Supporting our members, offering outstanding psychoanalytic training to mental health professionals, and educating the general public about psychoanalysis since 1999.

space needle at sunset

Photo by Caron Harrang

Scientific Meetings:

NPSI Scientific Meetings provide a dynamic and engaging forum for exploring contemporary psychoanalysis. While emphasizing British object relations theory—including the work of Winnicott, Bion, and post-Bionian developments—these meetings also feature a broad range of psychoanalytic perspectives that are relevant to contemporary clinical practice. Each month during the academic year, a psychoanalyst—either from NPSI or invited from another IPA Component Society—presents an original paper, with occasional special presentations added to the schedule. Sessions are recorded and made available for purchase through NPSI’s video library, extending access to members and the broader professional community. Meetings are moderated by one of the Continuing Education Committee co-chairs: Caron Harrang, Drew Tillotson, or Nancy Winters.

Designed to foster thoughtful exchange and deeper understanding of psychoanalytic processes, these online meetings provide ample time for discussion of the presenter’s material. Open to NPSI members and all interested mental health professionals worldwide, NPSI Scientific Meetings offer an excellent opportunity to engage with leading-edge psychoanalytic ideas and to connect with colleagues across both local and international psychoanalytic communities.

Upcoming Scientific Meetings

    • 11/18/2026
    • 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM
    • via Zoom
    Register

    “Psychoanalysis on the Precipice:

    Retaining our Humanity and Relevance

    During Times of War and Violent Othering”



    Harriet Wolfe, MD, FIPA

    How can psychoanalysis remain relevant in times of war?

    While President of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) as the horrors of the Israel-Palestine war were unfolding, Harriet Wolfe was called upon to articulate the IPA’s stance regarding the war. In this presentation she reflects on her psychoanalytic and personal journey in exploring what psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic institutions might offer in the face of the ravages of violent conflict. She reflects on her struggle to bring psychoanalytic understanding to a recurrent psychoanalytic dilemma: how to retain our humanity and our capacity to think when in a disrupted state of mind in the face of suffering impossible to comprehend and intense pressure to take sides.

    Wolfe will present material from her 2025 article, “Psychoanalysis and the Israel-Palestine War: Perspectives on Our Relevance” in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, along with more recent reflections. She examines several interconnected challenges: the challenge to our ability to think when our clinical identities and potential unconscious fantasies about the capacity to cure are threatened by our inability to alleviate suffering; the discovery of how disruptive and painful empathy becomes when one truly begins to apprehend what the other is experiencing; and the power of projection to divide and conquer externally while striving to preserve coherence internally.

    Wolfe will suggest how the “we” of clinical psychoanalysts and the “we” of psychoanalysis as an institution might think, speak, and remain relevant and effective in the current Zeitgeist increasingly marked by violent othering.

    We anticipate that Wolfe’s observations and self-reflections on life in psychoanalytic organizations will be a stimulating prelude for our conversation on December 5, 2026, with Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin, “Making a Home Together in a Warring World: Two American Psychoanalysts—Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli—Bearing Witness and Imagining a Future.” With Wolfe’s contributions, we hope to open a space for our collective exploration of the dilemmas we face as psychoanalysts and citizens of a turbulent world.

    Learning Objectives

    After attending this scientific meeting, participants will be able to:

    1. Describe psychic and socio-cultural phenomena that characterize the contemporary Zeitgeist of violent othering.

    2. Distinguish the difficulty in sustaining the ability to think within ourselves from that within our colleagues or patients when world events call into question our capacity to alleviate suffering.

    3. Recognize the challenges of authentic empathy in the context of unspeakable suffering.

    About the Presenter

    Harriet Wolfe, MD, FIPA is a psychoanalyst practicing in San Francisco. She is immediate Past President of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Past President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.

    Wolfe’s scholarly interests include clinical applications of psychoanalytic research (“Clinical discussion of Psychodynamic Therapy: a Meta-Analysis Testing Equivalence of Outcome” in: Outcome Research and the Future of Psychoanalysis: Clinicians and Researchers in Dialogue, 2020); organizational processes (“Consultation to organizations” with W. Myerson et al, in: Textbook of Applied Psychoanalysis, 2018), female development (“Female leadership: Difficulties and gifts”, American Journal of Psychoanalysis, accepted 2020) and ethical aspects of therapeutic action. 

    Wolfe has a longstanding commitment to psychoanalytic public health intervention. She has co-authored a number of guided activity workbooks for children, parents and teachers that help children cope with natural and manmade disasters: the current pandemic, wildfires hurricanes, homelessness, war and terrorism (childrenpsychologicalhealthcenter.org).

    About the Moderator

    Nancy C. Winters, MD, FIPA is a psychoanalyst practicing in Portland, Oregon. She is a Training and Supervising Analyst of the Oregon Psychoanalytic Institute and the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University. She is co-editor and chapter author of the Gravida Award-winning Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond (2022, Routledge). Reflecting her diverse interests, recent publications and paper presentations include “Autoimmunity and its Expression in the Analytic Situation: Contemporary Reflections on Our Inherent Self-Destructiveness” (2022), “A Home to the Lie: The Contemporary (Per)Version of Truth” (2023), and “Transformations in O Online: Group Process in the Virtual Realm” (2024); and the papers “The Liar and the Truth-Teller: An Analytic Dialogue” (Lisbon, 2025; print forthcoming), “Freud’s ‘Open Wound’ of Melancholia: Psychic Inflammation and Self-Healing” (Seattle, 2026), and “The Jouissance of Hatred in Verdi’s Rigoletto” (Toronto, 2026).  

    • 12/16/2026
    • 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM
    • zoom

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI December Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  Mary Brady

    Moderator:  Caron Harrang





    • 01/23/2027
    • 9:00 AM - 10:45 AM
    • via Zoom
    Register

    “Gender in the Subjunctive Mood: 

    Temporality and the Question of Evidence"



    Oren Gozlan, C. Psych, ABPP, FIPA

    In this timely and thought-provoking presentation, Oren Gozlan takes up contemporary debates around gender-affirming care to interrogate a pressing question for psychoanalysis today: what is meant by “evidence,” and what work does it perform in the analytic field?


    Drawing on his concept of the subjunctive mood, Gozlan explores how evidentiary discourse can subtly reorganize analytic listening—authorizing caution, rendering responsibility legible, and positioning clinical work for scrutiny beyond the consulting room. He distinguishes between the ontic demands of documentation—decision letters, refusals, and retrospective justification—and the ontological stakes of psychoanalysis, where questions of recognition, bodily suffering (for both analyst and analysand), and transference must be discovered within the unfolding analytic process itself.


    Against the apparent neutrality of statements such as “the evidence shows,” Gozlan highlights how these sorts of formulations may prematurely close inquiry while shaping clinical action. Psychoanalytic evidence, he argues, belongs to a different temporality, one that emerges gradually through repetition, revision, transference, and afterwardsness.


    The subjunctive mood names both an ethical and a clinical stance—one that sustains uncertainty in the analytic encounter without collapsing into withdrawal or foreclosing possibility. In this way, gender becomes not only a topic of debate, but a privileged site for rethinking time, knowing, and ethical responsibility in psychoanalysis.


    Learning Objectives:


    After attending this scientific meeting, participants will be able to:


    1. Distinguish ontic from ontological stakes in psychoanalytic work with gender.
    2. Identify how evidentiary discourse can reorganize analytic listening.
    3. Apply the subjunctive mood as an ethic of clinical uncertainty.


    About the Presenter


    Oren Gozlan, C. Psych, ABPP, FIPA, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in Toronto, Canada, and a member of the Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He is the author of Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian Approach (winner of the American Academy & Board of Psychoanalysis annual book prize, 2015), and recipient of the Symonds Prize (2016), Ralph Roughton Award (2022), and Miguel Prados Prize (2023). His edited volume Critical Debates in the Transsexual Studies Field: In Transition (Routledge) was a runner-up for the 2019 Gradiva Award. His recent books include Gender with Sexuality: Situations of Psychoanalytic Learning and Gender: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge).



    About the Moderator


    Caron Harrang, LICSW, FIPA, BCPsa is a board-certified psychoanalyst with a full-time private practice in Seattle, Washington. She is an IPA training and supervising psychoanalyst on the faculty of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and teaches throughout North America. Her recent publications include co-editor and chapter author of the Gradiva Award–winning Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond (2021); “Introduction. Truth and Lies: Psychoanalytic Perspectives” (2023); “On Grotstein’s ‘Truth’ in Bion’s Theory of ‘O’” (2023); Nancy C. Winters, Caron Harrang, and Stefanie Sedlacek, “Transformations in O Online: Group Process in the Virtual Realm” (2024); “Earthquakes in the Analytic Field: A Post-Bionian View of Negative Therapeutic Reaction” (2025); and “Binocular Vision as a Function of the Analytic Field” (2026). For additional information, see www.caronharrang.com.


    Zoom Information

    A Zoom link will be emailed to registrants the day prior to the event at the email address used to register. If you have not received the Zoom link several hours prior to the event, please check your other email folders (including spam, junk, and trash).  Please also consider adding "admin@npsi.us.com" to your email contacts to ensure receipt of the Zoom link.


    • 02/17/2027
    • 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM
    • zoom

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI February Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  Drew Tillotson

    Moderator:  TBD






    • 03/17/2027
    • 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM
    • zoom

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI March Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  Afsaneh Alisobhani

    Moderator:  Nancy C. Winters




    • 04/24/2027
    • 9:00 AM - 10:45 AM

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI April Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  TBD

    Moderator:  TBD


    • 05/19/2027
    • 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM
    • zoom

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI May Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  Michael Diamond

    Moderator:  Drew Tillotson




    • 06/16/2027
    • 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM
    • zoom

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI June Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  Judy K. Eekhoff

    Moderator:  Caron Harrang




    • 09/18/2027
    • 9:00 AM - 10:45 AM

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI September Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  TBD

    Moderator:  TBD


    • 10/20/2027
    • 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM
    • zoom

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI October Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  Samantha Good

    Moderator:  Caron Harrang




    • 11/17/2027
    • 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI November Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  TBD

    Moderator:  TBD



Our Mission

Our mission is to

  1. Deliver premier psychoanalytic education and training for individuals aspiring to become psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed psychotherapists, with a dedicated focus on British Object Relations theory, the work of Wilfred Bion, and contemporary Post-Bionian clinical practice;
  2. Foster the ongoing professional growth and development of our analyst members, candidates, and community members through rigorous scholarship, mentorship, and collegial exchange;
  3. Advance regional, national, and international understanding of mental life by contributing original thought and research to the evolving field of psychoanalysis; and
  4. Promote emotional health, creativity, and well-being for those we serve through the ethical and compassionate practice of psychoanalysis.


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Tel: 206.930.2886

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