46th Annual IAPSP International Conference
Pasadena, California USA
October 16-19, 2025
MIND-ING OUR GAPS: CULTIVATING VULNERABILITY AND PRESENCE IN THE FACE OF OTHERNESS
Conference Co-Chairs:
Michelle Harwell
Margy Sperry
Planning Committee:
Stacy Berlin
Simone Drichel
Heather Ferguson
Tyia Grange Isaacson
Thato Letsatsi
Peter Maduro
Sarah Mendelsohn
Taz Morgan
Nick Santo
Orly Shoshani
Elaina Vasserman-Stokes
Dear Colleagues,
We are thrilled to welcome you to IAPSP's 2025 conference, Mind-ing Our Gaps: Cultivating Vulnerability and Presence in the Face of Otherness, to be held in Pasadena, California from Thursday, October 16th through Sunday, October 19th, 2025.
We are living in a time when the capacity of civil dialogue seems to be unraveling. Political polarization has reached harmful extremes, communities are fractured along ideological lines, and the capacity for genuine dialogue is increasingly endangered. As therapists, we witness this division not only in the broader culture but also in our consulting rooms, our institutes, and sometimes within ourselves. This conference emerges from the recognition that our traditional approaches to ruptures, fissures, and divides may no longer be sufficient. What are our options when the capacity to repair or to connect with others despite our differences feels elusive? Together we will explore these disturbing trends and reimagine how we might meet otherness with vulnerability and presence.
The conference opens Thursday evening with our keynote by Dr. Simone Drichel, Enduring the Ethical Gap: Vulnerability and Presence in the Face of Otherness, which challenges us to see gaps as essential ethical spaces that preserve otherness. Our four plenaries explore this theme through distinct lenses: ‘Witnessing the Gap’ examines clinical presence during therapeutic rupture, distinguishing empathy as bridge-building versus bearing and witnessing patients' irreducible difference, ‘Radical Hope and Courage in the Gaps’ explores spaces where radical possibilities emerge when personal suffering intersects with, collective struggle, and psychological insight inspire political action, ‘Breakdown’ investigates how breakdown operates across organizational, clinical, and international contexts not as failure but as necessary ruptures that reveal what lies beneath familiar structures and ‘Intersubjective Taboos’ addresses racial silence in therapeutic encounters and how silence in relation to otherness creates shared but unacknowledged experience, where we are all mutually implicated in racial trauma.
We're excited to introduce Coffee Talks, our brand-new discussion platform featuring unscripted morning roundtable conversations from 8:00 to 9:00 am on Friday and Saturday. These intimate gatherings bring together diverse panels exploring evocative topics: from navigating spiritual dimensions in clinical practice to confronting the wounded planet's impact on our consulting rooms, from art as bridge between known and unknown to the visible wounds when the therapist’s vulnerability enters treatment. Grab a cup of coffee and join your colleagues for meaningful dialogue that will energize your day!
Our Pre-Conference workshops offer deep dive explorations designed to expand your clinical knowledge. These intensive three-hour sessions provide hands-on learning experiences in smaller groups, allowing for rich interaction bridging theory and practice in ways that will immediately enhance your work.
We’re delighted to offer a unique pre-conference tour that promises to prime the pump for the days that follow. Moving outside our consulting rooms and conference meetings, join us on Wednesday afternoon, October 16 for "Race + Place: Pasadena Pilgrimage," an immersive exploration of Pasadena's cultural and racial history. This powerful excursion takes participants to historically significant sites where we’ll meet with local scholars, activists, and storytellers who bring the past into vivid dialogue with the present. We will wrestle with questions of spatial trauma, collective memory, and our responsibility to confront communal history. We’ll see the impact of climate injustice as we visit an area that was ravaged by the wildfires and witness a community that is fighting to preserve their identity as they struggle to recover and rebuild. This embodied experience will deepen our conference themes in unexpected ways.
In addition, you won’t want to miss the opportunity to visit the iconic Griffith Park Observatory on Wednesday evening, or to take a walking tour of the downtown Pasadena area focused on the history and architecture of the area on Friday evening.
Saturday night, it’s time to kick back and celebrate California-style! Los Angeles started the gourmet food truck craze, and we’re bringing that iconic street food magic straight to you with a little help from a local psychology grad school just a quick five-minute stroll away. Get ready to dig into flavors made famous by the guy who started it all - celebrity chef Roy Choi. We’re talking good eats, great company and loads of fun. And the night’s just getting started! After dinner, we’ll head back to the hotel where the DJ will be spinning, the music will be rocking, and the dance floor will be calling your name. After all, no one grooves quite like a Self Psychologist!
We will be joined by a bunch of the local grad students—you’ll see some of them volunteering during the conference. We’re excited to introduce them to the vibrant world of Self Psychology - they are our future! If you'd like to help offset the cost of their meal, we’ve included an optional donation line. Every bit helps—and we know they’ll appreciate the warm welcome!
Our paper sessions feature compelling presentations addressing various aspects of otherness, vulnerability, and therapeutic presence, while special interest groups provide focused discussions for those working with couples, children and adolescents, and social justice initiatives.
For virtual attendees, all four plenary panels will be live-streamed and recorded, along with select papers from each session, ensuring meaningful participation for our global community. Online participants will have an opportunity to meet together in post-panel discussion groups. We're committed to creating connections across distances.
In these times when it feels easier to retreat into familiar echo chambers, this conference asks us to do something more challenging: to stay present with discomfort, remain curious about differences, and find courage to be vulnerable in service of deeper understanding. We believe Self Psychology has essential contributions to make to our fractured world.
We look forward to gathering with you in Pasadena or online as we explore together how we might mind our gaps with greater wisdom, compassion, and presence.
Warmly,
Michelle Harwell and Margy Sperry
IAPSP Conference Co-Chairs
