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UPCOMING EVENTS
If you have any questions or concerns about upcoming events, please contact Membership & Events Coordinator Julia Seixas at [email protected].
Upcoming Events
Program Flyer – Click here to learn more about the program or see below!
Virtual Only Program - Click Here to RSVP
In-Person Program and/or Welcome Back Party - Click Here to RSVP
About the Program Stepparents & Their Children
In this presentation, Andrew I. Smolar, MD, will discuss the challenges and potential growth for stepfamilies. While reviewing the psychoanalytic literature on the subject, Dr. Smolar will describe the circumstances that lead to the formation of the stepfamily – such as parental death, alienation, or the most common, which is divorce – and then describe how the stepfamily’s development is experienced from the point of view of child, parent, family group and community. Dr. Smolar will then provide clinical examples of the impact of stepparents on various therapy processes, within psychoanalytic, couples, and group therapy settings. Psychoeducational and in-depth processes are described. Dr. Smolar will emphasize how the transference is handled, and how group attachment insecurity, for some patients, restricts their participation in groups. Dr. Smolar will note that internal object images of parents and stepparents may be in conflict, and this conflict may be experienced within the therapist and patient, thus complicating therapeutic process. Dr. Smolar will conclude with several technical recommendations for therapists working with patients who may struggle to appreciate the full impact of stepfamilies in their histories, and for therapists working with patients who may be struggling to help children adapt to these new family structures.
About the Speaker Andrew I. Smolar, MD
Andrew I. Smolar, MD is Training and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Temple University School of Medicine. He has been in the private practice of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and group therapy in Wynnewood, PA since 1998. Dr. Smolar has served as President of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia from 2015-17; he also served there as Chairman of the Education Committee, and Supervising Analyst Committee, Ethics Committee, co-Chair of the Supervision Study Group for Supervising Analysts, and is co-Director of the Developmental Pathway for recent graduates. Dr. Smolar has contributed to the academic literature by writing on the following subjects: analytic work with an immigrant analysand; group therapy in various clinical settings; combining analytic treatment with group therapy techniques; and most recently, psychotherapy during this era of political turmoil, contributions of group fragmentation toward national discord, the role of group identifications during normative development, and traumatic group identifications during adolescence with co-author Fred Baurer. He is co-editor of a book on marriage with Salman Akhtar and Ann Eichen, and is working with the same co-editors on a book on parenthood. He is co-investigator of research of American citizens suffering from conspiracy thinking. He has published op-eds on mental health subjects in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
Presenter: Nathan Kravis, MD
Date: Wednesday, October 7 th, 2026
Time: 7:00 AM – 9:00 PM EDT
Location: In-Person Rockland
2 CE/CME's Available
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$80 for Non-Members Seeking CE Credit
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$40 for Non-Members not Seeking CE Credit
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FREE for Students & PCOP Members
Program Flyer – Click here to learn more about the program or see below!
About the Program
Spectacularization (Debord 1967) denotes our tendency to replace direct experience with spectacle. Spectacularization defends against envy but can lead to depressive hedonia (Fisher 2008; Gilroy-Ware 2017) and enshittification (Doctorow 2025), defined here as a deterioration of meaningful experience and loss of interpersonal connectedness despite a cultural surround of apparent unfettered access and engagement. Nathan Kravis, MD, will sketch his understanding of the psychodynamics of spectacularization and depressive hedonia, illustrate them with a clinical vignette, and relate them to Guy Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. Spectacularization and enshittification travel together: they are both implicated in the degradation of meaningfulness. Dr. Kravis will argue that the clinical problem posed by depressive hedonia and the Debordian cultural problematic of the spectacle can be linked with the psychoanalytic concepts of envy and unmourned loss and the sociologic concept of alienation. Then Dr. Kravis will try to show how individual and large group (i.e., societal) psychodynamics reflect and inform each other with regard to the phenomena of depressive hedonia, cultural spectacularization, and enshittification. Fascism and nostalgia, Dr. Kravis argues, are linked as defenses against envy and unmourned losses.
About the Speaker
Nathan Kravis is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, Associate Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Cornell, Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and a former Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is the author of two dozen publications, including On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud (MIT Press, 2017). Other recent publications include “The Analyst’s Hatred of Analysis” (Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2013), “Fuck Redux” (Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2013), “The Googled and Googling Analyst” (Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2017), “Charisma” (Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2021), and “Greenberg and the analyst’s heresy/orthodoxy matrix” (Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2022). He is the recipient of teaching awards from the psychiatry residents at Cornell and psychoanalytic candidates at Columbia, and several other awards and honors. He is in private practice in New York.
Presenter: Andrea Celenza, PhD
Date: Saturday, October 17 th, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM EDT
Location: In-Person Rockland & via Zoom
2 CE/CME's Available
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$80 for Non-Members Seeking CE Credit
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$40 for Non-Members not Seeking CE Credit
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FREE for Students & PCOP Members
Program Flyer – Click here to learn more about the program or see below!
About the Program
The centrality of love and sexuality in our work will be illustrated through the use of clinical vignettes, including a variety of erotic fantasies and transferences that can emerge in treatment. The ways in which the analyst should attend to countertransference feelings will be discussed in order to understand and interpret the material. Clinical vignettes will be presented that involve erotic transferences and respective countertransference difficulties.
About the Speaker
Andrea Celenza, PhD, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and Assistant Clinical Professor at Harvard Medical School. She is also Adjunct Faculty at The Florida Psychoanalytic Center. She has written numerous papers and four books on love, sexuality and psychoanalysis. She has two online courses and her work has been recognized with The Karl Menninger Award, The Helena Deutsch Prize, and The Simonds Prize. Her writings have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Korean, Russian, Chinese, and Farsi. Her third book, entitled, Transference, Love, and Being: Essential Essays from the Field, was published in 2022 by Routledge and was nominated for the Gradiva Award. Her fourth book, published by Routledge in 2024 is Erotic Transferences: A Contemporary Introduction. Dr. Celenza is in private practice in Lexington, Massachusetts, USA.
Presenter: Jeffrey Katzman, MD
Date: Saturday, November 7th, 2026
Time: 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT
Location: via Zoom
2 CE/CME's Available
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$80 for Non-Members Seeking CE Credit
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$40 for Non-Members not Seeking CE Credit
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FREE for Students & PCOP Members
Program Flyer – Click here to learn more about the program or see below!
About the Program
Loneliness has been declared an epidemic around the world, with extremely high rates in the United States. Though it is associated with multiple physical and mental health conditions, it is rarely discussed in a clinical visit. This presentation will outline the connection of loneliness to our health, describe various models of understanding loneliness, delineate the experience from social isolation, present psychodynamic models of understanding loneliness, outline its connection with violence, and present promising international interventions.
About the Speaker
Dr. Katzman received his BA at Stanford University and went on to medical school at UC San Diego before completing psychiatry residency training at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico and Adjunct Professor at Yale. He was the Vice Chair for Education, Clinical and Academic Affairs at the University of New Mexico, and prior to that served as the Director of the Behavioral Health Care Line for the New Mexico VA Health Care System for 12 years. He currently serves as the Director of Education at Silver Hill Hospital, and Medical Director of the Project ECHO Resilience program. He has received multiple awards recognizing his devotion and expertise in teaching and mentorship. He has been a lifelong student and teacher, particularly in the area of psychotherapy. He has been trained extensively in the areas of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy, Mentalization Based Therapy, Good Psychiatric Management, and Transference Focused Psychotherapy by experts in the field, and his work in the areas of attachment, psychodynamic psychotherapy and resiliency have been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals. For decades, he has trained medical students and psychiatry residents in these areas through presentations and clinical supervision.
Dr. Katzman also has a thirty-year background in improvisational theater. He is interested in the application of improvisation and how this can enhance our experience in our relationships, in the workplace, and in our communication with others. He has worked with psychiatry residents and medical students using improvisation to develop the capacity for collaboration and spontaneity so important to the therapeutic alliance. He regularly consults to providers in various hospital settings and with medical leadership teams to foster a sense of teamwork and joy in working together.
In addition to his scholarly, peer-reviewed research, Jeff has also published three books. His study and love for improvisation is captured in his books Life Unscripted and Ensemble!, co-authored with his improvisation mentor Dan O'Connor. His 2012 novel, The Storymaker, was a semi-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel competition featuring 10,000 entries.
Stay tuned for more upcoming events—we have exciting updates coming soon!
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact PCOP Membership & Events Coordinator, Julia Seixas, at [email protected] for questions or assistance with registration.
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