Psychoanalysis in extension: Segments & bios
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Working with children & adolescents in institutional settings
Cassia Mosdell, PhD is a psychologist at Montclair High School in NJ. Dr. Mosdell’s early career was in the field of infant mental health and dyadic work with infants and their caregivers. Her doctoral dissertation was based on her work with substance using mothers and their infants, exploring ways in which their experiences intersect with axes of power, oppression and structural inequality. It included a Lacanian analysis of the phenomenology of heroin. Her recent paper The Space to Heal Heroin Addiction: a Psychoanalytic Case for Harm Reduction (Mosdell & Mongiello, 2022) illustrates the ways in which harm reduction, as a philosophy and as a practice, maps onto the particular developmental themes of addiction. Dr. Mosdell has a career spanning 25 years working with children, infant through high school, including working with LGBTQ youth and advocating for LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum in schools.
David Lichtenstein, PhD is a psychoanalyst in New York, past Editor of DIVISION/Review, a quarterly psychoanalytic forum; faculty at CUNY Graduate Center, New School University; and founding member of Apres-Coup Psychoanalytic Association as well as the Group for a Radical Human Science. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters. He is a member of the faculty at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.
Kristen Hennessy, PhD is a licensed psychologist in private practice in rural Pennsylvania where she treats traumatized children from a Lacanian framework. She is co-editor of Psychoanalysis, Politics, Oppression and Resistance (Routledge, 2022) and her work appears in Lacanian Psychoanalysis with Babies, Children, and Adolescents: Further Notes on the Child (Routledge, 2017).
Olga Poznansky, PhD is a clinical psychologist and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in New York City, where she works with children, adolescents, and adults. She is particularly interested in applying psychoanalytic ideas to school settings and currently consults at a pre-school in Manhattan where she tries to be useful rather than right.
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William Braun, PsyD is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and certified group psychotherapist in private practice in New York City, working with adults, children, and adolescents. He is currently faculty in the department of psychiatry at Lenox Hill Hospital and the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYPSI). Previous positions include director of the psychiatric diagnostic assessment program at Silver Hill Hospital and director of training for the clinical psychology internship/externship programs at NYPSI. He has also worked as a psychological consultant at Hunter College Elementary & High School and George Jackson Academy. He completed his doctorate in clinical psychology at George Washington University; trained in adult, child, and adolescent psychoanalysis at NYPSI; and studied modern group analysis at The Center for Group Studies. He holds a bachelor’s degree in piano performance and remains an avid jazz pianist.
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Emma Lieber, PhD, LP (moderator/plus-one) is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York, part-time faculty in Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College, and a member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, Das Unbehagen, and the Group for Independent Formation. She is the author of The Writing Cure (Bloomsbury 2020) and co-editor of The Queerness of Childhood: Essays from the Other Side of the Looking Glass (Palgrave 2022), with Anna Fishzon. Her writing has further appeared or is forthcoming in American Imago, The Point Magazine, New England Review, Massachusetts Review, Lit Hub, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, and other academic and psychoanalytic publications.
Capitalism, identity & and the circulation of hate
Benjamin Fong, PhD is honors faculty and associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University. He is the author of Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge (Verso, 2023).
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Christie Offenbacher, LCSW works as an analyst in both private practice and a public mental health clinic in New York City. She is also an editor at Damage Magazine, a political organizer, and a performing musician.
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Christopher Chamberlin, PhD is the Marie Slodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. His work examines the history and afterlife of racial slavery from a variety of clinical, theoretical, and historical angles, with an emphasis on the work of Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, and Willy Apollon. Chamberlin is an active member of a number of psychoanalytic organizations based in Berlin, Quebec, and California, and serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.
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Matthew Oyer, PhD is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst. He is Co-Director at the Greene Clinic, Assistant Clinical Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine, and Adjunct Supervising Faculty in the clinical psychology doctoral program at City College. He completed his doctoral training at the City University of New York and his doctoral internship at New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYPSI) and Mount Sinai Medical Center. He is a founding member of the Group for Independent Formation.
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Jason Royal, PhD (moderator/plus-one) is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City, where he works with older children, adolescents, and adults. He is adjunct supervising faculty in the clinical psychology doctoral program at City College, supervises at the Greene Clinic, and has taught seminars in training programs at the Greene Clinic and the Pratt Institute counseling center. Previous psychoanalytic event-curation projects include the case presentation event series in association with Das Unbehagen. In 2016, he set the Group for Independent Formation into motion, as one of the orienting structures of his analytic training. He has a long relationship with music, primarily at a pianist, and in a previous life earned a doctoral degree in music composition.
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The Object In/Of Extension
Florencia Bernthal Raz, LP holds a license in Psychoanalysis from New York State and a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from the UNC (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina). The center of her work is in research, training and transmission of psychoanalysis. She currently works in her private practice in New York. She is a board member of Fundación Salto in Argentina, editor and translator of the academic journal Saltos and co-founder of Leap (Lacanian Encounter Association of Psychoanalysis) in the United States. She has experience in childhood education, where she developed the tools to truly engage children in order to provide a learning experience that would positively impact students and their families.
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Jennifer Yusin, PhD is a psychoanalyst in private practice. She is also Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy, and Director of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Drexel University. Her book, A Psychoanalytic Approach to Sexual Difference, is forthcoming this winter with Routledge Press.
Sam Boyles, LCSW (moderator/plus-one) is an analyst-in-formation residing in Ithaca, NY. He practices at a community mental health clinic, and works with a wide variety of ages and concerns. He is interested in the joints at which psychoanalysis links together with social systems and formations, as well as bringing together people who revitalize the psychoanalytic field itself.
Working with psychosis in community settings
Bret Fimiani, PhD is faculty, board member and psychoanalyst of the San Francisco Bay Area Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, USA, and a clinical psychologist. He works with people experiencing psychosis and extreme states in his private practice in Oakland, CA and at the Haight-Ashbury Integrated Care Center in San Francisco. His research interests include adapting the Lacanian analytic frame for the treatment of psychosis and extreme states.
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Marie Brown, PhD is a psychologist in New York City and Clinical Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. She works in the Adult Outpatient Psychiatry Department at Bellevue Hospital and is a member of the faculty group practice at NYU Langone. Marie is the Vice President of the International Society for the Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis, US Chapter (ISPS-US), and a member of the American Psychological Association's Task Force on Serious Mental Illness and Severe Emotional Disturbance. She is co-editor of three books, Women and Psychosis: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness (both with Marilyn Charles), and Emancipatory Perspectives on Madness: Psychological, Social, and Spiritual Dimensions (with Robin S. Brown), and the author/co-author of numerous research articles and book chapters on topics such as hearing voices and other anomalous experiences, postpartum psychosis, trauma, women's mental health, and transforming the mental healthcare system.
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Matthew Oyer, PhD is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst. He is Co-Director at the Greene Clinic, Assistant Clinical Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine, and Adjunct Supervising Faculty in the clinical psychology doctoral program at City College. He completed his doctoral training at the City University of New York and his doctoral internship at New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYPSI) and Mount Sinai Medical Center. He is a founding member of the Group for Independent Formation.
Orna Ophir, PhD is a psychoanalyst in private practice. She holds a Ph.D. from the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University and teaches at Gallatin School for Individualized Studies at NYU. She is the Associate Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute for Psychiatry: History, Policy and the Arts at Weill-Cornell Medical College, where she has been a researcher since 2009. She is a member of the Committee on the History of Psychoanalysis at the IPA. Ophir taught at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University (2015-2017) and the Doctoral Studies in Clinical Psychology at Long Island University (2013-2015). She is the author of On the Borderland of Madness (Hebrew, Resling, 2013); and Psychosis, Psychoanalysis, and Psychiatry in Postwar America (Routledge, 2015). Her new book, Schizophrenia: An Unfinished History, was published by Polity Press in 2022.
Loren Dent, PhD (moderator/plus-one) is a psychologist is private practice, and co-director of and supervisor at the Greene Clinic. Prior to working private practice, he was a team leader at a first episode psychosis program at Lenox Hill Hospital. He is the senior editor of DIVISION/Review, a publication of Division 39 of the American Psychological Society, and teaches courses on psychoanalytic theory at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He is a founding member of the Group for Independent Formation, and an analysand in formation at Apres-Coup.
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The psychoanalytic 'vertex': Orienting to the generative, dis-orienting effedt of psychoanalysis
James Ogilvie, PhD is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City, where he also leads study groups on Bion and on Wittgenstein for Psychoanalysts. For many years James worked in inpatient psychiatric settings where he developed ongoing spiritual issues groups. He has written and presented on subjects including: Bion and the limits of language; the relevance of Wittgenstein for the treatment of persons with psychotic states; and on the clinical utility of Emptiness. James is a co-founder and faculty member of the Contemplative Studies Project of New York and teaches at several local psychoanalytic institutes. He is currently the lead organizer for the 13th International Bion Conference to be held in New York in November 2024.
Jason Royal, PhD is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City, where he works with older children, adolescents, and adults. He is adjunct supervising faculty in the clinical psychology doctoral program at City College, supervises at the Greene Clinic, and has taught seminars in training programs at the Greene Clinic and the Pratt Institute counseling center. Previous psychoanalytic event-curation projects include the case presentation event series in association with Das Unbehagen. In 2016, he set the Group for Independent Formation into motion, as one of the orienting structures of his analytic training. He has a long relationship with music, primarily at a pianist, and in a previous life earned a doctoral degree in music composition.