The Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute is pleased to offer its upcoming educational series to clinicians in the Atlanta area who are interested in psychoanalysis and its applications to psychotherapy. Each session meets in person from 6:30 pm to 8:15 pm on the second Thursday of the month at 6 Executive Park Drive, Atlanta, GA, 30324.
The cost of each 90-minute session is $60 ($40 per CE hour). You may register for individual sessions or for the entire series. Each session has a limit of 35 people, due to classroom size. Each session includes 1.5 CEs for physicians, psychologists, nurses, social workers, licensed professional therapists and marriage and family therapists.
October 8, 2026 | Geoff Goodman, PhD | Can AI Conduct Psychodynamic Therapy?
Consumers use large language models (LLMs) to provide low-cost psychotherapy. While researchers have identified the dangers of using LLMs for psychotherapy by testing their safety features (e.g., Santos et al., 2025), no one knows the quality of psychotherapy process conducted by LLMs. This session will report on the results of a study seeks to address this gap by assessing typical psychotherapy process conducted by three LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot), which implemented three treatment models (psychodynamic therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy and supportive-expressive therapy) in 54 two-session modules. | Register for this session.
November 12, 2026 | Stefanie Speanburg, PhD | Withstanding the Test of Time: Defense Mechanisms in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Practice
Of all the psychoanalytic concepts introduced by Freud, defense mechanisms have withstood the test of time and the rigor of empirical research (Petraglia et al., 2017). Despite their empirically validated ubiquity, psychoanalytic models of anxiety and defense lost favor to skills-based models of treatment in many present-day clinical programs. Clinicians, fortunate to learn how to identify defenses, may not be supervised in interpreting unconscious anxieties contributing to defenses or articulating their functions. This workshop addresses this learning gap by supplanting popular skills-based understandings of defenses and introducing participants to fundamental principles when working with defenses in clinical encounters. | Register for this session.
December 10, 2026 | M. Jane Yates, PhD | Integrating Psychoanalytic Concepts into Your Existing Clinical Practice
This presentation is designed to introduce a range of basic psychoanalytic principles and concepts, as well as their applicability in non-psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy treatments. Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) will be used as an example due to the common perception of it being antithetical to psychoanalysis. Opportunities for group discussion will be provided to explore examples of how these understandings may be applied in one’s own existing clinical work. | Register for this session.
January 14, 2027 | Bruce Rudisch, MD | Working Through in the Psychotherapeutic Process
How does psychotherapy work? What happens in a psychotherapeutic process? What is the meaning of emotional growth and how is this facilitated in a psychotherapeutic process? These are fundamental and imperative questions for all practitioners in mental health and allied professions. We will use examples from the psychoanalytic literature, from Freud to present day, to illustrate the concept of working through. We will discuss traditional, as well as alternative and modern versions of working through, and will relate this concept to other core psychoanalytic concepts including unconscious processes, transference, mourning, sadness, acceptance and gratitude. Case examples will be discussed, and participants will be encouraged to apply this lecture to their own clinical practices and to their own personal development. | Register for this session.
February 11, 2027 | John Paddock, PhD | Motivational Systems Theory: Relevance to and Applications in a Multicultural Context
While a whole semester could be spent exploring the empirical underpinnings and clinical utility of Motivational Systems Theory (MST), this presentation aims to give participants a foundational understanding and a starting point for applying it to their current clinical work, especially with a diverse patient population. | Register for this session.
March 11, 2027 | Nadia Sawicki, MD | The Living World and the Unconscious
The environment contains everything humans need to survive and myriad threats to our survival. Vulnerability and dependence undergird the relationship. How do psychoanalysts characterize our human relationship to the natural world and why is this important? How do many humans try to protect ourselves from awareness of distressing environmental realities? Environmental damage and the climate crisis challenge individual and collective abilities to cope well emotionally and psychologically. Yet research indicates that most U.S. citizens are not in denial anymore, so then what explains collective failures to take more meaningful action? The mechanism of disavowal will be discussed – how it functions and why we need to understand it better from within. | Register for this session.
April 8, 2027 | Karen Schwartz, PhD | Making Unformulated Experience Real through Painting
Painting, like psychoanalytic psychotherapy, is an intersubjective process able to connect hearts and minds of painters and viewers alike, because the creative process of making a painting brings the artist into a more complex and animated relationship with themselves. My own painting process is largely nonverbal. Interactions between me and my evolving artwork-in-process reveal experiences, thoughts and feelings not yet formulated in words, and so, not available explicitly to conscious awareness until visual representation allows questions of meaning and intention to be thought about and elaborated in the usual, verbal sense. I will describe and show how my particular painting practice provides an experiential frame for the creative process of self-articulation that goes on in psychotherapy, as well as how the physical and mostly nonverbal dialogue experienced in the painting studio serves as a source of listening attitudes and self-regulation in my work with patients experiencing inhibited self-expression and thwarted artistic ambitions. | Register for this session.
May 13, 2027 | Kendle Jenkins, LPC | Penelope’s Dream in The Odyssey: Prophecy, Core Conflict or Individuation? A Comparison of Freudian and Jungian Dream Theories
In this seminar we will explore Queen Penelope’s Dream of the Eagle and the Geese in Book 19 of Homer’s epic The Odyssey. Odysseus interprets her dream as a prophecy. We will take a look at how differently psychoanalytic thinking would view this dream, focusing on comparing Sigmund Freud’s key dream theories with those of Carl Jung. We will consider what of these ideas are useful in treating patients in psychoanalysis today. | Register for this session.
For more information about CE series, please contact:
Rhonda D. Harris, MPH, MS
EUPI Program & Research Manager
Teri Sivilli, MPH, LCSW
CE Coordinator