NIPPA Fall Colloquium 2026: Simon Says, “You’re Still Here”

Simon Says, “You’re Still Here”: Toward Love and Symbolic Expression in the Transference

Presented by:

Joseph Perr, MAT

Margaret Black Mitchell, LCSW

2nd Discussant: TBD

Location: Lafayette

Address: 380 Lafayette St, New York, NY 10003

Date: Sunday, November 1, 2026

Time: 11:30am-2:30pm

NIPPA’s Annual Colloquium and Brunch is a congenial event – celebrated for its friendly and supportive atmosphere. Please join us for the first in-person Annual Colloquium and Brunch since 2019!

This event is approved for 3.0 CE contact hours for psychologists, social workers, psychoanalysts, and mental health counselors. Personalized CE certificates will be handed out at the conclusion of the event.

DESCRIPTION

How does an analyst come to love a patient who spends five years trying to destroy him as his therapist, through relentless crude sexual provocation? This presentation follows the treatment of “Simon,” and traces how his provocations became legible as communication: the only language available to a man who longed to be held but could only imagine contact as violation. The clinical task, following Sheldon Bach, was one of translation: from “the language of perversion” into “the language of love.” It asks how five years of sadomasochistic attack produced not disgust or alienation, but love. Part of the answer lay in a maternal dimension that opened between patient and analyst: a capacity to withstand a child’s mess, and to see in the tantrum the wish to be loved.

Participants will be better able to:

I. Identify provocation as an appeal for contact in work with patients who test the treatment relationship.

II. Determine when provocative material calls for containment rather than interpretation.

III. Utilize their own countertransference as data for formulating a patient's early relational configurations.

IV. Apply the concept of surviving a patient's ruthlessness as a route to analytic love.

BIOS

Joseph Perr (MAT) is Co-Director of the One-Year Evening Program at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP), where he is also a graduate of the License Qualifying Program and the Four-Year Adult Psychoanalysis Program. Before training as an analyst, he taught social studies in the New York City public schools. He is the author of two graphic novels, and his comics have appeared in The New York Times, Jewish Currents, The Nation, and BOMB.

Margaret Black Mitchell, LCSW, is supervisor and Board member of NIP. She is a Founding Board member and faculty of the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center and a Founding Board member and Vice President of IARPP. Her publications concern the relationship between theory and the analytic relationship.She is also co-author, with Stephen Mitchell, of Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought.