experiencing psychological difficulties. She also presented a case in substantial depth.

Christopher Bollas, September 15-16, 2006

An eminent analyst in private practice in London and a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society, Christopher Bollas is the author of ground-breaking works that have expanded our grasp of the subtle movements of the unconscious, creativity, dreaming and the forces of destruction. His work includes The Shadow of the Object (1987), Forces of Destiny (1989), Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience (1992), Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience (1995), The Mystery of Things (1999), Hysteria (2000), Free Association (2002), and the analytically-informed novellas Dark at the End of the Tunnel (2004), I have Heard the Mermaids Singing (2005), and Mayhem (2006).

Bollas' visit to Salt Lake City was a unique experience for all who participated. His warmth, depth of vision, and breadth of knowledge conveyed psychoanalytic thinking and practice at its best. While he was here, Bollas participated in three events:

A videoconference, in which Bollas discussed forms of depression and the importance of analytic thinking for comprehending today's world.

An afternoon conference in which Bollas discussed free association as a fundamental goal of psychoanalysis.

Kit Bollas and Colleen Sandor

An intimate half-day case consultation, in which of participants presented their own cases to Bollas for supervision and consultation.

Bollas and case consultation participants