Sharon Weller

Conversion (Functional Neurological) Disorders: An Update

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  •  March 2, 2019
     10:00 am - 12:00 pm

Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuropsychoanalysis:

“Conversion (Functional Neurological) Disorders: An Update”

Saturday, March 2, 2019

10:00 am – 12:00 pm

Presenter: Daniel Schneider, M.D.

Known to 19th century thinkers as “hysteria,” that specific form of psychosomatic illness known today as “conversion disorder,” or “functional neurological syndrome,” has been a source of controversy within the field of medicine for centuries.  Questions such as the proper means to make a diagnosis, etiology of symptoms, patient motivations, treatment options, and even what to call the syndrome, have all been vigorously debated over the years.  This talk will make a nod to that long history, while focusing on the recent research and evolution in understanding that has occurred over the past few decades. We will learn how modern physicians make this diagnosis (hint, it is NOT a diagnosis of exclusion), what we have discovered about the brains of patients with this disorder, and current notions of “best practice” in treatment of the condition.

2 CME/ CE credits will be offered.

Dr. Schneider is a board-certified psychiatrist and neurologist with specialty training in movement disorders. He is currently an associate professor at Rutgers – Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, where he sees patients with a variety of neuropsychiatric and movement conditions. He runs the only weekly clinic for patients with conversion symptoms in the Northeast, and has worked with his department of Occupational and Physical Therapy to create a specialized program for the study and treatment of these patients.

Educational Objectives: Upon completion of this activity, participants will be able to:

  1. Discuss the relative merits and deficiencies of terms like “functional”, “conversion”, and “psychogenic” to describe the condition.
  2. Describe at least two symptoms or dynamics which are used to diagnose this condition.
  3. Recount at least two aspects of our current understanding of the pathophysiology of the disorder.
  4. Identify current treatment strategies.

Psychologists
New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute is approved by the American Psychological Association (APA) to sponsor continuing education programs for psychologists. New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

Social Workers
New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0317.

Physicians
This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the Essential Areas and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education through the joint providership of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this Live Activity for a maximum of (2) AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Important disclosure information for all learners
None of the planners and presenters of this CME/CE program have any relevant financial relationships to disclose.

Persons with disabilities
The building is wheelchair accessible and has an elevator. Please notify the registrar in advance if you require accommodations.

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Sharon Weller

Defects in the Process of Representation in Early Childhood

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  •  March 12, 2019
     8:00 pm - 10:00 pm

NYPSI’s 1035th Scientific Meeting:

“Defects in the Process of Representation in Early Childhood: Consequences in Child Development and Analytic Technique in Dyadic Therapy”

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

8:00 – 10:00 pm

Presenter: Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, M.D., Ph.D.

Discussant: Patricia Nachman, Ph.D.

In this paper presentation Dr. Anzieu will discuss the normal and pathological development of representation in childhood. Using clinical examples, she will demonstrate the ways in which the child’s analyst can foster the process when it has gone off track. By integrating Freud’s idea of autoeroticism and early instinctual life with concepts from Klein, Winnicott, and Bion, she will describe the formation of the child’s self and will consider how its representation progresses from an initially symbiotic double of the mother to a differentiated object.

In doing psychoanalytically informed work with children, the analyst encounters behaviors, anxiety states, and syndromes that may be said to result from a failure of the early symbolization process. A discharge of tension, as opposed to play, reveals the failure of association between representation and emotion. Why the child acts rather than plays, why behavioral problems are on the rise, and how both relate to a failure in the capacity for representation, a failure that leads to severe anxieties and other disorders in the absence of loved ones, will therefore provide the focus of the discussion.

2 CME/CE credits offered.

Christine Anzieu-Premmereur is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC.  A member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris and the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute, she is on the faculty of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research, where she directs the Parent-Infant Psychotherapy Training Program, and Assistant Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at Columbia University.  Among her several publications, Dr. Anzieu-Premmereur most recently co-edited A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today’s Psychoanalysis.

Patricia A. Nachman, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and child and adult psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute.  She is an Attending Psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine;  and a Lecturer in Psychiatry at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Dr. Nachman is a former Assistant Professor of graduate psychology at the New School University and Director of the Margaret Mahler Observational Research Nursery;  prior to that she was a Senior Research Scientist in the Laboratory for Developmental Processes headed by Dr. Daniel Stern in the Dept. of Psychiatry, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Cornell Medical College.

Educational Objectives: Upon completion of this activity, participants will be able to:

  1. Describe and critically evaluate the consequences of disorders in representational capacity.
  2. Evaluate the role of mental representation in psychic functioning.
  3. Identify techniques of analytic therapy in child and adult work in the theoretical context of representation and its deficit.
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Sharon Weller

Thinking Psychoanalytically (and Historically) about the State of the Nation: 1939, 2019

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  •  April 9, 2019
     8:00 pm - 10:00 pm

NYPSI’s 1036th Scientific Meeting:

“Thinking Psychoanalytically (and Historically) about the State of the Nation: 1939, 2019”

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

8:00 – 10:00 pm

Presenter: Elizabeth Lunbeck, Ph.D.

Discussant: Ben Kafka, Ph.D.

Many have observed that emotion has increasingly come to dominate in the realm of politics, eclipsing rationality, nurturing violence, and threatening democratic forms of governance around the globe.  Historians in particular have sounded the alarm, invoking the catastrophic consequences of democracy’s dismantling in the 1930s to caution against complacency.  In this presentation, I look at the writings of the 1930s and 1940s psychoanalysts who witnessed  Europe’s embrace of fascism.  I show that concepts rooted in the idiom of narcissism (among them omnipotence, grandiosity, and magical thinking; humiliation, helplessness, and insecurity) and drawn from psychoanalysis’s disavowed originary practices (such as hypnosis and suggestion) figured centrally in their understandings of their own historical moment.  I suggest that their focus on feelings and emotions rather than on instinctual drives was lost to American psychoanalysis in the postwar period, rendering it phenomenologically impoverished, and conclude by arguing that their conceptualization of narcissism as a coherent structure of feeling offers us a powerful tool with which to understand the shocks and dislocations of the present.  If, as has been suggested, the “right to feel” is now consensually recognized in the political sphere, then current analytic understandings of narcissism are critical to grasping its complexities and power.

2 CME/CE credits offered. 

Elizabeth Lunbeck, Ph.D., is a professor in the department of the history of science at Harvard University and the author of several prize-winning books, most recently The Americanization of Narcissism (Harvard, 2014).  She is Academic Associate Member of APsaA and BPSI, and holds an MA in counseling psychology.

Ben Kafka, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. He is also an advanced candidate at IPTAR, and sees patients in private practice downtown. He has been a member of the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; Fellow and Chair of the Executive Committee of the New York Institute for the Humanities; and a Rita Frankiel Memorial Fellow of the Melanie Klein Trust. He is the author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (2012) as well as a number of articles, essays, and reviews. He is currently working on a book about gaslighting, double binds, folies-à-deux, and other forms of induced insanity.

Educational Objectives: Upon completion of this activity, participants will be able to:

  1. Discuss the contributions of 1930s and 1940s analysts to understandings of mass followership in non-democratic societies;
  2. Explain the differences between feelings and emotions on the one hand and apparatuses and energic cathexes on the other as frameworks for understanding individuals’ psychologies;
  3. Explain the ways in which leaders can mobilize narcissism to connect to their followers.
Psychologists
New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute is approved by the American Psychological Association (APA) to sponsor continuing education programs for psychologists. New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
Social Workers
New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0317.
Physicians
This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the Essential Areas and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education through the joint providership of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this Live Activity for a maximum of (2) AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
Important disclosure information for all learners
None of the planners and presenters of this CME program have any relevant financial relationships to disclose.
Persons with disabilities
The building is wheelchair accessible and has an elevator. Please notify the registrar in advance if you require accommodations.
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Sharon Weller

Racial Socialization and Thwarted Mentalization

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  •  March 21, 2019
     8:00 pm - 10:00 pm

Advanced Seminar in Child and Adolescent Analysis:

“Racial Socialization and Thwarted Mentalization: Reflections of a psychoanalyst from the lived experience of James Baldwin’s America”

Paper Awarded the 2018 Rieger Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Award –
A Distinguished Member Award from The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Thursday, March 21, 2019

8:00 pm – 10:00 pm

Presenter: Beverly J. Stoute, M.D.

A contemporary psychoanalytic perspective recognizes that the discussion of race will occur at the intersection of the intrapsychic and the social.   Framing this discussion with clinical examples, Dr. Stoute traces and explores the developmental evolution of race awareness from childhood and adolescence into adulthood, and reformulates the research on race awareness with a rare analytic interpretation of James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew, first published in 1962 in The Progressive, later in his acclaimed The Fire Next Time and revived as the literary forerunner of Between the World and Me  in 2015 by Ta-Nehisi Coates.   In this discussion, enriched with analytic data on mentalization and trans-generational trauma, Dr. Stoute integrates the theoretical, the clinical, the literary and the developmental perspectives to demonstrate the invaluable importance of psychodynamic understanding in deconstructing how we process racial difference in treatment situations and help clinicians recognize and discuss their own conscious and unconscious racial and cultural bias in working with patients.

2 CME/ CE credits offered. 

Beverly J. Stoute, M.D., is a graduate of Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Stoute went on to complete her psychiatry residency and fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at Payne Whitney Clinic—New York Hospital, part of Cornell Medical Center. She completed psychoanalytic training in child, adolescent, and adult psychoanalysis at The New York Psychoanalytic Institute. She serves as a training and supervising analyst at Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute and a child and adolescent supervising analyst at New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Dr. Stoute is a faculty member of the Southeast Child Analytic Consortium and an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences of Emory University School of Medicine. She emphasizes clinician education and training in recognizing and discussing racial bias. Dr. Stoute co-edited the 2016–2017 series in The American Psychoanalyst entitled Conversations on Psychoanalysis and Race, featuring her ground-breaking review paper “Race and Racism in Psychoanalytic Thought: The Ghosts in our Nursery,” now required reading in race and diversity courses at psychoanalytic institutes across the country. Dr. Stoute treats children, adolescents, and adults in her private practice. Her book, with co-editor Michael Slevin, MSW, entitled Race in the Therapeutic Encounter is due out in 2019.

Educational Objectives: Upon completion of this activity, participants will be able to:

  1. identify the developmental nodal points in the process of race awareness in childhood, and the factors that affect how attitudes around race are shaped into adulthood.
  2. identity the technical challenges of how issues around race arise in clinical situations and how their own attitudes and countertransference are factors in the process of mentalization.
  3. identify the utility of using psychoanalytic principles to understand how to understand and work with race in the consultation room.

 

 

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Sharon Weller

An Evening on Broadway in Support of NYPSI

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  •  January 22, 2019
     7:00 pm - 11:00 pm

A Special Evening in Support of NYPSI

Tuesday, January 22, 2019

7:00 – 9:00 pm: Theater Performance of Academy Award® winner Kenneth Lonergan’s “The Waverly Gallery”  

9:00 – 11:00 pm: Dinner & Conversation with Tony Award® winner Joan Allen and director Lila Neugebauer at Il Gattopardo Restaurant

 

Join us for a special evening that includes a performance of “The Waverly Gallery” starring Elaine May, Lucas Hedges, Joan Allen and Michael Cera, as well as a post-play dinner and conversation with star Joan Allen and director Lila Neugebauer.

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