2026-2027 program year statement
Endless Becoming
The Development of the Psychotherapist
Dallas Society of Psychoanalytic Psychology
2026–2027
Melissa Wallace, MD, President
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…”
As You Like It —William Shakespeare
This year at DSPP, the therapist will take the stage.
As psychoanalytic psychotherapists, we know that no clinical encounter is untouched by the inner life of the therapist. Our histories, identifications, losses, defenses, and fantasies enter the consulting room. They shape our capacities for reverie, containment, interpretation, and repair. They inform our blind spots, enactments, anxieties, and longings. The therapist’s development is not peripheral to the work; it is one of the conditions through which the work becomes possible.
How did we come to be therapists, and why do we continue? What conscious and unconscious motives drew us to this profession? What fears, doubts, joys, surprises and regrets have emerged along the way? How do these experiences shift across the therapist’s life cycle—from the anxieties of beginning practice, to the complexities of mid-career, to the questions of legacy, limitation, and loss that come later?
We will begin our year with a social dreaming matrix and median dialogue group, learning from one another. We are, after all, the experts in what it is like to be psychoanalytic therapists. Adam Brenner will present our first workshop, addressing humility, impostor syndrome, and de-idealization. Monica McGoldrick will trace Freud’s lifespan through the lens of genograms, inviting us to consider how we might have approached him in treatment at different stages of his life. Deborah Cabaniss will teach us how mourning therapeutic losses can deepen our work. In our final workshop, Aisha Abbasi will discuss how we find a home within ourselves to help our patients find the same.
In our monthly member meetings, we will explore therapists’ dreams, midlife transitions, and late-career decisions. These topics invite us to consider not only what we do as therapists, but who we become through the work: how we are changed by our patients, by our successes, failures, attachments, losses, and the repeated demand to remain open to unconscious life—our patients’ and our own.
Hedda Bolgar described the therapist’s development as an “endless becoming…not something that has a clear beginning and point in time when the becoming ends and one is.” This year, as we continue to become together, I hope we will build confidence in our newer therapists, renew vitality in our mid-career therapists, and drawn on the hard-earned wisdom of our end-of-career therapists.
Our DSPP community is one of caring collegiality: a professional home rich with depth, generosity, and accumulated wisdom. I look forward to a year of reflecting, questioning, and becoming together.
Endless Becoming
Program for the Dallas Society of Psychoanalytic Psychology
2026–2027
September 16, 2026
7:30-9 PM
All the World’s a Group
We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
— The Tempest
Dale C Godby, PhD & Melissa Black, PhD will host a Social Dreaming Matrix (SDM) followed by a Median dialogue group to begin our exploration of Endless Becoming. (1.5 CEUs)
October 24, 2026
10 AM – 2 PM
Who Am I to Talk About Impostor Syndrome? Humility an Shame in the Development of Therapists
This above all: to thine own self be true
— Hamlet
Adam Brenner, MD will present a workshop on humility and imposter syndrome. (3 CEUs)
November 18, 2026
7:30 -9 PM
The Family Web
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together
— All’s Well That Ends Well
Monica McGoldrick, MA, LCSW, PhD will discuss Freud’s genogram after hearing Radhi Dani, MD Sivan Peleg, MA, and Beverly Bonnheim, MSW present an imagined analysis of Freud at the ages of 29, 40, and 83. (1.5 CEUs)
January 20, 2026
7:30-9 PM
When the Patient Appears in the Therapist’s Dreams
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
— Hamlet
Steve Scherffius, MD will present on working therapeutically with the therapist’s dreams. (1.5 CEUs)
February 27, 2027
9 AM – 2 PM
What Therapists Mourn: An Interactive Workshop
Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.
— Macbeth
Deborah Cabannis, MD will present a workshop on the role of the therapist’s mourning. (4 CEUs)
March 24, 2027
7:30 – 9 PM
The Middle Distance
Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be
— Hamlet
J Unterberg, PhD Carla Pulliam, PhD, and Scott Nelson, PhD will present on the therapist at midlife. (1.5 CEUs)
April 17, 2027
9 AM – 2 PM
Developing a Stable Internalized Sense of Home
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie
— All’s Well That Ends Well
Aisha Abbasi, MD will present a workshop on finding an authentic home within from which to work as a therapist. (4 CEUs)
May 19, 2027
7:30 – 9 PM
The Readiness is All
There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow…
if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.
— Hamlet
Malcolm Bonnheim, PhD and Joan Berger, PhD will present on decision-making as the sun sets on our work as therapists.(1.5 CEUs)
For age is opportunity no less than youth itself, though in another dress, and as the evening twilight fades away, the sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow