Session One (8:30 - 10:00 AM)

Bob Bergman: The Eyes of Oedipus

• Oedipus symbolizes our inherent passions but also trauma and its dissociation. He put his eyes out to avoid seeing the horror. Distinguishing between troubles that come from trauma and those that arise in conflict helps in the treatment of either.Oedipus symbolizes our inherent passions but also trauma and its dissociation. He put his eyes out to avoid seeing the horror. Distinguishing between troubles that come from trauma and those that arise in conflict helps in the treatment of either.​

Julie Cake: "Whispers of Heavenly Death": Challenging the Mythos of the Confederate War Hero

• When traumatic wounds are neglected, they will fester and infect. What will it take to dismantle the Southern narrative of the honorable and noble Confederate soldier? Unraveling one soldier’s story and how it has impacted multiple generations will be explored.​

Erin Pierson and Rachel Newcombe: The Collective Anxiety of Therapists Encountering Suicidal Patients

• Suicidal patients bring about many feelings in therapists, including fear, anxiety, and shame. Through presenter and audience discussion, this presentation aims to help attendees have a clearer understanding of why suicidality evokes such a wide range of emotions.

Harland Curtis: From Entanglement to Connection: The Transformation of Enactments in Couples Therapy

• Entangled implicit identifications in each partner is what drives couple enactments. With a “surrender” to the inductive pull of these identifications, the attuned couples therapist can gently coax implicit experience into conscious understandings with the use of resonating words.

Session Two (10:15 - 11:45 AM)

• Building on the concept of "micro-trauma," this presentation depicts another problematic pattern, “subservient caretaking.” It then articulates various obstructions and aids to working through cumulative injury to promote maximal psychic change. Highlighted are the roles of “curating one’s interpersonal surround” and cultivating a patient’s subjective well-being. 

• A psychotherapist with autism will explain how psychoanalytic concepts saved his life and helped him to achieve a high level of functioning and success in love, parenting, and his private practice. His clinical use of self-disclosure will be discussed.

• “Hineni – Here I am”, Abraham answers when God calls him to sacrifice his son Isaac. I will use this Torah portion, Akedah and relational psychoanalytic concepts to expand our notions of whiteness and sacrifice through a case involving police brutality. 

• The interpretation of dreams was the heart and soul of Freud’s psychoanalysis, but dreams are often neglected by modern psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. In this presentation, we will rediscover clinical techniques for playing with dreams in search of personal meaning. 

Lunch (12:00 - 1:30 PM): A catered lunch will be provided

Plenary Session (1:30 - 3:30 PM)

Liberating the Unspeakable—A performance and workshop with Anastacia-Renee

 

Join us for an afternoon uncovering truths spoken, unspoken and yet to be discovered, as we seek transcendence and transformation in the strength of vulnerability through personal storytelling. After her performance, Anastacia-Renee will facilitate a workshop with our community, helping us to explore and discover our own stories.

 

 Anastacia-Renee is the current Civic Poet of Seattle, recipient of the 2017 Artist of the Year Award, and former 2015-2017 Poet-in-Residence at Hugo House. She is the author of five books: Forget It (Black Radish Books), (v.), (Gramma Press) 26, (Dancing Girl Press), Kiss Me Doll Face (Gramma Press) and Answer(Me) (Winged City Chapbooks, Argus Press) and has received writing fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, Artist Trust and Jack Straw, as well as a writing residency from Ragdale.  Her theatrical mixed-media project, 9 Ounces: A One Woman Show, is a multivalent play unapologetically downward dogging its way through class, race, culture, oppression, depression, survival and epiphany. Her cross-genre writing has appeared in the anthologies: Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, Sinister Wisdom: Black Lesbians—We Are the Revolution, Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks and: Split this Rock, Painted Bride Quarterly, Crab Creek Review, Seattle Review, Bone Bouquet, Duende, Synaethesia, Banqueted, Torch and many more. She teaches poetry and creative writing at Hugo House and Seattle University and lives as a superhero in Seattle with her wife and dog.