Scientific Meeting
Saturday, April 25, 2026
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm
255 Bradley Street
Event will also be available
via Zoom (link will be sent via email the day before the event)
New Haven, CT 06510
On Trauma
Speaker: Sidney Phillips, MD
Speaker: Elizabeth Brett, PhD
Discussant: Gretchen Hermes, MD, PhD
Non-WNEPS member
$35.00
WNEPS members, candidates and all students/trainees
$0.00
In their presentation, “On Trauma,” Drs. Brett and Phillips will explore how Freud tried to understand where emotional and psychological problems come from. From early on, he asked whether people’s symptoms grow mainly out of painful life experiences (trauma) or out of inner conflicts and instinctual wishes (drives), and he described these questions using ideas about how mental energy is organized in conscious and unconscious life. Over the years he repeatedly revised how he thought these inner processes work and how they relate to the causes of suffering. This presentation will focus on why those debates still matter in the consulting room today—especially whether problems rooted in trauma differ in important ways from those rooted in inner conflict, and whether each may call for a different therapeutic approach. Rich, detailed clinical examples will illustrate these ideas and show how they play out in therapeutic encounters
Learning Objectives
- Describe Freud’s alternating views on the sources of psychopathology, especially whether it had a traumatic or drive-related cause.
- Identify two levels of psychic organization and their clinical manifestations.
- Explain the different therapeutic approaches depending on the level of psychic organization.
Speaker: Sidney Phillips, MD
Dr. Phillips is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. He teaches and supervises at the Institute. He has published in major psychoanalytic journals on war trauma, sexuality, and psychoanalytic theory and technique. He is in private practice in New Haven.
Speaker: Elizabeth Brett, PhD
Dr. Brett is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Western New England Institute of Psychoanalysis and Lecturer in Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. She is a Past President of the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies. Her publications include articles on trauma and therapeutic action. Recently she is a co-Editor with Rosemary Balsam and Lawrence Levenson of The Legacy and Promise of Hans Loewald and The Emerging Tradition of Hans Loewald.
