Symposium
Saturday, March 7, 2026
9:30 AM to 1:00 PM
230 S. Frontage Road
Event will also be available
via Zoom (link will be sent via email the day before the event)
Cohen Auditorium, Yale Child Study Center
New Haven, CT 06520
Do Words Cure? Language In and Out of Play
Speaker: Judith Yanof, MD
Discussant: Kirsten Dahl, PhD
Discussant: Matthew Shaw, PhD
Professional Registration
$80.00
Student/Trainee Registration
$25.00
Registration Coming Soon
Contemporary analysts are well aware that change occurs in very complex, multi-dimensional ways, and never through words alone. In this talk I will take a closer look at how language facilitates different kinds of communication that can come to life in the analytic setting. “Language,” as I am using the term, includes words, but not just words. It includes many other qualities of experiential relating. These qualities of language may not be verbal at all, but coalesce around specific words, accompany them, and carry meaning, even though these meanings may not be conscious. I have chosen clinical vignettes of critical moments in analysis when words were brought to life most effectively and opened up new experience for both patient and analyst. Although my examples come from my work in analyzing children, it is certainly applicable to work with adults as well.
Learning Objectives
- Describe how Dr. Yanof is using the word “language.”
- Define how Dr. Yanof understands interpretation and distinguishes it from the classical meaning within psychoanalysis.
- Understand how a child’s play communicates much more than words. It involves listening on multiple levels and attending to different channels of communication which is translatable to adult work.
Speaker: Judith Yanof, MD
Judith A. Yanof, M.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst and a Child Supervisor at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She has written articles on several different aspects of child analysis, including gender, development, transference, termination, and play. In 1996 she won the JAPA Journal Essay Award for her article “Is Child Analysis Really Analysis.” She currently serves on the Board of Directors and Editorial Board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and the Editorial Boards of the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, and JAPA. She was chosen by the American Psychoanalytic Association to be the 2010-2011 Helen Meyers Travelling Scholar. For over 25 years Judy has worked pro bono in community programs for children in the Boston area. In 2012, BPSI awarded her the Arthur Kravis Award for Community Action and Humanitarian Contributions. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of CAPS and the Anna Freud Foundation.
Discussant: Kirsten Dahl, PhD
E Kirsten Dahl, PhD, is a Training/Supervising Child, Adolescent and Adult Analyst Emerita at Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis (WNEIP). She is on the Faculty of the Child Analysis Program, Center for Psychoanalytic Studies, Dallas/Houston and the Southeastern Consortium for Child Psychoanalysis. She is a past Chair of the WNEIP Child Psychoanalysis Training Program. She was affiliated with the Child Study Center of the Yale University School of Medicine beginning as a Special Research Fellow in 1970 and continued in various roles that spanned more than 20 years, ultimately as Associate Professor of Child Psychoanalysis from 1991-1993. She lives in Austin, Texas, and continues her analytic practice and teaching remotely. She has written extensively on feminine development, gender, adolescence, representations of the mother in the developing mind and analytic work with very young children.
Discussant: Matthew Shaw, PhD
Matthew Shaw, PhD, is a psychoanalyst for children, adolescents, and adults, teaches at the Yale School of Medicine, and is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis in New Haven, CT. He chairs the child and adolescent training program and has published broadly, most recently in JAPA and in a book on Hans Loewald. Dr. Shaw gave the Saltz Grand Rounds at Children’s National Hospital, the plenary at the Association for Child Psychoanalysis, and the Beata Rank Lecture at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. He is on the editorial board for the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the Psychoanalytic Quarterly.
