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

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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

  • NPSI April Scientific Meeting

    • 04/15/2026
    • 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM
    • via Zoom
    Register

    “Freud’s ‘Open Wound’ of Melancholia:

    Psychic Inflammation as Self-Healing”



    Nancy C. Winters, MD, FIPA

    Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) remains the foundational psychoanalytic account of depression, offering enduring insights into its genesis and its notorious resistance to treatment. Nancy Winters revisits Freud’s intriguing observation that “the complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies . . . from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished.” For Freud, this “open wound”—and what distinguishes it from mourning—is seen in the melancholic’s severe self-denigration. As Freud observes astutely, the true target of the melancholic’s self-reproaches is the lost love object, taken into the ego through identification.

    Winters reconsiders the melancholic’s self-accusations as a mode of truth-seeking that may be understood as an attempt to heal this open wound, in line with Freud’s (1911) view of the symptom itself as an effort at recovery. She conceptualizes this process as a form of psychic inflammation, analogous to biological inflammation in its dual capacities for pain and healing, as well as its pathological extreme in the autoimmune self-attack (Winters, 2022). Clinical vignettes illustrate how this ‘inflammation’ can manifest as a search for the most damning truth about oneself—understood dynamically as an effort to loosen the identification with the introjected object and ultimately to restore life-enhancing libido to the depleted ego. 


    Learning Objectives:

    1. Understand Freud’s metaphor of melancholia as an “open wound” that draws libidinal energy to it and impoverishes the ego. 

    2. Describe the melancholic’s self-accusations as a mode of truth-seeking that can be thought of as akin to “psychic inflammation”

    3. Discuss clinical implications of the proposed psychic inflammatory process as an attempt to self-heal.  

    About the Presenter

    Nancy C. Winters, MD, FIPA is a psychoanalyst practicing in Portland, Oregon. She is a training and supervising analyst on the faculty of the Oregon Psychoanalytic Institute (OPI) and the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NPSI), and a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Child/Adolescent Psychiatry at the Oregon Health & Science University. She is on the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Quarterly. Recent publications and presentations include: Co-editor and chapter author of Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond (2022, Routledge); “Autoimmunity and its Expression in the Analytic Situation: Contemporary Reflections on Our Inherent Self-Destructiveness” (Int. J. Psychoanal,  2022); “A Home to the Lie: The Contemporary (Per)Version of Truth” (Am. J. Psychoanal., 2023); “Transformations in O Online: Group Process in the Virtual Realm” (Psychoanal. Q., 2024); and recent papers, “The Liar and the Truth-Teller: An Analytic Dialogue” (Lisbon, 2025), and “Schubert’s Final Piano Sonata in B Flat Major as a Metaphor for Analytic Termination” (Seattle, 2025).

    About the Moderator

    Drew Tillotson, PsyD, FIPA, BCPsa is a board-certified psychoanalyst in San Francisco, California. He is a graduate, Training and Supervising Analyst, faculty member, and Past President of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) and also serves as a Training and Supervising Analyst on the faculty of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NPSI). He is Past Vice-President of the North American Psychoanalytic Confederation and currently a board director for both the Confederation of Independent Psychoanalytic Societies and the North American Psychoanalytic Confederation. He teaches at PINC and NPSI and maintains a full-time private practice in San Francisco. 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); chapter author in Braving the Erotic Field in the Treatment of Adolescents and Children (2022); and contributions to Jonathan Sklar’s The Soft Power of Culture: Art, Transitional Space, Death and Play (2024).

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  • NPSI May Scientific Meeting - Save The Date

    • 05/20/2026
    • 7:00 PM
    • via Zoom

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI May Scientific Meeting


    "How Do We Know What We Know?  Recognizing Secrets in the Body"


    Presenter: Kathryn Zerbe

    Moderator:  Nancy Winters

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  • NPSI June Scientific Meeting

    • 06/17/2026
    • 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM
    • via Zoom
    Register

    “A Peculiar People:

    Mormonism, Drag Performance, and Erotic Non-Belonging”



    Danny Gellersen, LICSW, FIPA

    In this presentation Danny Gellersen examines the psychic impact of religious cultural inheritance and queer sexual identity—an intersection rarely addressed directly in the psychoanalytic literature. Drawing from a decade-long analytic treatment, they explore how Mormonism, belief, and religious residue persist as uncanny, affectively charged presences within the transference and countertransference.


    Using Freud’s concept of the uncanny, José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification theory, and Laplanche’s theory of après-coup, Gellersen traces how early theological inscriptions are reanimated in adult erotic life, dissociation, and experiences of non-belonging. Through clinical vignettes, dream material, and personal reflection, they consider how drag performance operates both as metaphor and praxis—destabilizing compulsive normativity while reclaiming erotic vitality.


    Positioning the analytic relationship alongside the drag stage, Gellersen’s presentation invites psychoanalytic colleagues to consider how religious inheritance and sexual identity shape the analytic field in ways that have remained largely untheorized. 


    Learning Objectives:


    After this presentation, participants will be able to:


    1.     Identify how religious and cultural inheritances may manifest as “uncanny” residues within transference and countertransference dynamics.


    2.     Apply Freud’s concept of the uncanny and Laplanche’s theory of après-coup to clinical material involving belief, depersonalization, and queer identity.


    3.     Evaluate how performance, disidentification, embodiment, and experiences of non-belonging can function as generative sites of erotic vitality within the analytic relationship.


    About the Presenter

    Danny Gellersen, LICSW, FIPA, is a licensed clinical social worker and psychoanalyst with a private practice in Seattle, Washington and New York State. They are a graduate of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, National Training Program in New York City, and resides in Seattle full-time, where they teach on the faculties of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and chairs the Distinguished Speaker Series for the Northwest Alliance for Psychoanalytic Study. Their practice and studies as an artist, writer, educator, and student of realist classical drawing, Mormonism, queer theory, and drag performance are greatly intertwined with their clinical werk.


    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” (in press). For additional information, see www.caronharrang.com.

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  • NPSI September Scientific Meeting - save the date

    • 09/16/2026
    • 7:00 PM
    • via Zoom

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI September Scientific Meeting


    [Title TBD]


    Presenter: Jeffrey Eaton

    Moderator:  Caron Harrang

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  • NPSI November Scientific Meeting - save the date

    • 11/18/2026
    • 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM
    • zoom

    SAVE THE DATE

    “Psychoanalysis and the Israel-Palestine War:

    Perspectives on Our Relevance”

    Presenter:  Harriet Wolfe

    Moderator:  Nancy C. Winters



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  • NPSI December Scientific Meeting - save the date

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

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI December Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  Mary Brady

    Moderator:  Caron Harrang





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  • NPSI January Scientific Meeting - save the date

    • 01/23/2027
    • 9:00 AM - 10:45 AM
    • zoom

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI January Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  Oren Gozlan

    Moderator:  Caron Harrang



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  • NPSI February Scientific Meeting - save the date

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

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI February Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  Drew Tillotson

    Moderator:  TBD



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  • NPSI March Scientific Meeting - save the date

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

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI March Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  Afsaneh Alisobhani

    Moderator:  Nancy C. Winters




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  • NPSI April Scientific Meeting - Save the Date

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

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI April Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  TBD

    Moderator:  TBD


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  • NPSI May Scientific Meeting - save the date

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

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI May Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  Michael Diamond

    Moderator:  Drew Tillotson




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  • NPSI June Scientific Meeting - save the date

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

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI June Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  Judy K. Eekhoff

    Moderator:  Caron Harrang




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  • NPSI September Scientific Meeting - Save the Date

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

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI September Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  TBD

    Moderator:  TBD


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  • NPSI October Scientific Meeting - save the date

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

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI October Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  Samantha Good

    Moderator:  Caron Harrang




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  • NPSI November Scientific Meeting - Save the Date

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

    SAVE THE DATE

    NPSI November Scientific Meeting

    Presenter:  TBD

    Moderator:  TBD


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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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