SOCIAL WORKER CONTINUING EDUCATION UNITS
IPA 2017 CONFERENCE
This section provides general information about CEUs at the IPA 2017 conference,which are provided by Amedco, and lists the 14 CEU-bearing sessions with abstracts. For more information, contact IPA Vice President Gilda Graff at
Satisfactory completion
Participants must complete an evaluation form to receive a certificate of completion. Your chosen sessions must be attended in their entirety. Partial credit of individual sessions is not available. NOTE: If you are seeking continuing education credit for a specialty not listed below, it is your responsibility to contact your licensing/certification board to determine course eligibility for your licensing/certification requirement.
New York Board for Social Workers
Amedco SW CPE is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #0115. 10 hours.
Registration and Fee
To register for the Conference, go to
In addition to the normal registration fees, the IPA will collect a $20 flat fee from conference participants who earn CEUs to help defray CEU-related administrative costs.
Sessions
There are three kinds of CEU-bearing sessions available at IPA 2017 and listed below:
(1) 50 minute presentations, which bear 1.0 credit each;
(2) Panels, which bear 1.25 or 1.5 credits each; and,
(3)Paired consecutive presentations (labelled “A” and “B”), which must both be attended to earn 1.5 credits for the paired session. The sessions are listed in the order in which they appear in the “2017 PRELIMINARY PROGRAM” at
1. Gaslighting from the Personal to the Political (PANEL) (1.25 credits)
Judith Logue and Robin Stern
The goal is to define “gaslighting” and “The Gaslight Effect” and why it may apply to our current social and political climate and POTUS. The objective is to understand the how and why of this effect in the context of historical precedent. Not new, but it appears to be more extreme, and qualitatively different from history of the past 50 years: hatred, bigotry and retaliation are permitted and encouraged; lies are re-labeled as “alt-facts” and facts are dismissed as irrelevant. Overall, authoritarian leadership appears to trump democratic process.
2. The Legacy of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism(PANEL)(1.25 credits)
Elizabeth Lunbeck, Natasha Zareksky and Dagmar Herzog
This panel will explore how historian Christopher Lasch used psychoanalytic findings to illuminate socio-historical phenomena in his 1979 best-seller. The panel will look at its impact in the past and for the present. The participants are historians Elizabeth Lunbeck of Harvard, Natasha Zaretsky of Southern Illinois University, and Dagmar Herzog of CUNY. Papers will include Narcissism in the Age of Trump, Christopher Lasch and His Critics: Narcissism in Historical Perspective, and Narcissism Post-Nazism.
3. The Politics of Exclusion: Discussion of Arnold Richards Perspectives on A Thought Collective(PANEL)(1.25 credits) Arnold Richards, Art Lynch and Burt Seitler
This panel examines the second volume of psychoanalyst Arnold Richards selected papers. Dr. Richards was the Editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association from 1994 to 2003, and before that edited The American Psychoanalyst. In 2000, he was given the Mary Sigourney Award for Achievement in the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. The American Psychoanalytic Association in 2004 honored Dr. Richards with its Distinguished Contributor Award, and in 2013, he earned the Hans W. Leowald Memorial Award for his article, “Psychoanalysis of the Left and Far Left.” Dr. Richards, Columbia University Professor Art Lynch, and psychoanalyst Burt Seitler will be the panelists.
4A. Creating a Journal that Makes Meaning of the Misunderstood Mentations of the
Mad, Sad, Scared: J.A.S.P.E.R(4A 4B, 1.5 credits)Burt Seitler
This presentation introduces a new journal that has been created to provide a home for publishing detailed, systematic qualitative and quantitative research about mad, sad, scared people, one which examines the individual’s emotional state in an historical, intergenerational, cultural and inter- and intrapsychic context.
4B. Sex and Sexuality: Good (Normal), Bad (Abnormal) and Ugly (Perverted)--
a Psycho-Social and Historical Perspective.(4A 4B, 1.5 credits)Jamshid Marvasti
In this presentation the psychological and historical aspect of sexuality will be explored from ancient time to the present. The normal and abnormal variety of human sexual activities is discussed with the help of PowerPoints. Although sexual life of U.S.Presidents are unknown to many of us, a couple of the President’s sexual characteristics will be analyzed as reported by news media.
5. The Psychology of Trump and the 2016 Election (sponsored by Psychohistory Forum)
PANEL(1.5 credits)
Paul Elovitz, Peter Petschauer, and David Cifelli
This panel will discuss the psychology of Donald Trump and the 2016 Election. Presentations include “Trump’s Disruptive Personality and His Need for Conflict,” “Trump’s Continuing Appeal,” and “The Past in the Present: Ordinary People and Authoritarian Regimes.”
6. New Directions for Psychobiography and Psychohistory (PANEL) (1.5 credits)
Irene Javors and Ken Fuchsman
Irene Javors will discuss how psychohistory and psychobiography need to focus on contemporary narratives that are concerned with multiculturalism, diversity, and intersectionality as well as the effects of institutionalized racism, sexism, homoprejudice, class bias, and ageism. Ken Fuchsman will discuss how psychohistory needs to focus not only on psychological approaches but on what the study of history of the human species requires that has psychological dimensions. This would include the nature and history of creativity, the role of genius in historical development, and the history of the emotions. Ms. Javors is a therapist in private practice and on the faculty of Yeshiva University. Dr. Fuchsman is President of the International Pyschohistorical Association, and a Professor Emeritus from the University of Connecticut.
7. Artists Rethinking Blackness and Asian Identity: Immigration, Globalization,
and Intergenerational Memory (PANEL)(1.5 credits)
Robert Craddock, Lan Ding Liu,Keisha Thompson, Brian D’Agostino
Along with new economic opportunities and political freedoms, immigrants have always encountered the opportunity and necessity to forge new identities. This process has always necessarily enmeshed them in the racial hierarchies and class structures of the new countries in which they find themselves. The United States has long viewed itself as the land of the American Dream, in which immigrants could make a new and better life for themselves. With the ongoing demise of the country’s middle class in the era of Globalization since the 1970s, racial and class issues long submerged by the American Dream narrative are surfacing to consciousness.
For example, is there such a thing as “Blackness” or “Whiteness” or “Asian identity,” and if so, how do these cultural constructs relate to class structures in the United States in the era of Globalization? How do artists navigate these questions through their art? What roles do family narratives and intergenerational memory play in lives of artists struggling with racial, gender, and class tensions? This panel explores such questions through the art of Robert Craddock, an African American art therapist and educator who was the first Western artist to have a major public sculpture commissioned by a Chinese city, and Lan Ding Liu, an immigrant from China whose painting, sculpture, and multi-media productions explore the themes of cultural dislocation, family, and inter-generational memory.
8. Beholder’s Share through the Lens of Neuroscience, Art, and Psychohistory
(PANEL)(1.5 credits)Inna Rozentsvit and Sandra Indig.
There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. (E. Gombrich)
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. (Anais Nin)
The “beholder’s share” (originally “beholder’s involvement”) concept was developed by art historianAlois Riegl,and his great disciples Ernst Gombrich andErnst Kris. They described the workings of the mind of the viewer (the beholder), including decoding the visual information, determining its meaning, understanding it, and interpreting it– depending on one’s prior life experiences, emotional memories, and idiosyncrasies.
This presentation will be based on the work of the Nobel laureate, neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel, who tried to tackle the issue of the beholder’s share – from the scientist’s and the art lover’s points of view – in his books,The Age of Insight:The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brainand Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging Two Cultures. His books are not just a psycho-historical endeavor; they are not the textbooks, where all the theories are provided and are proven; and they are not the memoirs. These books stimulate one’s mind to connect the dots and to find one’s own answers, the answers that might be proven “wrong” after a while, but which contribute to one’s personal development, one’s “work-in-progress.”
The panel will feature selections fromTalking Colors: Seeing Words/Hearing Images, by Sandra Indig. Narrowing the field of perception to the sound of color and the color of words we, the “beholders,” can partake in the author’s creative process; hallucinated reality transforms cognitive reality and inter-modal visual poetry penetrates and melts barriers to multiple meanings. Poems and paintings weave together threads of aesthetic, spiritual, scientific, and psychoanalytic concerns which bring the beholder to experience deeper levels of consciousness and greater depths of human understanding.
9. We Can’t Know the Present, Absent History of the Past: The Transmission of
Slavery’s Traumas (KEYNOTE ADDRESS, 50 minutes) (1.0 credit)Janice Gump
My paper discusses what is probably the most powerfully determining phenomenon of African American history – slavery. It is an attempt not so much to reveal facts as it is to determine and illuminate the psychological effects those behaviors, laws, and philosophy produced in the victimized and in their descendants. I shall also explore slavery’s effects upon those who did the victimizing.
Thus, this is a paper about the transmission of the traumas slaves endured, but most importantly about the unconscious transmission of those wounds’ effects upon the generations of children slaves produced. I shall discuss that conceptualization of trauma which I found most illuminating of our experience, the subjectivity of the African American and such qualities as subjugation and the proscription of affects and desire
10. Attachment, Love Before the First Sight, and What it Means to be Human (PANEL)
(1.5 credits) Inna Rozentsvit and Ken Fuchsman
Human attachment begins in the womb and extends through every stage of the life span. It involves cognition and emotions, while the need for nurturing children shapes how families and society are organized. We cannot understand being human without knowing the full psychological and social ramifications of attachment dynamics.
This panel discussion will include a look at the parent-child bond and attachment through the lens of neurobiology (Inna Rozentsvit) and through the lens of psychohistory and the meaning of attachment in human development, family, and society (Ken Fuchsman). The two parts of the panel are entitled:
- Love before First Sight: Parent-Child Bonds and Attachment through the Lens of Neurobiology (Inna Rozentsvit)
- The Foundations of Attachment and Its Implications for Psychohistory (Ken Fuchsman).
11A. Stony the Road We Trod…. Clinicians and Clients of Color Addressing and
Coping with Racial Microaggressions and Racial Battle Fatigue.
(11A & 11B, 1.5 credits)Keisha Thompson
Racism based on beliefs in racial superiority can manifest itself both on individual and institutional levels (Sue, Capodilupo, and Holder, 2008). Acts of racism are more easily identified when done in an overt fashion. The covert acts can oftentimes go undetected by both the perpetrators and the recipients. The end results of this can be that clinician in working with people of color can at times miss a major cause of distress. One example of covert acts is that of racial microaggressions. Sue and colleagues (2007), define microaggressions as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.”
This presentation will focus on the racial micro aggression and the ensuing race related stress and racial battle fatigue felt by people of color in the United States which have seemingly peaked in recent months. It will serve to place racial microaggressions in an historical context for participants as well as discuss the current racial climate, particularly as it pertains to clients and clinicians of color as they have intimate experiences with said racial climate. This presentation will focus on educating participants on the experiences of people of color with the aforementioned issues and identity coping techniques for clients and clinicians.
11B.The Dance Between the Latent and the Manifest while Interpreting Dreams:
A Practitioner’s Guide.(11A 11B, 1.5 credits) Jack Schwartz
From the beginning of psychoanalysis, an argument ensued as to what constitutes “deep work.” The battle over introspection and projection will be revealed and brought together into a unified idea. Although dreams continue tohold a mystery, this discussion will demystify it, and enlighten its participants.
12. Talking With China (PANEL)(1.5 credits)
Arnold Richards, Arthur Lynch, Arlene Kramer Richards, Margaret Yard
After a seven year experience in teaching, supervising and treating people in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in China, our four presenters will discuss the cultural differences between Chinese and American students as they learn how to do psychotherapy. We have graduated 240 students from a three year program in Wuhan, China and we will have graduated another 240 by the time of our presentation. In addition, we have lectured to very large audiences via electronic media. All of these experiences have yielded rich anecdotal material from which we have formulated hypotheses abouthow cross cultural teaching can work.
13A. The Concept of True Self and False Self as Exemplified by Jews Who Survived on
“Aryan Papers” in Nazi-occupied Poland: A Historical and Psychoanalytic
Perspective.(13A 13B, 1.5 credits)Krystyna Sanderson
The presentation will describe ways in which some Jews survived on “Aryan papers” in Poland during the Nazi occupation and how “passing” psychologically influenced the psyche of survivors in terms of D. W. Winnicott’s theory of true self and false self. The presentation will also address the role of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. A special focus is given to the case of survivor Sima Gleichgevicht-Wasser and the woman who helped her to survive, Apolonia (Pola) Gorzkowska-Nikodemska.
13B. The Name of the Game is Shame, Part II: 8 Years of Obama and then We Elected
Trump.(13A 13B, 1.5 credits)Gilda Graff
Eight years have passed since I wrote "The Name of the Game is Shame: The Effects of Slavery and Its Aftermath". Our first black president has been followed by Donald Trump. Is the name of the game still shame? Do white Americans understand the shame surrounding racial issues? Did the death of Michael Brown and the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement stem from black rage, or was it from white rage? Or did it stem from the shame of both blacks andwhites?
14. Dueling the Duality of the Death Instinct, and Towards a New Paradigm (PANEL)
(1.5 credits)Inna Rozentsvit and Jack Schwartz
For too long the death instinct has been under the purveyor of speculative theorizing. This discussion starts with the psychohistorical excursion of the topic – from Sigmund Freud to Jack London, to Albert Einstein, and to Karl Menninger. Then, it pits approaches of basic biological determinism of the death drive (Inna Rozentsvit) with the psychological construct of the death instinct as a productof the failure of the social-environmental provision (Jack Schwartz). It is toward these co-mingling contracts thata new paradigm can be created.