Salman Akhtar is professor of psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College, and a training and supervizing analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. He is an internationally sought speaker and teacher, who has given plenary addresses at the meetings of both the International Psychoanalytic Association and American Psychoanalytic Association. His more than 400 publications include 100 authored and edited books. He has received the prestigious Sigourney Award in 2012. He has also published nine collections of poetry.
Silvia Bonacchi is professor of German studies and Intercultural Communication at the University of Warsaw, Faculty of Applied Linguistics, Institute of Specialised and Intercultural Communication (ISIC), deputy director for Science and Organisation. Her research interests cover pragmalinguistics, intercultural communication studies, multimodal communication, conversational and discourse analysis; her main research fields are (im)politeness and verbal aggression, multilingualism and multiculturalism, history of thought, and Gestalt Theory in language.
Margaret Boyle Spelman is a chartered clinical and counselling psychologist, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and an organizational psychologist in private practice in Dublin, Ireland. She worked for more than three decades as a clinical psychologist in the Irish health services. Margaret is a former Board Member and Director of Clinical Training at the Irish Institute of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and past member of the executive council of the Psychological Society of Ireland and has been a director on the boards of the Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, the Irish Council for Psychotherapy and its Psychoanalytic Section.
Florian Dreyer is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg and lecturer at the International Psychoanalytic University (IPU) in Berlin. Using Multimodal transcripts and Motion Tracking algorithms, he analyzes how patterns of embodied interaction evolve over the course of video-taped psychotherapy sessions. He has published on formulations and empathy in psychotherapy, as well as on Conversation Analysis of child psychotherapy.
Oliver Ehmer is an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Freiburg (Germany). He studied speech science and received his PhD and Habilitation in Romance Linguistics. His research is informed by interactional, cognitive, and usage-based linguistic approaches. He investigates the grammatical and embodied resources through which people construct meaning and organize interaction. In his current work he focuses on knowledge transmission in instructional interaction, imagination, and remembering in conversation, and the emergence and sedimentation of linguistic structures.
Jay Frankel is an adjunct clinical associate professor, and clinical consultant in the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; associate editor, and previously executive editor, of the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and author of three dozen journal articles and book chapters, and numerous conference presentations, on topics including the work of Sándor Ferenczi, trauma, identification with the aggressor, authoritarianism and mass submission to authority, the analytic relationship, play as inherent to the therapy process, child psychotherapy, relational psychoanalysis, and others.
Michael M. Franzen is a university lecturer and research associate for Social Psychology at the International Psychoanalytic University (IPU) Berlin (Germany); current research projects: recurrent practices in therapeutic interactions (PhD student in Linguistics at Institute of German Language (IDS) Mannheim).
Colum Kenny is Professor Emeritus of Communications at Dublin City University. A lawyer and journalist, he has been chair of the Masters in Journalism programme at DCU, where he developed original courses including a module on ‘Belief & Communication’. A founding and council member of the Irish Legal History Society, he has served on the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.
Howard B. Levine, is a member of APSA, PINE, the Contemporary Freudian Society, on the faculty of the NYU post-doc Contemporary Freudian track, on the editorial board of the IJP and Psychoanalytic Inquiry, editor-in-chief of the Routledge Wilfred Bion Studies Book Series, and in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts. He has authored many articles, book chapters, and reviews on psychoanalytic process and technique, intersubjectivity, and the treatment of primitive personality disorders.
Heidi M. Levitt is a professor in the Clinical Psychology program within the Department of Psychology at The University of Massachusetts Boston. Using mixed-method and qualitative approaches, she has studied common factors such as significant moments, emotion, narrative, and silence within psychotherapy. In her psychotherapy research, she develops principles for clinical practice that focus on critical decisions within the moment-to-moment process of facilitating change in therapy. In another line of research, she studies LGBTQ gender communities and the process of healing from and resolving sexual minority stressors. She has been awarded Fellow status by the American Psychological Association via Division 5 [Quantitative and Qualitative Methods], Division 29 [Psychotherapy], Division 32 [Society of Humanistic Psychology], and Division 44 [Society for the Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity].
Christopher Mahlstedt was born in 1985 in Delmenhorst. After spending most of his youth at the local music school, he decided to study jazz saxophone at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt Weimar in 2006. He finished his BA in 2012 at the Jazz-Institut Berlin, which belongs to the Universität der Künste and Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler. In his master studies he focused on the musical dimensions of a couples’ interaction. In the field of music-psychology Christopher Mahlstedt researched on the topic “Comparing perceived emotions while playing and listening to music”. As a member of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychoanalyse and Musik e.V. he gave workshops and a lecture at the symposia in 2017, 2018 and 2019. From 2019 on he has been working as a psychologist with people with disabilities e-entering the general labour market.
Zenobia Morrill is a doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts Boston where she studies Counseling Psychology. Her research is broadly focused on conceptual and ethical issues related to pursuing a social justice mission in psychology including topics such as psychotherapy, qualitative inquiry, and global mental health. Her dissertation explores the intersection of humanistic and feminist multicultural theoretical approaches and navigating expert and cultural power dynamics within the psychotherapy process.
Helga de la Motte-Haber, taught for eight years at the Department of Musicology at the Technical University in Berlin. She went on to hold a Professorship at the Pädagogische Hochschule in Köln. In 2002, she was awarded the Glaskasten Marl for the Mediation of Sound Art, and in 2015 was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellenden Kunst, Hannover. Helga is an Honorary member of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Musikpsychologie and Gesellschaft für Musikforschung. She has published research on the psychology of music, sound art, and music of the twentieth century.
Donna Orange is educated in philosophy, clinical psychology, and psychoanalysis. She teaches at NYU Postdoc (New York) and at IPSS (Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York), and in private study groups.
Stefan Pfänder, Prof. Dr., is an interactional linguist and full professor (Chair) at Freiburg University, Germany and Co-Director of the Hermann Paul School of Linguistics Freiburg-Basel. One of his main research areas is Collaborative Storytelling in multimodal talk-in-interaction. This research focus has been developed out of an interdisciplinary research project with social psychology, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. Narrative research within the Thyssen project was followed up during a FRIAS senior fellowship and the successful co-acquisition of a research training group funded by the German Research Foundation, a lead agency project funded by the German Science Foundation and the SNF on “Emergent Remembering” and a cooperative project with cultural anthropology and psychosomatics/body psychotherapy which investigates and models the synchronization of interactants in everyday and clinical interaction and is co-funded by the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) and the European Union (Marie-Curie Fellowships).
Elsa Ronningstam is an associate professor of Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist in the Gunderson Outpatient Clinic at McLean Hospital. She is also a psychoanalyst, and a member of the Faculty of Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, where she has been teaching since 2006.
Elke Schumann graduated in German and Slavic Studies at the University of Freiburg and in 2007 received her doctorate in the field of neurolinguistics. Since 2009, she has been working at the Department of Romance Languages of the University of Freiburg, in the field of conversation analysis and multimodal interaction analysis—for example in projects on autobiographical narration (retelling, collaborative remembering) and on synchronization in embodied interaction. She also works as a lecturer for communication and conversation in nursing and medical contexts.
Patrick Shen is a filmmaker and the founder of Transcendental Media. Patrick’s cinematic works include the award-winning films Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality, The Philosopher Kings, La Source, and the SXSW 2016 film, In Pursuit of Silence. His films have received 24 awards and 11 nominations, and have been featured on the TED blog, CNN, Huffington Post, NY Times, LA Times, Boston Globe, and the Washington Post. In 2009, Patrick was the recipient of the Emerging Cinematic Vision Award from Camden International Film. In 1999, Patrick was invited to the White House to meet with President Clinton in recognition of his work on the Emmy-nominated documentary We Served With Pride. Since 2012, Patrick has been lecturing and teaching filmmaking workshops all over the globe as a film envoy for the U.S. State Department and the USC School of Cinematic Arts for their American Film Showcase. Patrick is currently at work on a new slate of films which include Day of a Stranger, In Praise of Shadows, and Four Minutes.
Anna Vatanen, works currently as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Research Unit for Languages and Literature at the University of Oulu, Finland. She has also worked at the Centre of Excellence on Intersubjectivity in Interaction at the University of Helsinki. Vatanen is an interactional linguist and conversation analyst who works on video-recorded Finnish and Estonian conversational data. Her research has been published, for instance in Research on Language and Social Interaction, Journal of Pragmatics, and several edited volumes. The phenomena she has studied include silent moments in interaction, units of language, various social actions, turn-taking organization, and multiactivity.