Let’s Talk Psychoanalysis
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Psychoanalytic institutes get treated like the family some people never fully had. That's exactly the problem. 💭
In this clip from APsA's Reimagining Engagement in Psychoanalytic Institutions symposium, Dr. Aisha Abbasi — LTP's founder — names the fantasy directly: candidates join with a longing to belong, then unconsciously expect the institution to function as family. It can't. "We all come from families that have had a lot of dysfunction," she notes, "so no organization or institution can be perfect." Treating one like a family sets up a disappointment the structure was never built to survive.
Her point isn't cynicism — it's what she argues actually makes it possible to tolerate ambivalence toward an institution long-term.
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07/23/2026
Da Vinci. Racker. Bloom. Maroda. Aisenstein. 💭
Look at that list for a second — a Renaissance polymath, a mid-century Kleinian analyst, a contemporary academic psychologist who isn't even a psychoanalyst, and two of the sharpest living voices in relational and psychosomatic theory. Five centuries and at least three disciplines, all converging on the same question: what does it cost an analyst to actually bear a patient's pain?
That's not incidental to Dr. Dhwani Shah's argument — it's the argument. He doesn't just cite these thinkers. He takes Aisenstein's "guardian of life" and Racker's account of guilt-driven passivity and pushes both further than either of them took it alone, toward something he calls "the erotics of pain" — a position neither purely self-defeating nor purely theoretical.
Sunday, he brings all of it into the room with actual clinical material.
Countertransference Masochism, with Dr. Dhwani Shah. Sunday, July 26. 2.0 CME credits. $65.
Register: https://f.mtr.cool/tgpgivpgnf
Is there such a thing as regenerative masochism? 💭
That's the question Dr. Dhwani Shah opens with in the video above — and it's a real provocation, not a rhetorical one. Training tends to treat masochistic dynamics as one thing: a self-defeating pattern rooted in guilt, shame, and narcissistic injury, something to interpret away. Sunday's seminar argues that framing is incomplete. There's a second form — erotogenic, generative — that lets an analyst actually receive and metabolize a patient's psychic pain instead of just enduring it.
The distinction matters clinically. One version keeps an analyst passive and stuck. The other might be doing real work.
Countertransference Masochism, with Dr. Dhwani Shah. Sunday, July 26. 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM PST (1:30 PM – 3:30 PM ET). 2.0 CME credits. $65.
Register now: https://f.mtr.cool/wxtzglljsq
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