Presented by:

Eileen M. Russell, PhD

Description: One’s sense of agency, the recognition and expression of one’s will, and the clarity and courage around one’s desires are not necessarily byproducts of therapy or healing, particularly for those patients who have experienced relational trauma, neglect, enmeshment or severe illness or disability. Rather, these are core affective experiences that need our explicit focus and facilitation to break into being and enliven the person and the work. This seminar will explore these phenomena through the lens of AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) and contextualize them in developmental theory, relational psychoanalytic theory, and learning theory. Using videotapes of actual sessions, Dr. Russell will illustrate examples of blocked agency as well as techniques for inviting the emergence of agency within the therapeutic relationship.

   Eileen Russell, Ph.D. is a psychologist in private practice in New York City and Montclair, NJ. She is Senior Faculty at the AEDP Institute where she teaches and trains therapists and teaching faculty at NIP’s Integrative Trauma Program. She is author of Restoring Resilience: Discovering Your Clients’ Capacity for Healing and “Agency, Will, and Desire as Core Affective Experience: Undoing Disempowerment to Foster the Emergence of the Agentic Self” in the forthcoming Undoing Aloneness and the Transformation of Suffering Into Flourishing: AEDP 2.0.

Presented by:

Luc Olivier Charlap PhD

Description: This presentation will attempt to address the experience of transitioning later in life and the impact of female socialization in everyday life on this male identified transgender psychoanalyst. Despite valid efforts to maintain a sense of gender fluidity, society’s unrelenting call for a binary expression of gender has never been so stark. Society’s lack of “gender mentalization” and its insistence on defensively and unconsciously concretizing it, as it threatens basic organizing principles, reintroduce a sense of shame, shame which I meant to escape in the first place. I am now hiding in fear of misrecognition, in a new way. Yes, gender as an internal experience is a soft assembly, but in everyday encounters it is mostly rigidified and concrete. Passing as male and required to use the male locker rooms, I shift back and forth between multiple gendered/ungendered self-states, in such a hyper-gendered environment. Using Harris, Orange and Bromberg, I will discuss this forced return and unrequited adoption of the binary and its psychic implications in terms of gender, mentalization, shame and trauma- in the seemingly benign exposures to everyday encounters that lie within the walls of the bare exclusivity of male only spaces.

NIPPA Focus Seminars do not offer CE hours, but they do count toward NIP’s training requirements for candidates in the four-year program.

Virtual Event via Zoom

NIPPA members and NIP candidates: Free 

General Registration fee:  $10.00

All participants must complete online registration.    Learn more and register here

Dr. Luc Olivier Charlap PhD is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. As a faculty member of various psychoanalytic institute he has taught classes on Trauma and its Treatment; Gender and Sexuality; Object Relations; Klein; and Envy, Narcissism and Borderline States. He is also a faculty member at NYU Silver School of Social Work. At present, as a faculty member and training analyst at the Contemporary Institute of Psychotherapy, he teaches Theories of Human Development in the Two-Year psychotherapy program and Narcissism and Borderline States in the Four-Year psychoanalytic program. He also supervises psychotherapy and psychoanalytic candidates.