ISPS-US Annual Conference 2026

1:30pm EST

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Track (In-Person Only)

Friday November 6, 2026 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST

This panel is a continuation of panels presented for the past 4 years that focus on an in-depth discussion of clinical work with an individual diagnosed with psychosis via a detailed reading and discussion of a psychotherapy transcript. It serves as an extension of discussions that are held in an ongoing basis during our ISPS-US/CCP case conference, although anyone with an interest in clinical work is welcome to attend and join the discussion. We have found that the discussion that arises from this immersion into a moment "in the consulting room" is often surprising, illuminating, and most of all, inspiring.

Speakers

Nancy Burke, PhD, ABPP

Co-Chair, Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis

Nancy Burke, PhD, ABPP, is a psychoanalyst, writer and psychotherapy activist in Evanston IL. She is currently vice-president of ISPS-US, co-chair of Expanded Mental Health Services of Chicago, NFP, and a board member, past-president and core faculty member of the Chicago Center for... Read More →

Zak Mucha, LCSW

President, Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis

Zak Mucha, LCSW is a psychoanalyst in Chicago and the author of Swimming to the Horizon: Crack, Psychosis and Street-Corner Social Work, Emotional Abuse: A Manual for Self Defense, and two collections of poetry.

Adam Weg, LCSW

Primary Clinician, Lenox Hill Hospital

Adam Weg, LCSW practices psychoanalytic psychotherapy in New York City, with a special interest in the psychoanalysis of “serious mental illness.” He also works in the Early Treatment Program at Lenox Hill Hospital, and is an Associate Faculty Member at the Chicago Center for... Read More →

Michael Ryzner-Basiewicz

PhD Candidate, Duquesne University

Michael Ryzner-Basiewicz is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Duquesne University. He is a member of ISPS-US and associate clinical faculty at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. Michael works psychoanalytically with small children, adolescents, and adults.

Friday November 6, 2026 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST
Breakout Room #2

Breakout Session, In-Person Only

3:30pm EST

From Control to Connection: Human Rights Aligned Approaches (In-Person Only)

Friday November 6, 2026 3:30pm - 5:00pm EST

Breakout Room #2

From Control to Connection: Human Rights Aligned Approaches

3:30-4pm Lived Wisdom, Dialogic Practice, Trust, and Respect: Best Practices from a Human Rights Perspective - Claire Bien, MEd
4-4:30pm In the Openness of the Beast's Eye: A Study of a Different Response to the Crisis in Mental Health in a Brazilian City - Jana Koosah, PhD Student
4:30-5pm Provision of Psychological and Psychosocial Interventions in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: The Case of Early Intervention in Psychosis - Ruben Valle

Lived Wisdom, Dialogic Practice, Trust, and Respect: Best Practices from a Human Rights Perspective - Claire Bien, MEd
This talk speaks to the ways in which the social conditions of our lives, including imbalances of power, stigma, cultural misunderstandings, and racism, influence perception and treatment. The goal is to instill within the professionals who have vast power over the rest of a person’s life the necessity of beginning with a large measure of professional humility, addressing each individual, each interaction, each conversation, each diagnosis, and each disposition, with a clear understanding of the reasons for the actions, behaviors, and concerns that brought the person who stands or sits before them into their awareness. The talk is drawn largely from a chapter I wrote for a book entitled Prescribing Psychiatric Medications: The How, Why, and Why Not, edited by John D. Cahill, MD, and Keith Gallagher, MD, to be published by Cambridge University Press in late 2026/early 2027. The chapter, entitled: "Wisdom from without: what can we learn from the consumer movement about prescribing well,” speaks to the vastness of human experience and vulnerability and presents critically important perspectives of the disability rights/mental health recovery/peer/survivor movements, with an emphasis on human rights, person-centered and trauma-informed approaches to treatment, mutual trust and responsibility, and shared decision making among all parties. It is informed by my own lived experience as well as by the lived wisdom and experiences of colleagues and friends in the Hearing Voices Network, ISPS, and the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health.

In the Openness of the Beast's Eye: A Study of a Different Response to the Crisis in Mental Health in a Brazilian City - Jana Koosah, PhD Student
My research in Brazil examines a new approach to crisis management that does not involve coercion and makes use of 24-hour community centres. This approach fosters autonomy and heteronomy without servitude. Drawing on the work of Basaglia, Foucault, Fanon, Castel, Tosquelles and critical psychoanalysis, the study explores crisis as a situation that links health, social suffering, power and knowledge rather than as an individual psychiatric disorder. The study argues that responses to crisis outside of psychiatric isolation can become practices of collective transformation, mutual care, and socio-political recomposition. It therefore emphasises territoriality and critiques psychiatric colonisation.

Provision of Psychological and Psychosocial Interventions in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: The Case of Early Intervention in Psychosis - Ruben Valle
Early Intervention in Psychosis (EIP) is grounded in the principles of early intervention and phase-specific treatment. Consequently, EIP is not limited to pharmacological management but relies on a broad set of evidence-based psychological and psychosocial strategies that address the diverse needs of people with emerging psychosis. Research has demonstrated the existence of EIP programs in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs); however, their capacity to deliver such interventions remains largely understudied, particularly given that mental health systems in LMICs struggle to provide comprehensive mental health care. This presentation synthesizes the current state of psychological and psychosocial strategy provision within EIP services in LMICs, drawing on two complementary studies.

A systematic review showed that most EIP programs in LMICs reported only a limited set of psychological and psychosocial strategies. The most consistently offered interventions were individual psychoeducation and family education or support. Major gaps were observed in the provision of supported employment, educational support, and structured engagement and retention strategies. Among the few studies evaluating effectiveness, the addition of psychological and psychosocial components to antipsychotic medication produced better outcomes than medication alone across most domains.

A case-study of 10 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean examined in depth the provision of psychological and psychosocial care within EIP programs and related initiatives. Findings confirmed the scarcity of psychological and psychosocial interventions and highlighted key barriers such as limited trained human resources, non-protocolized care pathways, and care models reliant on personnel in training. At the same time, the study documented the limited implementation of innovative care models, as well as the insufficient involvement of service users and families in program design, delivery, and cultural adaptation.

Together, these findings show that delivering comprehensive psychological and psychosocial care remains challenging in LMICs, even in the context of specialized health services. Advancing their provision in LMICs may involve the use of novel care delivery methods (i.e., task-sharing and task-shifting) and digital health technologies that have demonstrated benefits in other areas, while assuring co-participation with key stakeholders and culturally responsive adaptation.

Speakers

Claire Bien, MEd

Research Associate, Yale University Program for Recovery and Community Health

Claire Bien, MEd, is a research associate at the Yale University Program for Recovery and Community Health; mental health advocate and educator; and author of a memoir, Hearing Voices, Living Fully: Living with the Voices in My Head. She is treasurer of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS) and a board member and immediate past president of ISPS-US. She served as a board member of the Hearing Voices Network (HVN)-USA from 2019. Claire speaks widely about her experience... Read More →

Jana Koosah, PhD Student

PhD Student, Universidade de São Paulo, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil

Psychologist and doctoral researcher Jana Koosah is currently conducting her doctoral research in the Department of Social Psychology at the University of São Paulo. Her research examines responses to crisis situations within community-based, non-institutional mental health care... Read More →

Ruben Valle, PhD

Friday November 6, 2026 3:30pm - 5:00pm EST
Breakout Room #2

Breakout Session, In-Person Only

1:30pm EST

Psychiatric Discourse, Identity, and the Production of Difference (In-Person Only)

Saturday November 7, 2026 1:30pm - 2:30pm EST

Breakout Room #2

Psychiatric Discourse, Identity, and the Production of Difference

1:30-2pm Psychiatric Discourse and the Boundaries of Belonging - Michelle Goodwin
2-2:30pm From Grief to Possibility: Thinking Queer Theory with Psychosis - Brett Thatcher

Psychiatric Discourse and the Boundaries of Belonging - Michelle Goodwin
This presentation examines how psychiatric discourse influences belonging by shaping how experiences of distress come to be understood as "mental illness." Psychiatric discourse refers to the language and interpretive frameworks of the biomedical paradigm through which experiences of distress are interpreted and responded to. Rather than assuming psychiatric diagnoses provide the primary explanation for distress, they are situated within the broader social, historical, and political contexts from which they emerged. In doing so, psychiatric discourse locates responsibility within individuals while obscuring the social conditions that shape both distress and its interpretation.

Using qualitative research and Critical Discourse Analysis, psychiatric diagnoses are examined as extending beyond clinical description to influence identity. These diagnoses affect how people are understood and responded to, with consequences for identity and experiences of belonging. Drawing on the work of Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa, the analysis situates psychiatric discourse within broader systems of power that construct difference and organize social and symbolic boundaries. Within this framework, psychiatric knowledge is understood as emerging through broader systems of power that privilege particular ways of knowing distress while marginalizing others. White supremacy is examined as one of these structuring forces, influencing how distress is interpreted, judged, and responded to, as well as how individuals labeled as mentally ill are understood by others and understand themselves.

Rather than locating distress within the individual, "mental illness" is reframed as emerging within the tensions of the social world, shaped by relations of power, exclusion, and belonging. This perspective opens space for responses grounded in connection, dignity, and collective

From Grief to Possibility: Thinking Queer Theory with Psychosis - Brett Thatcher
Grounded in Saketopoulou’s (2022, 2023) psychoanalytic reconsideration of our relationship to trauma in theory and practice - what she calls a traumatophilic approach, this presentation offers the provocations of Queer Theory to our thinking about psychosis. By allowing habituated notions to be unsettled by attention to the margins and inviting clinicians to “inhabit unease” (Amin 2017), this paper gestures toward a generative disturbance of the norms that discipline mental health. A selection of voices in Queer Theory (Amin, Halberstam, McRuer, Chambers-Letson, and others) will be utilized to draw attention to the frequently oppressive nature of the normativity used to deny social cohesion for those with psychotic experiences. More than just deconstructing the policing of these neoliberal logics, attention will be paid to the possibility of a more livable world, the world as it could be.

Speakers

Brett Thatcher, LICSW

Clinician, Gould Farm

Brett Thatcher (he/him), LICSW, is a clinician at Gould Farm and a psychotherapist in private practice. He has Masters degrees in theological studies and social work from Boston College and has completed postgraduate training in intersubjective psychotherapy and mentalization-based... Read More →

Michelle Goodwin, PhD, LMHC

licensed mental health counselor, adjunct professor, social researcher, community member

Michelle Goodwin, PhD, LMHC is a licensed mental health counselor with over a decade of experience in community-based settings across Massachusetts. Her work has been shaped by years inside traditional psychiatric systems, where questions of dignity, voice, and belonging became central... Read More →

Saturday November 7, 2026 1:30pm - 2:30pm EST
Breakout Room #2

Breakout Session, In-Person Only

3:00pm EST

Beyond Pathology: Meaning, Spirituality, Culture, and Connection (In-Person Only)

Saturday November 7, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm EST

Breakout Room #2

Beyond Pathology: Meaning, Spirituality, Culture, and Connection (In-Person Only)

3-3:30pm God, Psychosis, and Blackness: Methodological Reflections from a Grounded Theory Study - Candice NunnTelfort, PhD
3:30-4pm Becoming Creative Architects of the Stories of Our Lives: Making Meaning Through the Symbols in Psychosis Through Honoring the Content of Our Madness - Jennifer Gaita Siciliano, MST
4-4:30pm Psychosis, Relationality, and Reconnection in a Time of Poly-crisis - Michelle Boyle MA, PhDc, Katie Mottram, MSc

God, Psychosis, and Blackness: Methodological Reflections from a Grounded Theory Study - Candice NunnTelfort, PhD
There has long been an enduring relationship between God and psychosis, from the seminal case of Daniel Paul Schreber to contemporary discussions of religious visions, voices, and spiritual experiences within psychiatric discourse. For the Black participants in my grounded theory study on Blackness and psychosis, this relationship emerged in distinctive ways, as Blackness mediated both their experiences of God and their experiences of psychosis. Participants described divine encounters, spiritual suffering, and theological meaning-making that challenged conventional distinctions between religious experience and psychopathology. This presentation explores the grounded theory methodology used to analyze these narratives and demonstrates how qualitative research can illuminate the intersections of Blackness, psychosis, and religious experience.

Becoming Creative Architects of the Stories of Our Lives: Making Meaning Through the Symbols in Psychosis Through Honoring the Content of Our Madness - Jennifer Gaita Siciliano, MST
Storytelling is what builds worlds in our minds, so becoming one's own architect in the story of one's own life is essential in making meaning of our psychosis. Treating psychotic experiences as meaningful is threatening to the biomedical model of madness, as the patient never knows what is real. To show the richness of this error in assumed hierarchy, I will share my personal story of my Near-Death-Experience on a flight home from India in 1994, which led to my bipolar sentence of forced drugging and involuntary hospitalizations for the next three decades. Ultimately, the only way to find my way back home to my sanity was through learning to interpret and trust the voices of my guides—a Star-Trekkian angel squad in an alternate universe that got me safely home from India. Today's psychiatric medicine is not in the practice of guiding the spiritual initiate home to healing after shamanic dismemberment, and instead, pathologizes the state of distress while ignoring the content in a wakeful dream state. Oftentimes, a fear of the mad--or psychophobia--prevents deep explorative work in areas of symbolic interpretation. For creatives, this dreamy state is where inspiration sits, and many of us who unexpectedly find ourselves in that ethereal zone collecting our bits and pieces of symbolism in order to tell our stories, get lost along the way. When I entered these states, the symbolic messages were highly personal, and always meaningful, as they contained premonitions of psychic memories of the people of yesterday who walked the same path.Fear on the part of the mental health professional also strongly dictates the course of treatment, often crushing an artist's ability to feel deeply or create because of overmedicalization. In this talk, I aim to share the needs for better social treatments beyond drugs and provide evidence of cultural engagement programs that have shown success in positive outcomes in helping people share their stories through art, theater, and community connection. For me, launching my Not As Crazy As You Think Podcast was instrumental in my final recovery stage, as the podcast shares the message that states of mental distress are not the result of individual pathology but manifest as a sign of guidance to redirect our lives.

Psychosis, Relationality, and Reconnection in a Time of Poly-crisis - Michelle Boyle MA, PhDc, Katie Mottram, MSc
Dominant mental health frameworks continue to locate experiences labelled as psychosis within the individual, obscuring the relational and social contexts from which they emerge. Building on ISPS traditions that understand psychosis as a response to social alienation, this presentation extends the concept of relationality beyond the human domain to include ecological and more-than-human worlds.In a dialogical format, Michelle Boyle and Katie Mottram weave lived experience voices, real-life scenarios, and interdisciplinary theory to explore how experiences commonly pathologised as psychosis may also be understood as gestures toward re-connection - at the intra, inter and trans-personal level. Many such experiences point not only to disrupted interpersonal bonds, but to altered or intensified forms of relationship with the land, the environment, and the more-than-human world.We place these contemporary experiences alongside broader socio-historical processes, not simply as withdrawal from the self and the social, but as attempts to reconstitute forms of coherence in the wake of our current poly-crises. At the same time, we consider the role of trauma in spiritual emergence and extreme states, asking how deep wounding may become intertwined with experiences of meaning, identity, belonging and vocation. Rather than reducing such experiences to pathology, we explore how they may contain initiations of unrealised capacities and ways of relating that seek healing expression, raising important questions about how individuals and communities might support processes of emergence in ways that foster healing - both for the individual and the collective. Giving consideration to Indigenous and other relational cosmologies, we ask: what might it mean to understand psychosis not only as a response to social disconnection among humans, but as an expression of a deeper rupture in the web of relations? And how might therapeutic, communal, and cultural practices shift if the restoration of connection extended beyond the interpersonal to include the more-than-human world?Attending to these questions may also open toward emerging forms of collective understanding and care in a time of deepening social and ecological strain, where experiences at the margins can illuminate both present fractures and possibilities for renewed relational life.

Speakers

Candice NunnTelfort, PhD

Assistant Professor of Psychology, Culture, and Spiritual Care, Iliff School of Theology

Candice M. NunnTelfort, Ph.D. (they/them), is Assistant Professor of Psychology, Culture, and Spiritual Care at Iliff School of Theology. Their academic formation spans Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Vanderbilt Divinity School, and Lincoln University, a Historically Black... Read More →

Jennifer Gaita Siciliano, MST

Arts Educator, Podcaster, Writer, Artist, Not As Crazy As You Think Podcast

Jennifer Gaita Siciliano is the creator, host, and producer of Not As Crazy As You Think Podcast, fighting for the disenfranchised and often ignored voices of psychiatric survivors. An expert by lived experience offering an alternative view on mental illness, Jennifer challenges today’s... Read More →

Katie Mottram, MSc

consultant, Imroc

Katie Mottram has spent over 25 years working in the mental health field. Over time, she became increasingly frustrated about the limits of conventional psychiatric approaches and began exploring the rich intersection of trauma, spirituality, and human transformation. As a founding... Read More →

Michelle Boyle PhDc

Managing Editor of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis and Assistant Editor of ReVision: Journal of Consciousness and, California Institute of Integral Studies

Michelle Boyle is a doctoral candidate in East–West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her dissertation explores ancestral healing and intergenerational trauma and draws on fieldwork conducted as a visiting researcher at the University of Torino, Italy... Read More →

Saturday November 7, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm EST
Breakout Room #2

Breakout Session, In-Person Only

5:00pm EST

Beyond the Individual: Systems, Crisis, and the Social Conditions of Distress (In-Person Only)

Saturday November 7, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm EST

Breakout Room #2

Beyond the Individual: Systems, Crisis, and the Social Conditions of Distress

5-5:30pm Mental Health Crisis: Whose Crisis Is it, Really? - Zephyr Doles, MA, LMSW
5:30-6pm Disordered Systems, Not Disordered Selves: Isolation and Institutional Power in First-Person Accounts of Psychosis - Ashley Phillips, MA, MT-BC

Mental Health Crisis: Whose Crisis Is it, Really? - Zephyr Doles, MA, LMSW
What is a “mental health crisis”? Is it a problem of the individual, or a larger breach of social norms; an illumination of the failures of a fractured society; a metaphor for the alienation produced by intensifying pressure on the individual within a society that increasingly serves the needs of corporations over people? Mental health crisis response has been a major topic in the intersecting fields of social work, psychology, and community mental health over the past decade, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic and other crises of our time. However, much of the existing literature has focused on comparing the efficacy of various current mental health emergency response models without specific regard to how the crises of the individuals served reflect broader, social and historical crises and institutional failures. In my project, I will critically examine how by focusing interventions entirely on the pathology of the individual, current definitions of “mental health crisis” represent a failure of containment, not just of the individual, but of the broader social, political and historical contexts that contribute to psychological distress. By failing to integrate the social, historical, and political dimensions of psychological experiences that may present as a mental health crisis in an individual, current prevailing concepts of mental health crisis are prone to reproduce the harms of the psychiatric establishment and the provision of services under the neoliberal welfare state, rather than alleviate them. In conclusion, by carefully situating the current “mental health crisis” as it is understood as a defining issue of our time within the backdrop of global polycrisis, my project will introduce new ways of seeing mental health crises not as failures of broken individuals, but as representations of larger social processes that alienate and disconnect vulnerable populations from themselves and from society at large.

Disordered Systems, Not Disordered Selves: Isolation and Institutional Power in First-Person Accounts of Psychosis - Ashley Phillips, MA, MT-BC
Dominant frameworks often conceptualize psychosis as a pathology existing within the individual, minimizing the social dimension and placing responsibility for isolation on individuals experiencing psychosis. Existing research suggests that these individuals experience profound isolation, but these experiences are often reduced to symptoms rather than understood as meaningful responses to fractured social worlds.This presentation explores experiences of isolation in psychosis, with a focus on the ways that social standards and institutional power shape experiences of isolation and belonging. The exploration uses an existential-phenomenological perspective to thematically analyze 17 published first-person accounts of psychosis. The findings of this study suggest that psychosis can be understood as a response to and reflection of disordered systems, not disordered selves. By positioning psychosis within the social and institutional link, this presentation challenges dominant models of psychopathology and explores implications for clinical practice that prioritize subjective meaning, reflexivity, and liberation.

Speakers

Zephyr Doles, MA, LMSW

Social Worker, B-HEARD, NYC Health + Hospitals

Zephyr Ann Doles, MA, LMSW is a clinical social worker, community mental health worker, writer, independent scholar, and interdisciplinary artist. Her work critically examines the intersections of culture, identity, mental health, and social justice, particularly concerning systems... Read More →

Ashley Phillips, MA, MT-BC

Clinical Psychology Student, William James College

Ashley Phillips, MA, MT-BC is a doctoral student at William James College, currently completing a PsyD in clinical psychology. Her clinical and scholarly work focuses on de-pathologizing psychotic experiences using existential, phenomenological, and liberation perspectives. Ashley... Read More →

Saturday November 7, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm EST
Breakout Room #2

Breakout Session, In-Person Only

11:00am EST

Historical Trauma, Colonialism, and Eugenic Legacies in Psychiatry (In-Person Only)

Sunday November 8, 2026 11:00am - 12:00pm EST

Breakout Room #2

Historical Trauma, Colonialism, and Eugenic Legacies in Psychiatry

11-11:30am Madness and the Repetition of Colonial Trauma in Psychiatric Services - Elan Cohen, PhD
11:30-12pm Neurodiversity, Neuroscience, and Our Eugenic History: A Reading and Discussion of The Devil's Castle - Susanne Antonetta, MFA

Madness and the Repetition of Colonial Trauma in Psychiatric Services - Elan Cohen, PhD
Contact with patients who embody the uninscribed residues of historical injustice can revive disavowed legacies of oppression embedded in psychiatric services. As many have noted, the institutional treatment of psychosis is directly tied to some of the cruelest aspects of our racial and colonial history. By neglecting legacies of historical trauma in search of an address, biopolitical regimes risk reproducing the conditions that necessitated psychosis in the first place. How might insights from the history of psychoanalysis challenge the pacts of silence and communities of denial that take shape in psychiatric systems? This presentation brings insights from psychoanalytic theory to a clinical example that bears witness to the repetition of historical trauma in psychiatric services. Drawing from Freud, Ferenczi, Bion, Lacan, and their followers, I advocate for attunement to enactments of historical trauma in psychiatric settings, a problem for which a combined psychoanalytic and socio-historical perspective is well-suited.

Neurodiversity, Neuroscience, and Our Eugenic History: A Reading and Discussion of The Devil's Castle - Susanne Antonetta, MFA
This session will include a reading from and discussion of my book The Devil’s Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry’s Troubled History Reverberates Today (Counterpoint, 2025). My book confronts the darkest chapters of psychiatric history while offering a vision for the future of mental health care, using models ranging from Philippe Pinel to Loren Mosher to lesser-known psychiatric reformers like Dorothea Buck. For this presentation, I will focus on the more contemporary aspects of my book, noting that I am myself a psychiatric survivor, diagnosed bipolar.While briefly covering the Nazi euthanasia program, I will also present, through excerpts and discussion, my original research on the mind-positive vision of neuroscience and the way methods like Nazi survivor Dorothea Buck’s “trialogue” offer new and powerful ways to treat mental distress. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, said of The Devil’s Castle “unique in its tone and its passion, this is an arresting and deeply resonant book.” In line with the goals of ISPS, the book and my advocacy work around it offer a different, more humane, and more effective way to think about psychotic disorders. I also center, in line with Dorothea Buck, psychoanalytic conversation as key to psychiatric practice.

Speakers

Elan Cohen, PhD

Psychologist

Dr. Elan Cohen is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in New York City. His work focuses on social and psychoanalytic approaches to psychosis and trauma. Before becoming a psychologist, Elan was a respite worker in the city's first Crisis Respite Center, and... Read More →

Susanne Antonetta

Author & Speaker

Susanne Paola Antonetta's latest book is The Devil's Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today. She is also the author of The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, Make Me a Mother, Entangled Objects, Body Toxic, A Mind Apart, and... Read More →

Sunday November 8, 2026 11:00am - 12:00pm EST
Breakout Room #2

Breakout Session, In-Person Only

1:30pm EST

Listening for Meaning: Language, Dialogue, and Understanding (In-Person Only)

Sunday November 8, 2026 1:30pm - 2:30pm EST

Breakout Room #2

Listening for Meaning: Language, Dialogue, and Understanding

1:30-2pm Get Me: Interpreting and Responding to Psychotic Speech Patterns - Erin Soros, PhD
2-2:30pm Being Heard in Psychosis: Recognition and Dialogue in Open Dialogue - Ross Ellenhorn, MSW, PhD

Get Me: Interpreting and Responding to Psychotic Speech Patterns - Erin Soros, PhD
Have you heard the ricochet of psychotic speech—patterns that move with equal parts jubilance and terror? Have you ever found yourself speaking in these forms? This presentation guides audience members through a close reading of several samples of my own psychotic speech. Drawing on interpretive approaches from literary studies, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy, I demonstrate at a granular level how repetition, assonance, homonyms, condensation, and other modes of linguistic play and associative freefall can still communicate meaning, even as they also push meaning toward crisis.Participants will leave with a set of tools for hearing and interpreting mad speech patterns with greater nuance. The talk will also offer suggestions for attuned, ethical ways to respond to people who express themselves through language that falters, fragments, or gives way.

Being Heard in Psychosis: Recognition and Dialogue in Open Dialogue - Ross Ellenhorn, MSW, PhD
This dialogue will center on learning Open Dialogue, but will take such learning deeper, and give it richer meaning, by investigating what it means to be in dialogue—the kinds of truths that emerge from it, the noetic quality of it, the experiences it engenders, how it is often associated with a connection to the divine, and its close-to-synonymous relationship with play. After all, if we consider psychosis an acute experience of estrangement, whether that estrangement is endogenous or caused by stigma, we might also want to consider it a disconnection from dialogue or a blocked-off world of purely inner dialogue and want to find new forms of dialogue that will be especially sensitive to psychotic experience. That’s what this presentation, discussion and shared-learning experience will be all about.

Speakers

Erin Soros, PhD

Assistant Professor, University of Northern British Columbia

Erin Soros lives in Prince George, British Columbia where she is an assistant professor of contemporary critical theory and literary studies. She writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and critical essays. She researches psychosis and the psychiatric and police response to it. She has... Read More →

Ross Ellenhorn, MSW, PhD

Founder & CEO at Ellenhorn, Ellenhorn

Trained as a sociologist, psychotherapist and social worker, Ross Ellenhorn, Ph.D., created the first fully operational intensive hospital-diversion and wraparound program in Massachusetts, and went on to establish and lead one of the first public Programs for Assertive Community... Read More →

Sunday November 8, 2026 1:30pm - 2:30pm EST
Breakout Room #2

Breakout Session, In-Person Only

3:00pm EST

Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives (In-Person Only)

Sunday November 8, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm EST

Breakout Room #2

Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives

3-3:30pm Unsettling Self: Working with Divergent Self-Experiences in Psychosis - Chris Nadler, PhD, LP-D, Saskia Nislow, MAT
3:30-4pm Synchronicity, Psychosis, and the Social Link - Robin S. Brown PhD
4-4:30pm Psychosis in Totalitarian Regime and the Mind - Masha Yaglom LCSW, MS

Unsettling Self: Working with Divergent Self-Experiences in Psychosis - Chris Nadler, PhD, LP-D, Saskia Nislow, MAT
In order to turn away from thinking about psychosis as a problem of the individual, the idea of the individual itself must first be problematized: rather than bringing an examination of the social into the analysis of the individual—constraining our thinking of the social within the already problematic theoretical and political conceptions of the individual—the presenters on this panel draw instead upon our theory of what we call inside outside relations. In doing so, we offer a new psychoanalytic perspective wherein we emphasize clinical work that addresses issues “prior” to object relations; this primary level of relation, we argue, is where the self, rather than being an already-bounded individual, is constructed in a continuous process of binding and containing through the body’s interactions with the social and physical environment. We draw upon literature outside of psychoanalysis—particularly Sass and Parnas’s work on schizophrenia—to situate psychosis as a manifestation of a self disorder; this is not a problem of the individual or a pathological personality, but a divergence in the movement between and within inside and outside, presenting in variations in the construction, maintenance, and experience of the self. In explaining this framework—and our own clinical examples—we provide ways of working with psychotic patients to alleviate distress and suffering that are not predicated on pathologizing or eradicating the psychotic self-experience, and instead attend to the difficulties in making use of one’s mind within the particularities of one’s own relations of inside and outside. Having reframed psychosis as an issue of self, this presentation concludes with linking the theoretical and clinical interventions related to the concept of the self back to the social so as to attend to the analysis of social problems without placing us back in problematic limitations of the individual and psychosis.

Synchronicity, Psychosis, and the Social Link - Robin S. Brown PhD
Experiences of synchronicity—meaningful coincidences—are typically conceptualized in psychiatric frameworks as ideas or delusions of reference, understood as misattributions of significance to neutral events. This presentation asks why such experiences occur more frequently in psychosis, and reconsiders synchronicity not as a cognitive error, but as a shift in embodied and temporal attunement. Drawing on Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity and Yasuo Yuasa’s theories of embodied cultivation and image-thinking, I suggest that this pattern reflects a disruption in the mediating bodily, symbolic, and relational structures through which shared reality is ordinarily stabilized over time. In this context, synchronicity may be understood as a form of relational openness in which the boundary between self and other becomes less distinct. Clinically, I argue that approaches focused primarily on reality-testing risk enacting the metaphysical assumptions of a Western scientific worldview in which reality is presumed to be fully separable, objectively given, and independent of participatory meaning. I suggest instead that clinical work is strengthened when it supports the restoration of a shared embodied and social field in which experience can be held without becoming overwhelming or fixed.

Psychosis in Totalitarian Regime and the Mind - Masha Yaglom LCSW, MS
There is a deep connection between the “madness” of a totalitarian regime and the destruction of the psychic apparatus in psychosis.The presenter will describe the connection and interaction between the two applying Wilfred Bion’s understanding of psychotic processes focusing on psychotic attacks on linking and inability to “suffer”, metabolise pain and mourn.Distortion of reality ( lies, propaganda, brainwashing) ,ban on thinking ( emphasis on ideology) and on experiencing life fully ( ban on travel, freely interacting with people etc)are just a few examples of the processes that lead to turning people to automatons and their psyche into a “container of madness”. The presenter will describe in detail the life in a totalitarian regime and will show how it resonates with the life in psychosis.

Speakers

Chris Nadler, PhD, LP-D

Psychoanalyst, Private Practice, NYC

Dr. Chris Nadler, PhD, LP-D, (they/them) is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. They are a training analyst, supervisor and faculty member at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, and lecture in the Anni Bergman Parent-Infant Training Program. Chris completed... Read More →

Saskia Nislow, MAT

Psychoanalytic Training Candidate, Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis

Saskia Nislow, MAT, (they/she/he) is a fourth-year psychoanalytic training candidate in the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis’s Licensure Qualifying program. Saskia is a fiction writer whose debut novella, Root Rot, was published in March 2025 by Creature Publishing.

Robin S. Brown PhD

Psychoanalyst, Private Practice

Robin S. Brown, PhD, LP, NCPsyA, is a New York State licensed psychoanalyst in private practice. Dr. Brown has served on the faculty at Columbia University, Pacifica Graduate Institute, and the California Institute of Integral Studies. His work has been published widely and spans... Read More →

Masha Yaglom PhD,LCSW, MS

Member of the Faculty,Teacher,Supervisor, Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy

Masha Yaglom, LCSW, MS, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. Masha is a supervisor and teacher of psychoanalysis, she is affiliated with the Manhattan Institute of Psychoanalysis ,( which she is a graduate of),Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and William... Read More →

Sunday November 8, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm EST
Breakout Room #2

Breakout Session, In-Person Only

ISPS-US Annual Conference 2026

From $64.67

Tickets

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ISPS-US Annual Conference 2026

1:30pm EST

Nancy Burke, PhD, ABPP

Zak Mucha, LCSW

Adam Weg, LCSW

Michael Ryzner-Basiewicz

3:30pm EST

Claire Bien, MEd

Jana Koosah, PhD Student

Ruben Valle, PhD

1:30pm EST

Brett Thatcher, LICSW

Michelle Goodwin, PhD, LMHC

3:00pm EST

Candice NunnTelfort, PhD

Jennifer Gaita Siciliano, MST

Katie Mottram, MSc

Michelle Boyle PhDc

5:00pm EST

Zephyr Doles, MA, LMSW

Ashley Phillips, MA, MT-BC

11:00am EST

Elan Cohen, PhD

Susanne Antonetta

1:30pm EST

Erin Soros, PhD

Ross Ellenhorn, MSW, PhD

3:00pm EST

Chris Nadler, PhD, LP-D

Saskia Nislow, MAT

Robin S. Brown PhD

Masha Yaglom PhD,LCSW, MS

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