UPCOMING EVENTS

If you have any questions or concerns about upcoming events, please contact Membership & Events Coordinator Julia Seixas at [email protected].

Upcoming Events

PCOP Open House – Postponed. New Date Coming Soon. 

PCOP Faculty Party – Postponed. New Date Coming Soon. 

 Date: Saturday, April 25th, 2026

Time: 8:40 am to 1:00 pm EDT 

Location: via Zoom (Zoom information will be included in your registration confirmation email)

 4 CE/CME's Available

Click Here to Learn About The Program & Meet Our Outstanding Presenters, and Moderator! 

RSVP Here! 

 Admission Rates: 

• $100 for Admission 

• $30 for Full-Time Students, Residents, & Candidates  

About the Symposium  

The Mahler Symposium brings together researchers and clinicians whose work focuses on how to best facilitate early child development. Some of the matters to be addressed are how to best guide and foster successful early relationships, what beneficial developmental experiences may help protect against trauma and compromised development, and what therapeutic means can help to interrupt the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Leaders in the field will present and compare the latest data on these subjects.

Presentations & Presenters 

Daniel Schechter, MD – Associate Professor of Psychiatry (Child & Adolescent Psychiatry), Lausanne University Faculty of Biology and Medicine, Lausanne, Switzerland
Interrupting Passage of Traumatic Memories from One Generation to the Next in Early Childhood: Implications for Parent-Child Psychotherapy 

Angela Narayan, PhD, LP – Associate Professor, Clinical Child Psychology Ph.D. Program, Department of Psychology, University of Denver
Benevolent Childhood Experiences (BCEs) and Angels in the Nursery as Resilience Factors to Counteract Intergenerational Trauma

Claudia M. Gold, MD – Pediatrician, Early Relational Health Specialist

Inside Ordinary Moments of Meeting: Lessons in Early Relational Health from Infants and Caregivers

Discussants

Jack Novick, MA, PhD & Kerry Kelly Novick, FIPA – Authors of Freedom to Choose, Working With Parents Makes Therapy Work, and Good Goodbyes 

Jordan Bate, PhD – Associate Professor, Adelphi University, New York; leads the Attachment & Psychotherapy Process Lab

Moderator

Lawrence D. Blum, MD – Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Adjunct in Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania; Faculty, Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia 

Presenter: Daniel José Gaztambide, PsyD
Date: Tuesday, May 26, 2026
Time:  7:30 PM – 9:00 PM (EDT)
Location: Virtual via Zoom

Program Flyer – Click Here 

 RSVP – Click Here

Program Description

Discussions of racialized gender are often framed in zero-sum terms, as if attending to the violence racialized cismen face somehow detracts from the vulnerability of racialized women and LGBTQ people. However, the sexualized nature of racialized violence reveals that this is not a question of “who suffers more,” but a question of the processes by which racialized violence is enacted. Integrating decolonial and Marxist feminisms, trans of color critique, Black Male Studies, and prototypicality research with a decolonial psychoanalytic reading of Freud and Fanon, this paper argues that an unconscious imago—what Sylvia Wynter called a genre—of the “deviant male” stands at the core of the violence targeting racialized people, whether cis, trans, or non-binary. This fantasy of the deviant male will be shown to scaffold fears of “military age male” immigrants and “men in women’s bathrooms” to empower Racial Capitalist Patriarchy and its “strong men” to position themselves as “protectors of the vulnerable,” even as their policies result in the sexual violation and elimination of vulnerable groups. Case vignettes will illustrate the clinical implications of this model. The political implications of a decolonial psychoanalytic perspective on racialized gender will be outlined.

About the Speaker

Daniel José Gaztambide, PsyD is an assistant professor of psychology at Queens College, where he serves as the director of the Frantz Fanon Lab for Decolonial Psychology and conducts research on Puerto Rican and Latinx populations, ethnic minority identity, psychotherapy, and public policy and the social determinants of health. He is the author of the books A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology, and Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Technique: Putting Freud on Fanon’s Couch, which won a 2024 Gradiva Award for Best Book. 

• $80 for Non-Members Seeking CE Credit
• $40 for Non-Members not Seeking CE Credit 
• FREE for Students & PCOP Members 

Program Description 

Anni Bergman’s later work regarding rapprochement is briefly considered and then used as a foundation for this reconsideration of rapprochement’s place in development over the lifespan. Resolving rapprochement challenges is seen as the central developmental process whereby one either utilizes or refuses the love and care one receives. A sense of safety in early life leads to the capacity to metabolize love and to the development of a secure attachment followed by libidinal object constancy. This developmental achievement sets the stage for caring relationships and optimal development over the lifespan. A predominant sense of danger in early life, either reality-based or based primarily on internal experience, leads to the development of an insecure attachment. Hostile object constancy, a form of self-regulation based on the anticipation of future danger, leads to the defensive refusal of the actual love and care one receives. Subsequent interference with the capacity for caring relationships leads to pathological development over the course of life. Successful psychological treatment involves helping the patient become open to loving connections. In addition, Anni intended her work to pave the way for a reconciliation of Attachment Theory and Separation-Individuation Theory. This integration is better conceptualized as Attachment-Individuation Theory, which highlights the unique contributions of each to a unified developmental process. This article aims to further this integration.  

About the Speaker 

William Singletary, MD, is a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, a member of the faculty and supervising child analyst of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, and President of the Board of the Margaret S. Mahler Child Development Foundation. He is in private practice in Philadelphia, PA. A major focus of his work has been on understanding how building relationships contributes to changing the brain as well as our psychological structure and on developing the capacity to use available love as a major goal of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Currently, he and Timothy Rice recently published their paper, “Two diverging paths in psychological and neurobiological organization: Using or refusing love” as a Target Article in Neuropsychoanalysis. 

About the Discussant 
Irene Hurford, MD, graduated from the University of Toronto, and received her MD from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She did her residency at UCLA, and completed a two year research fellowship in San Diego. Dr. Hurford is on volunteer clinical faculty in the department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches and supervises residents. Dr. Hurford was founder and clinical director of the Psychosis Education, Assessment, Care, and Empowerment (PEACE) program at Horizon House, Inc, which has become a leading First-Episode Psychosis (FEP) program across the United States. Dr. Hurford is a candidate at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, where she also teaches about psychotherapy for psychosis. She is currently in private practice where she specializes in the treatment of psychosis.

 Upcoming 2026 Programs & Events   

PCOP Annual Year End Dinner & Graduation Ceremony 
Date: 06/25/26 

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact PCOP Membership & Events Coordinator, Julia Seixas, at [email protected] for questions or assistance with registration!