The Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (ICP+P) created a series of conferences, the Relational Perspective Institute (RPI) over four weekends in 2009-2010. This project was inspired by the recognition of a fundamental paradigm shift in psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy from Freud’s drive structure theories toward a set of perspectives that place human relationships and relational needs at the center of psychoanalytic theory and practice. In the original RPI, the foundations of relational theory and practice were described by five luminary thinkers from the relational field.

Beginning this fall, we will build on our earlier project and once again bring leading voices from the contemporary relational movement to ICP+P for a series of four virtual conferences over the course of the 2021-2022 year. The speakers selected for this second Relational Perspectives Institute (RPI II) are individually and collectively moving the relational paradigm forward and shaping the contemporary theories and clinical practice of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy.

This second RPI will present an expanding and generative set of relational perspectives as well as describe the ways these ideas and clinical approaches can assist us in helping people during this very challenging time in human history. As with other ICP+P offerings and in line with our mission, RPI II will include a focus on inclusion and openness to issues of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and identity, class, and ableism.

RPI II consists of a series of four remote conferences over 2021-2022. The institute will enhance the participant’s theoretical and clinical understanding of contemporary relational psychoanalysis in a setting of open dialogue and respect. Lectures, clinical presentations and small group discussions will provide the participants with the opportunity to integrate relational concepts into their clinical understanding and into their clinical practices.

Conference Series Co-chairs: Roger J. Segalla, Jr., Ph.D. and William Pinney, Ph.D.

​Register CLOSED!
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Dramatic Dialogues in Contemporary Clinical Practice

October 2, 2021
9:45 am – 4:00 pm Eastern

Featuring Galit Atlas Ph.D.
Conference Co-chairs: Kirsten Chadwick, Ph.D. and William Pinney, Ph.D.

In this presentation, Dr. Atlas will introduce the foundational principles of dramatic dialogue and discuss contemporary clinical practice. Dramatic dialogue is an expression first used by Sandor Ferenczi when he was struggling and experimenting with moving beyond interpretation as the exclusive psychoanalytic technical intervention. Galit Atlas and Lewis Aron have further developed the notion of dramatic dialogue to describe the ways that the multiple self-states of both patient and therapist live together in the present moment, informed by the past and the anticipated future. They argue that enactments in the analytic dyad are not only restrictive and repetitive, with therapeutic benefit resulting from their resolution, but that enactments themselves may also be generative and growth-enhancing. Through clinical material, Atlas will examine the ways patients and analysts enact and reenact both what the dyad is actively talking about as well as what they cannot yet talk about. She will discuss the prospective function of enactments and the ways the mind unconsciously “looks forward” to future possibilities.

At the conclusion of the conference, the participants will be able:
1.  Define generative enactment.
2.  Describe the relationship between dramatic dialogue and generative enactment.
3.  Define the prospective function.
4.  Explain the enacted dimension of dramatic dialogue.
5.  Critique Dr. Atlas’s concept of dramatic dialogues and apply it to their clinical work through engagement in a small group discussion.

References:
1)  Atlas, G. (2016), The Enigma of Desire. London, Routledge.
2)  Aron, L., & Atlas, G. (2015). Generative Enactment: Memories From the Future, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 25:3,309-324.
3) Aron, L. & Atlas, G. (2019). Dramatic Dialogue: Dreaming & Drama in Contemporary Clinical Practice. Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 16(3),249-271.
4) Katz, G. (2015). Repressed Ghosts and Dissociated Vampires in the Enacted Dimension of Psychoanalytic Treatment. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 84(2),389-414.

Dialogues of the Unconscious: Mutual Analysis and Uses of the Self in Contemporary Relational Technique

December 4, 2021
9:45 am – 4:00 pm Eastern

Featuring Anthony Bass, Ph.D.
Conference Co-chairs: Sally Bloom-Feshbach, Ph.D. and Dawn Taylor, L.I.C.S.W.

In this conference, we will explore the psychotherapy relationship, focusing on the nature of the unconscious communication between therapist and patient that constitutes the heart of therapeutic work. Dr. Anthony (Tony) Bass will present his concept of Dialogues of the Unconscious, following Ferenczi’s introduction of the term, and use it as a point of departure for examining how disciplined attunement to our inner experience, both psychic and somatic, can further our work. Along with Dr. Bass, participants will work with clinical vignettes, gaining experience using emotional responses to patients to identify and work through enactments, impasses and other challenging countertransference obstacles. We will explore the implications of how we make use of ourselves and the ways in which we respond to our patients, and in so doing, learn about ourselves, thus clarifying and deepening our therapeutic intentions and sense of technique.

We will focus on patients with whom we have felt especially emotionally affected, i.e., those who have evoked intense, disturbing or arousing reactions: patients about whom one dreams at night, or becomes preoccupied with by day, or who evoke anxious or counter-resistive responses, such as fighting sleep or falling asleep or becoming bored; patients who arouse us to anger, disgust, shame, or sexual or other body experiences. Such experiences, often at the heart of enactments in psychotherapy, provide special opportunities for gaining access to the ways in which the unconscious lives of patient and therapist emerge and interact, creating special opportunities for deepening and furthering the work.

At the conclusion of the conference, the participants will be able:
1. Detail the history of some of the origins of Ferenczi’s work of the active use of countertransference in the therapeutic situation.
2. Name three ways they have learned how to use themselves in sessions, involving direct and indirect use of countertransference.
3. Explain ways of gaining access to and making use of their countertransference to benefit work with difficult patients.
4. In a small group setting, identify and discuss moments of intense affect or disturbing reactions that have arisen from the unconscious communication between the therapist and patient.

References:
1) Bass, A. (2001) It Takes One to Know One; or, Whose Unconscious is it Anyway? Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 11 (5),683-702.
2) Bass, A. (2015) The Dialogue of Unconsciouses, Mutual Analysis and the Uses of the Self in Contemporary Relational Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 25 (1),2-17.
3) Bass, A. (2019) Ordinary Unconscious Communication in the Therapist/Patient Relationship. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 39 (3-4),189-197.
4) Bass, A. (2016) Regression, Self State Work, and the Developmental Perspective: The Application of
Diverse Theoretical Perspectives to Working with Trauma. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 26 (3),259-266.

Thinking and Working Relationally with Transgender Patients

February 26, 2022
9:45 am – 4:00 pm Eastern

Featuring Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D.
Conference Chair: Robert Benedetti, Ph.D.

Fulfills Diversity and LGTBQ requirements

This conference offers an opportunity for multiple levels of engagement around issues of normative gender, trans identities, and the complex embodiments of both. The day will start with a paper presentation by Dr. Saketopoulou which will offer a working theory of gender that does not separate it out from sexuality but, instead, permits us to think them through conjointly. The paper and the conversation that will follow will also track how racialization is always already embroiled in gender. The issues this paper will raise are complex, posing several challenges to our conventional way of thinking about how we are gendered and raced. Through lively conversation and direct engagement with the presenter, participants will explore these issues in relation to their own practices as well as through vignettes offered spontaneously and through questions.

After a lunch break, we will resume for a clinical presentation of a gender non-conforming adolescent. This case will raise complex discussions that have to do with hormone blockers, cross-sex hormones and the kinds of developmental issues that all adolescents need to contend with: a sense of ownership of one’s own body and matters of sexuality. With non-normative gender, these issues also have to be contended with, but are refracted through a different framework. Breakout groups will have the opportunity to explore this more closely, and the larger group will reconvene after that for a collective discussion.

At the conclusion of the conference, the participants will be able:
1. Explain how thinking about gender diversity contributes to deepening the work with patients of all genders, including normative genders.
2. List three forms of countertransference that stand in the way of working productively with gender non-conforming patients.
3. Explain why gender is always already racialized.
4. Describe a relational way of thinking about how we are gendered and how we gender others.
5. Critique Dr. Saketopoulou’s concepts regarding working relationally with transgender patients and apply it to their clinical work through engagement in a small group discussion.

References:
1) Hansbury, G. (2017). The Masculine Vaginal: Working with Queer Men’s Embodiment at the Transgender Edge. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 65 (6),1009–1031.
2) Saketopoulou, A. (2020) Thinking Psychoanalytically, Thinking Better: Reflections on Transgender. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 101(5),1019-1030.
3) Towards a Trans of Color Critique of Medicine and The Racial Plasticity of Gender and the Child, (Introduction and Chapter 1). In Gill-Peterson, G. (2018). Histories of the Transgender Child. University of Minnesota Press.
4) Saketopoulou, A. (2014). Mourning the Body as Bedrock: Developmental Considerations in Treating Transsexual Patients Analytically. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 62(5),773-806.

 Three Characters in Search of a Story: Empathy as a Complex Relational Achievement

April 30, 2022
9:45 am – 4:00 pm Eastern

Featuring Hazel Ipp, Ph.D. and Malcolm Owen Slavin, Ph.D.
Conference Chair: Roger J. Segalla, Jr., Ph.D.

We share multiple realms of experience with our patients. Very often, what feels real—what we both deeply trust—emerges through a process of probing and negotiating the universal, human existential challenges around otherness and loss that we inevitably share with our patients.

Hazel Ipp and Malcolm Slavin will basically try to show this—show it as it developed over time in an ongoing therapeutic relationship. Their story will revolve around Mal’s treatment of his patient, Adam. We’ll hear Hazel re-narrating how Mal and Adam communicate—how they try to connect and make meaning. Mal resumes his story. Hazel continues to comment. Back and forth, we hear the story develop.

What emerges is what Hazel and Mal come to see as a complex form of empathy: A valued empathy that, however, is neither a “stance,” nor a learned “technique.” Rather, through an “adaptive probing” of what is hidden, conflicted and multiple in the other, a kind of complex empathy emerges over time in this relational context.

Eventually Adam, Mal’s patient, reads and responds to the story as Mal tells it. He reflects and directly speaks to us through his written commentary on Mal’s story of their years of therapy. As Adam brings us inside his inner dialogue, we hear his subjective experience of the empathic process that Hazel and Mal have come to understand and to call a complex relational achievement.

At the conclusion of the conference, the participants will be able:
1. Describe how empathy can be a complex relational achievement.
2. Identify how adaptive probing, coming to know and be known, works in the process of building trust.
3. Describe how patients may change and develop internally without putting significant parts of their experience into words.
4. Critique Dr. Ipp & Slavin’s concept of complex relationally achieved empathy and apply it to their clinical work through engagement in a small group discussion.

References:
1) Bromberg, Phillip (2013), Hidden in Plain Sight: Thoughts on Imagination and the Lived Unconscious, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 23,1–14,
2) Eigen, M. (2011). Tears of Pain and Beauty: Mixed Voices. In Contact with the Depths. London: Karnac.
3) Slavin, M.O. & Klein, E.J., (2013). Probing to Know and Be Known: Existential and Evolutionary Perspectives on the “Disorganized” Patient’s Relationship with the Analyst. In, Beebe, B. & Lachmann, F., The Origins of Attachment: Infant Research and Adult Treatment. 163-171. New York: Routledge
4) Slavin, M.O. (2016). Relational Psychoanalysis and the Tragic-Existential Aspect of the Human Condition. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 26(5),537-548.
5) Ipp, H. (2018), Analytic Safety: Navigating the Shifting Sands—A Relational Perspective. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 38(8)5,87-595.

This conference is appropriate for clinicians at all levels of experience and offers 20 CEs for all 4 conferences.

About our presenters:

Galit Atlas, Ph.D. is on the faculty at The New York University Postdoctoral Program for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy as well as the Four-Year Adult and National Training Programs at NIP. She is the author of The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing and Belonging in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2015) and Dramatic Dialogue: Contemporary Clinical Practice (co-authored with Lewis Aron, Routledge, 2017). She is the editor and a contributor to When Minds Meet: The Work of Lewis Aron (Routledge, 2020). Her next book, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients and the Legacy of Trauma will be published by Little Brown in January 2022. Atlas serves on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Perspectives and is the author of articles and book chapters that focus primarily on gender and sexuality. Her New York Times article “A Tale of Two Twins” was the winner of a 2016 Gradiva award. Atlas is a psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor in private practice in New York City.
Anthony Bass, Ph.D. is an adjunct clinical associate professor and a clinical consultant at the New York University Postdoctoral Program for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is on the faculty and a training and supervising analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research as well as the NIP National Training Program, and the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center, which he co-founded, and at which he serves as president. He was the 2018 visiting professor at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. He was a founding editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, where he is now editor emeritus after serving twelve years as joint editor-in-chief. He is a founding director of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He offers clinical workshops and seminars throughout North America, Europe and Israel with special reference to the therapeutic relationship, unconscious forms of communication between therapist and patient, and the implicit and expressive uses of countertransference.
Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D. is a Greek and Greek-Cypriot psychoanalyst. She trained and now teaches at the New York University Postdoctoral Program for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Postdoc, and is also on faculty at the William Allanson White Institute, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center, the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, and the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. She serves on the editorial boards of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Her written work has received the Ralph Roughton Award, the annual JAPA essay prize, the Symonds prize and the Ruth Stein Prize. She is currently at work on a solicited book manuscript provisionally titled “Risking Sexuality Beyond Consent: Race, Traumatophilia, and the Draw to Overwhelm.” She is co-chair of the first conference in the US dedicated to the work of Jean Laplanche which is scheduled for October 2-3, 2021, “Laplanche in the States: the sexual and the cultural.”
Hazel Ipp, Ph.D. is in full time private practice in Toronto, Canada. She is a founding Board Member of the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and is currently Vice President of this institute. She also serves on the faculty and provides training and supervision. She teaches and supervises for several other institutes nationally and internationally. She is a founding director and past president of The International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and is currently vice president of the organization. She has been a frequent presenter at the International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology conferences. She is Chief Editor Emeritus of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and also serves on the editorial boards of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalysis, Self and Context.
Malcolm Owen Slavin, Ph.D. is a founder of The Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he teaches, supervises and has served three terms as President. He is on the faculty of several other psychoanalytic institutes worldwide as well as a director of The International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and is on the governing council for the International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. He is a consulting and associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues also serves on the editorial boards of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalysis, Self and Context. Mal’s first book (with Daniel Kriegman) is The Adaptive Design of the Human Psyche: Psychoanalysis, Evolutionary Biology and the Therapeutic Process. His current book, Original Loss: Mourning Existential Trauma in the Arts and the Art of Psychoanalysis, explores our major human evolutionary loss of an earlier, innate, instinctual embeddedness in nature necessitating the vital survival function of the arts, and the art within psychoanalysis and religion. He is assembling a volume of his collected papers entitled, Why the Analyst Needs to Change, a name drawn from an earlier paper with that same title.

Registration CLOSED!
Click Here Conference Series Brochure!

Conference Fees for all 4 Conferences:

$600ICP+P Members 2021-2022
$800Non-members*
$280ICP+P 1st and 2nd Year Members, MITs, Emerging Professionals, Graduate Student Members, Fellows, and Unaffiliated Students
$480International Attendees (Outside the US)

* Registrants who were not ICP+P members in 2020-2021 will receive membership at no cost. For a description of membership benefits, click here.For more information, email administrator@icpeast.org.
A refund for cancellation is available up to and no later than September 17th, 2021.
Enrollment is limited.
While all levels of mental health professionals are welcome, this program is geared toward an Intermediate and Advanced level.

To register by mail, send payment to:

ICP+P
3298 Governor Drive, Suite 22270
San Diego, CA 92192

Continuing education credit: 5 CEs will be awarded after full attendance for each of the four conferences, with a total of 20 for the entire institute. The Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (ICP+P) is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. ICP+P maintains responsibility for this program and its content. ICP+P is approved by the Maryland Board of Social Work Examiners to offer Category I continuing education credit. As our CE program receives oversight from a licensed social worker, the CE credits we award are highly likely to be recognized by licensing boards in Virginia and the District of Columbia. These continuing education credits meet the ANCC standards for nurses. Marriage and family therapists licensed in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia may submit these CE credits to their licensing boards. (Marriage and family therapists in other jurisdictions and licensed counselors should inquire with their local Boards regarding continuing education credit.) Attendees from the above professional groups will earn 5.0 CE credits for attending each day of the institute. CEs will be awarded after full attendance for each conference, with a total of 20 for the entire institute. Full attendance is required to receive the designated CE credit. ICP+P is accredited by MedChi, the Maryland State Medical Society to provide continuing medical education for physicians. ICP+P designates this educational activity for a maximum of 20.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

* Galit Atlas, Ph.D., Anthony Bass, Ph.D., Saketopoulou, Psy.D., Hazel Ipp, Ph.D., Malcolm Slavin, Ph.D., and the planners have informed us that they do not have a conflict of interest and have disclosed that they have no relevant financial relationship with any commercial interests pertaining to this educational activity. Additionally, the presenters have been instructed to disclose any limitations of data and unlabeled or investigational uses of products during this presentation. This presentation will not contain any references to off­ label (non­FDA approved) use of products or devices.

CE Credit is granted to participants with documented attendance. Credit will not be granted to registrants who are more than 15 minutes late or depart more than 15 minutes early from a session.CE Credit is granted to participants with documented attendance at individual workshops and completed evaluation forms for those sessions. Credit will not be granted to registrants who are more than 15 minutes late or depart more than 15 minutes early from a session. Please arrive at least 10 minutes before the scheduled start time to allow time to check in.