This two-day virtual seminar will challenge the either/or qualities of many trauma-relevant approaches and paradigms and demonstrate how psychoanalytic perspectives can enrich and empower our therapeutic efforts. We will explore the constructive perspectives that emerge from an alternative both/and stance, choosing to understand, reconcile, and work around differences, permitting clinicians to mobilize the power of divergent models and contributions on behalf of the therapeutic needs of individual patients. Presenters Ira Brenner, Charis Cladouhos, Elizabeth Howell, Shelly Itzkowitz, Rick Kluft, John O’Neil, Adah Sachs, and Valerie Sinason will address a number of difficult topics. These include reviewing the role of instinct theory in trauma treatment, rethinking sexuality and the Oedipal complex in the treatment of the traumatized, the value of new ancillary psychedelic modalities, the underappreciated contributions of Bowlby, Fairbairn, and Ferenczi, and Bion, and returning ideas and approaches discarded by Freud to the mainstream of clinical work.

This package was originally presented as a live virtual seminar in November 2023.