NPSI upcoming events

NPSI April Scientific Meeting (04/15/2026)

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 02:00:00 GMT

“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).

NPSI May Scientific Meeting - Save The Date (05/20/2026)

Thu, 21 May 2026 02:00:00 GMT

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

NPSI June Scientific Meeting (06/17/2026)

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 02:00:00 GMT

“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.

NPSI September Scientific Meeting - save the date (09/16/2026)

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 02:00:00 GMT

SAVE THE DATE

NPSI September Scientific Meeting

[Title TBD]

Presenter: Jeffrey Eaton

Moderator: Caron Harrang

NPSI November Scientific Meeting - save the date (11/18/2026)

Thu, 19 Nov 2026 03:00:00 GMT

Thu, 18 Nov 2027 03:00:00 GMT

SAVE THE DATE

NPSI November Scientific Meeting

Presenter: TBD

Moderator: TBD