2026
SATURDAY, MARCH 21, 2026, 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM EST on Zoom, MITPP Online Workshop: INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA IN CLINICAL PRACTICE: INDIVIDUALS AND COUPLES
PRESENTERS: VIVIAN ESKIN, PH.D. and DEBRA GILL, LCSW
Details and registration Form: https://www.mitpp.org/events
This seminar explores how trauma is transmitted across generations—not through direct narratives or biological mechanisms, but through silence, repetition, narcissistic identification and embodied emotional communication. Inherited trauma affects the internal object world and influences the formation of an internal couple that carries into adult partnerships. Unconscious ties to the suffering from previous generations impair psychic separateness and identity formation. According to Marianne Hirsch, second and third generation Holocaust survivors can unknowingly remain bound to post memory living inside traumas that precede and supersede their own existence.
Relying on case material and relevant theory, we will examine how unmetabolized trauma from previous generations becomes the psychic inheritance of the next generations.
In the treatment situation, we will consider the meaning of the analytic frame, as conceived by José Bleger, for its therapeutic provision of constancy. The analyst provides the steady backdrop, that holds unmetabolized trauma until the inevitable disruptions occur, revealing psychotic parts of the personality. These disruptions are essential when what has been hidden and silently carried becomes visible and available for analytic work. Therapeutic witnessing and the analyst's containing function are essential processes through which the therapist gradually metabolizes unprocessed psychic experience. Over time, analytic patients begin to recognize and consider the meaning of inherited trauma, allowing for an emergence of a third position—and in couple work, a couple state of mind, all representing a reflective thinking space where transformation becomes possible through mourning, symbolization, and the creation of new relational life.
Saturday, April 11, 2026, 10:00 am - 1:15 PM Pacific time, newport psychoanalytic institute presents: Boundary Dilemmas in Psychotherapy
Saturday Salon: Boundary Dilemmas in Psychotherapy
Course Description:
We will discuss the complexity of addressing boundary issues that present dilemmas. This course invites interaction regarding dilemmas that participants may have. A variety of situations will be explored: love or hate in the analytic relationship, self-disclosure, touch, handling session endings, contact between sessions, etc. For each dilemma, we will examine how the analyst’s decision regarding the boundary either opens up or forecloses on relational possibilities in the therapy. In addition, a brief historical overview of issues regarding provisions and abstinence will be discussed as well as how to evaluate their impact on the patient.
Course Objectives:
Students will be able to formulate the dilemmas regarding self-disclosure.
Students will be able to formulate considerations regarding phone contact or texting between sessions.
Students will be able to explore special provisions regarding session endings.
3 CE Credits Available
Presented by Dr. Ira Poll, Ph.D., Psy.D.
Register @ https://www.npi.edu/events/saturday-salon-boundary-dilemmas-in-psychotherapy/
IFPE’s 36th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference, Subversion, October 1 - 3, 2026, Chicago, IL https://www.ifpe.org/2026-conference