Five Fridays 2024 – 2025
Our 2024-2025 Five Friday topics and presenters are listed below. Please note that for 2024-2025, four of the Five Friday seminars will be in person, at the BCC Service Center in Bethesda, MD. Our virtual webinars will be held via zoom, with zoom links sent to all registrants on the Monday before the seminar.
Finding My Way Home: Keys to Clinical Interventions from Attachment Informed Perspectives
September 27, 2024 from 11:30am – 2:30pm at the BCC Service Center
Mauricio Cortina, M.D.
Attachment theory and research help explore six key interventions used by psychodynamic, relational therapists (Leveson and Gay, 2022). Bowlby revised Freud’s instinct theory by conceptualizing instincts as prosocial for forming attachment bonds which profoundly affect development. The psychoanalytical and developmental paradigm of attachment theory, based on the infant’s need to seek the protection of the primary caregiver (attachment figure), is solidly backed by exhaustive, replicated investigation via naturalistic observation, longitudinal studies, and novel instruments yielding measurable results. Attachment bonds vary, allowing for predictability in the nature of close relations; e.g., infants who form secure attachments are likely to develop basic trust and positive expectations of others. While attachment bonds and intersubjective relatedness have different evolutionary and developmental roots, they are intertwined. This and the integration with developmental theory and research will be discussed.
Learning Objectives:
- Describe how attachment theory and research has contributed to the understanding normal from pathological (or less optimal) attachment relations.
- Define the difference between organized attachment patterns and disorganized attachment patterns.
- List two types of interactions which attachment figures bring into the relationship with infants and young children that produce disorganized attachment patterns.
- Name five ways affect regulation strategies derived from the history of secure, insecure, or disorganized attachment can be used clinically.
Presenter Bio:
Mauricio Cortina M.D. is faculty member of the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and The New Washington School of Psychiatry and the Instituto Mexicano de Socio-psicoanalisis A.C. in Mexico City. He is psychiatric fellow of the American Academy of Psychodynamic Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis and winner of the 2019 Bowlby and Ainsworth Award. He is an honorary member of the International Attachment Netwwork. He edited with Michael Maccoby A Prophetic Analyst: Erich Fromm’s Contributions to Psychoanalysis.(1996), and Leadership, Psychoanalysis, and Society (2022). He edited with Mario Marrone Attachmen Theory and the Psychoanalytic Process (2003) and Apego y psicoterapia: Un paradigma revolucionario (2017). He is editor of recently published 2024 issue the journal Psychoanalytic Inquiry entitled “Erich Fromm’s Relevance for our Troubled World”. He has published more than 30 chapters and articles on the work of Erich Fromm, attachment theory and human evolution.
“So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Racism and Xenophobia in Contemporary U.S. Context
November 8, 2024 from 9:30am – 12:30pm at the BCC Service Center
Usha Tummala-Narra, PhD
Note: This seminar earns 3 CEs in cultural competence.
There has been a long history of separating the psyche and the social in psychoanalysis and psychological theories, relegating sociocultural experience as peripheral to real psychotherapy. Yet, more recent theorizing about the role of sociocultural context and identity has begun to shift attention to the interaction of intrapsychic and sociocultural experiences. This presentation will provide a psychoanalytic perspective on racism and xenophobia and their impacts on intrapsychic and interpersonal life, particularly for racial minority immigrants and their children within the socio-politically polarized context of the United States. Dr. Tummala-Narra will explore how racism and xenophobia influence therapeutic dynamics and how immigrant experiences can facilitate the expansion of psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Three Learning Objectives:
- Describe the impact of racism and xenophobia on the intrapsychic and interpersonal life of clients and therapists.
- Identify how the therapeutic relationship can mirror racial and cultural dynamics and inequities in broader society.
- Identify how psychoanalytic theory informs and deepens an understanding of sociocultural context in psychotherapy.
Presenter Bio:
Usha Tummala-Narra, Ph.D. is a Professor of Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology at Boston College. Her research and scholarship focus on immigration, trauma, and culturally informed psychoanalytic psychotherapy. She is also a clinical psychologist in Independent Practice and works primarily with survivors of trauma from diverse sociocultural backgrounds. Dr. Tummala-Narra is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Senior Psychotherapy Editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. She is a member of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis, initiated by the American Psychoanalytic Association, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN). She is the author of Psychoanalytic Theory and Cultural Competence in Psychotherapy (2016), the editor of Trauma and Racial Minority Immigrants: Turmoil, Uncertainty, and Resistance (2021), and co-author of Applying Multiculturalism: An Ecological Approach to the Multicultural Guidelines (2023), all published by the American Psychological Association Books.
Borderline: The Biography of a Personality Disorder
January 10th, 2025 from 9:30am-12:30pm via Zoom
Alexander Kriss, PhD
IMPORTANT – Zoom links and materials will be sent to all registrants on the Monday before the seminar. Be sure to register by Sunday, January 5th, 2025 to receive the Zoom link.
The history of psychoanalysis has centered around the “borderline” — patients who fall in the gap between diagnostic categories, often exposing how arbitrary those categories can be — and yet it remains an elusive and frequently maligned concept. From Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s earliest days of trying to understand hysterical illness, to Anna Freud and Melanie Klein’s debates over whether the human self is fundamentally unified or multitudinous, to contemporary struggles to define and treat patients labeled as “treatment resistant,” we are repeatedly confronted with a shape-shifting clinical challenge that is currently most exemplified by the label of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).
This workshop will unpack BPD by placing it in its historical context and exploring how that history reflects the lived experience of individuals called borderline today. We will consider how borderline conditions can be successfully treated from a psychoanalytic perspective by borrowing pluralistically from contemporary approaches, and consider what these approaches offer that are missing from dominant cognitive-behavioral paradigms aimed at treating BPD.
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will be able to explain how borderline phenomena has been perceived and treated within psychoanalysis across three distinct historical eras.
- Participants will be able to identify two contemporary psychoanalytic approaches to treating borderline conditions and name their key features.
- Participants will identify sources of stigma toward borderline conditions stemming from both inside and outside of the psychoanalytic perspective.
Presenter Bio:
Alexander Kriss, Ph.D., is an associate professor of psychology at Fordham University in New York City and director of the Fordham Community Mental Health Clinic. His writing has appeared in Psyche, Salon, and Logic, and academic journals such as Psychoanalytic Psychology, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, and Attachment. Dr. Kriss is the author of two books, Borderline: The Biography of a Personality Disorder and The Gaming Mind: A New Psychology of Videogames and the Power of Play. His private psychotherapy practice is based in Sleepy Hollow, NY.
A Passage Through the Faraway, Nearby
March 14, 2025 from 11:30am – 2:30pm at the BCC Service Center
Kerry L. Malawista, MSW, PhD
Register for A Passage Through the Faraway, Nearby
How do we mourn the loss of someone essential to our identity? How do we find a bridge between the nearby of overwhelming grief and the dreaded faraway of feeling our loved one is lost to us forever? In her work with patients and with her own losses, the presenter suggests that a middle distance is necessary, a space that bridges the faraway and the nearby. In the middle distance—a liminal space—a death can be slowly integrated. The bereaved can shift between moments of excruciating pain and moments of ordinary living, ultimately able to summon loving memories without the daily ache and pain of loss, transforming suffering and surviving into healthy thriving.
Learning Objectives:
- Identify the complex dynamics that arise when a child loses a parent or a parent loses a child.
- Describe an understanding of identification, taking a loved one inside, as a means of healthy mourning and resilience.
- Explain the transitional space involved in mourning the loss of a loved one.
Presenter Bio:
Kerry L. Malawista, Ph.D. is a training and supervising analyst at the Contemporary Freudian Society. Associate Editor, Journal of American Psychoanalytic. She is co-chair of New Directions in Writing and founder of The Things They Carry. Her essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines and literary journals including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The
Baltimore Sun, The Boston Globe, Washingtonian Magazine, The Huffington Post, Bethesda Magazine, Arlington Magazine, and Delmarva Review, which nominated her for a Pushcart Prize. She is the co-author of Wearing my Tutu to Analysis and Other Stories (2011), The Therapist in Mourning: From the Faraway Nearby (2013), When the Garden Isn’t Eden (2022) all with Columbia University Press, and Who’s Behind the Couch (2017, Routledge Press). Meet the Moon, 2022, Regal House Publishing.
To Have & To Hold: Till Sex Do Us Part
May 9th, 9:30am – 12:30pm at the BCC Service Center
Noa Ashman, LCSW-C
A French euphemism for orgasm, La petite mort, signifies the momentary post-coital loss or weakening of consciousness – or in other interpretations, an undesired loss of a part of the self. Perhaps “The little death,” can also offer us another frame for understanding the role of sex in an aging couple’s life. Applying an existential sensibility, how might we think of intimate sexual pleasure as a force that at times mitigates and at others, deepens the felt loneliness and accompanying existential anxieties of aging and of the human condition. Using two case illustrations, we will explore how existential themes may surface in the older couples’ struggles to regain their lost sexual life. Case material will also examine how the couples’ shifting roles in the family life cycle may contribute to their ambivalence about sex.
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will be able to define at least three dimensions of the human condition and the existential anxieties they seek to contain.
- Participants will be able to explain at least two possible ways that conflicts
- about sex in an aging couple’s relationship symbolize existential struggles for the partners, both individually and together as a couple.
- Participants will be able to name two other psychoanalytic theories of mind to symbolize the no-sex symptom in couples.
Presenter Bios:
Noa Ashman, MSW practices individual, couple and family psychotherapy and clinical supervision in Bethesda, MD. She has held positions as Faculty and Founding Member and Chair of the Center for Couple & Family Studies at the Washington School of Psychiatry and Faculty at The George Washington University, where she supervised doctoral-level students in the Professional Psychology Program. She has also taught courses in couple and family therapy at Smith College School for Social Work and at the Washington Baltimore
Center for Psychoanalysis. Noa is currently engaged in a project teaching and supervising Ukrainian psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists in the fundamentals of couple therapy to support their clinical efforts during the war.