• Zoom Clinical Conference – Trauma, Psychosis, and Psychotic Manifestations of Transference with Michael Garrett, MD

    Live via Zoom

    Dr. Michael Garrett will challenge the validity of the concept of “schizophrenia” as a genetically determined brain disease and review research suggesting that chronic psychosis is a trauma-related disorder best characterized as a particular phenotypic form of complex PTSD. He will review research showing that childhood trauma increases the risk of psychosis and that fragmented trauma memories are often embedded in the content of psychotic symptoms. Dr. Garrett will trace the developmental origin of psychotic symptoms from implicit behavioral knowing that in infancy provides a template for relationship with caregivers, through pre-verbal fantasy, to conscious and unconscious object-related fantasy, to the emergence of florid psychotic symptoms in adolescence. Dr. Garrett will differentiate non-psychotic, near-psychotic, and psychotic manifestations of transference as seen from an object-related point of view, illustrating each form of transference with a brief clinical vignette and offer clinical suggestions about how to recognize and deal with a psychotic transference.

  • Ethics Conference via Zoom – Dreaming Into Being: Community Psychoanalysis and War with Gaea Logan, LPC-S

    Live via Zoom

    Gordon Lawrence’s Social Dreaming Matrix suggests that our dreams are communal, rather than personal. Arising from the social unconscious and belonging to the community, dreams can offer guidance, healing, and problem solving for a community of dreamers. I had such a dream. It included many symbols, some incomprehensible to me, yet the dream revealed a pathway for communal healing. The dream inspired the co-creation of the International Institute for Trauma Studies (IITS), an online immersive trauma training and certification program for graduate students and clinicians in war time Ukraine. IITS is a scalable contemporary psychoanalytic group approach to communal trauma for the treatment and prevention of war related depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and transgenerational trauma. This is a story of “Dreaming into Being”: ordinary citizens working together to create the extraordinary, an international training center and outpatient clinic for Ukrainian families, children and combatants. The paper also cites scholarly contributors in the current resurgence of community psychoanalysis and thinkers in social and phenomenological psychoanalysis.