What happens within a treatment when an analyst is overcome by her own primal pain, memory, and even trauma? Dr. Harwell offers a deeply personal look at the interiority of the analyst as she navigates the impossible entanglement of two traumas, her patient Lacy's and her own. Doors are opened within herself -ones she much preferred to keep closed - in the service of understanding Lacy and inevitably herself. Healing comes in spontaneous and ingenious ways by moving deeper into the traumas

In the sacred space between divine authority and emerging selfhood, this paper traces the delicate journey of a brilliant young student whose mind could soar through theological paradoxes yet could not bear to leave their thoughts inscribed on paper. Like a kind of psychic skywriting, their ideas bloomed and vanished, beautiful and ephemeral, refusing the permanence that might demand them to choose between their own voice and the voices that had shaped them. Drawing from Jason Jost's exploration of evangelical trauma and Peter Shabad's meditation on human agency, the author reveals how children raised under the unblinking gaze of absolute truth learn to hide their authentic selves, even from themselves.

In the Oklahoma wind, a scraggly tree learns to sink its roots deep or surrender to the storm. So too must the young clinician discover that the very forces threatening to topple them—uncertainty, vulnerability, the terrifying vastness of another's unconscious—are the winds that grow their capacity to hold what cannot be mapped or measured. This paper reveals how clinicians cannot be trained through maps and linear progressions but must instead cultivate an internal compass that points toward presence even in the storm, where the very uncertainties that threaten to overwhelm become the sacred winds that teach us to dance in the deep waters of another's soul.

David Whyte shares innocence is allowing the world to find you again. This paper explores the transforming nature of generosity in the clinical setting through the journey of one patient who believes emotional scarcity is the norm and that the best one can settle for is the quick get, stealing as a substitute for what the other can never provide. Journey with analyst and patient to discover how innocence lost can be found again and how stolen items are reliquished as stolen moments of honest and generous exchanges take hold.

In the tender geography between safety and threat, this paper traces the journey of a child’s early life in institutional care which taught them that invisibility was survival and connection was catastrophe. Like a master of psychic camouflage, this patient arrived at my consulting wielding exquisite defensive choreographies that could make intimacy vanish mid-sentence. We witness how early neglect rewrites the very architecture of trust, creating toxic stress patterns that turn the nervous system into a battlefield. The therapeutic work unfolds moving from symbolic assassination attempts on the therapist to moments of exquisite vulnerability. Here, in the crucible of a relationship we discover how a child who learned that contact meant intrusion can slowly learn to bear the pain of connection in order to receive its comfort.

It's 4 AM and I am standing in front of, an unfamiliar coffeemaker, in an unfamiliar house. "I don't know how to make coffee in this world." This paper is a deeply personal meditation which interweaves the displacement from my family home during the Eaton fires and an institutional breakdown in my professional home. It is a tender exploration of how breakdown births breakthrough, how vulnerability transforms into vitality when we resist the urge to foreclose on uncertainty. Drawing on Rebecca Solnit's insight that "inside the word emergency is emerge," I trace the journey from organizational devastation to generative possibility, arguing that conflicts threatening institutional continuity simultaneously create what Bion calls a caesura—a sacred pause where reimagination becomes necessary. Through Jessica Benjamin's "moral third" and Simone Drichel's "capacity to endure," this speech to graduates reveals how psychoanalytic training during institutional destabilization uniquely positions them not as witnesses to transition but as essential architects where new forms of ethical community can take root and flourish.