I am well past laying out a new outfit and buying school supplies, but when August rolls around, the enduring memories of starting a new academic year seem to sharpen my focus on professional development opportunities. If your annual calendar, like mine, starts with the school year, you might want to get an idea of what to expect from the self psychology community in 2016-2017.

I surveyed the calendars of some of the leading educational and training institutions and talked to a number of leaders in the field to see what is exciting them in the coming year. I know I am going to have to dip into my airline miles and sacrifice some vacation time with everything that intrigues me. One of the first decisions on my plate as an early career clinician was whether I would be in a position to attend this year’s IAPSP annual conference,”Critical Clinical Moments in the Treatment Process,” which will be held in Boston from October 20 to 23. I attended last year in Los Angeles and found that with roughly 500 attendees, the conference was vibrant but accessible, providing opportunities to meet long-standing members of the self psychological community as well as those just getting involved like me.

If you are a bit hesitant because you worry the conference is not a place for newcomers or early career professionals, think again. I confess that last year I figured I would give it a try because I knew I could always “escape” at any point to see my 2-year-old grandson not feel like I had ducked out of something tough. It turns out, I was hard-pressed to break away.

As Toronto analyst Bruce Herzog put it, self psychological therapists do not leave their empathy at home when they convene. Over a decade ago, the IAPSP established a formal mechanism to help newcomers. Its welcoming committee provides conference mentorship to first-time conference goers. Mentors help “mentees” do everything from selecting programs that match their interest to making introductions to members of the IAPSP community. The committee contacts all first-time conference-goers automatically, but if you are early in your career and you feel it would be beneficial to get some advance advice on the conference, committee chair Maria Slowiaczek can arrange that.

The overall program is organized to encourage discussion, so you will be assigned to a post-panel discussion cohort that you can participate in after each of the five major panels during the conference. Don’t slip out to answer emails or return phone calls once the presentations are done. I found that these post-panel discussion sessions can provide a good sense of the more established members of the community or as Boston analyst Elizabeth Corpt, who has written about social class in the formation of her psychoanalytic identity and served on the conference planning committee, put it, “how stuff is digested.” Besides, she said, it’s a useful “stepping stone” for speaking up in the larger sessions, which Corpt concedes some people find intimidating. It is best to participate in the discussion group you were assigned to at registration, but if for some reason, it does not meet your needs, no one is going to stop you from attending a different discussion group.

Conference A la Carte

When I registered my first time for the conference, some of the options besides the pre-conference, felt a bit overwhelming considering the additional cost. One of these was the Kohut Memorial Lecture, one of center pieces of the conference and the most expensive “add-on.” It is given by one of the field’s most distinguished contributors and will give you a chance to experience someone whom the field has valued over the years. Last year’s Kohut lecture, delivered by Australian analyst Tessa Phillips, who grew up in South Africa under apartheid, raised important questions about the place of race in self psychological theory. This year Bruce Herzog will deliver the lecture where he plans to talk about how Kohut’s reinterpretation of the Oedipus Complex came to influence him, not just as a clinician but as a father.

If you would like to hear this lecture, do not be deterred by hefty price tag of the accompanying luncheon. There are always chairs lining the back of the room so you can feel free to get some cheap grubs on your own or with a colleague, and come at the end of the luncheon for the lecture. You will not be the only one. Herzog, who said he has attended more than two dozen conferences, especially urges newcomers not to skip the early-morning coffees, which are generally well-attended and, he believes, a great place to meet other newcomers as well as long-standing members of the community.

Making the Most of Your Trip: The Added Value of the Pre-Conference

As an early career professional like me, you probably do not have endless time off for professional development, but if you can break away from work, the pre-conference is well worth your time and money. It is an easy way, as Corpt puts it, to “ease into the conference without being bombarded by the social aspects of it.” The pre-conference is specifically designed to be more interactive than the full conference, according to 2016 Conference Chair Richard Geist.

If you have begun to immerse yourself in the literature on self psychology and inter-subjectivity theory, a quick glance at the pre-conference schedule will reveal that the sessions are led by some of the most widely-published and experienced teachers in self psychology. Geist’s “Introduction to Contemporary Clinical Self Psychology,” is quickly becoming a mainstay of the pre-conference. Described by one person surveyed for this article as a “pure Kohutian,” Geist, who has expanded on Kohut with his theory of “connectedness,” will be offering a foundational course that is ideal for getting a broad self psychological perspective rich in clinical examples. I attended it last year at my first conference and found that whatever I thought I knew theoretically about the distinctive dimensions of self psychology came alive clinically for the first time in this workshop. This year, I have also marked my calendar to attend Geist’s full conference session, a meeting with candidates and students on Friday afternoon.

Unfortunately, you have some tough choices Thursday morning at the pre-conference especially if you are trying to figure out where self psychology fits among other theories. As you may know, self psychology is sometimes criticized for being a closed system. If you want to feel better equipped to put self psychology into a broader context, you might consider Scott Davis’ integrative pre-conference session, which is also becoming a pre-conference mainstay. Davis, who is interested in the evolutionary origins of connectedness, will bring together infant research, neurobiology, and self psychology in a condensed version of a course that he teaches at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.

My pick for the afternoon would probably be the session by Carla Leone and David Shaddock, who co-chair the IAPSP’s couple’s therapy interest group, on contemporary self psychological approaches to couples therapy. Fewer sessions are devoted to the application of self psychology to couples therapy, so this session would merit serious consideration by anyone eager to see how the application of self psychology has expanded. Even though I do not do couples or marital therapy, when someone described Leone as “unusual in her ability to provide an empathic experience for both members of a couple,” I instantly added it to my list.

If you still have some gas in the tank after the morning and afternoon sessions, you are in luck because the late afternoon sessions also feature some of the field’s most distinguished theorists and teachers. Anna Ornstein, a child psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who, with her husband Paul, was part of Kohut’s inner circle in the 1970s as his ideas began to appear in print, will be discussing a paper at the child and adolescent interest group meeting. Frank Lachmann, another of the field’s most prolific writers and a pioneering infant researcher known for his quick wit, will also be leading a session on the leading edge in development treatment.

Know about Other Educational Opportunities for Early Career Professionals?

If your institute or affiliate group has events that you think would be especially useful to early career professionals, I would like to learn about them so that I can share that information with this community. I encourage you to email flora.lazar@gmail.com well in advance so I have an opportunity to “preview” the event or course. Please provide all attendance information, but most important, please let me know why you think it would be especially helpful for early career professionals.