AKADEMI

On this page, you will find updates on upcoming presentations in the ISTDP Academy. Presentations are accessible to all members of the Scandinavian Societies for ISTDP, through your respective Society. Members of the Danish Society for ISTDP attend for free, and receive meeting invitations a few days before each presentation.

Presentations last 2.5 hours and are hosted online via zoom the first week of each month, not including the summer holidays.

Upcoming presentations:

2026

September 3: Johannes Ermagan – When Resistance Says No—and the Patient Says Yes

About Johannes: Johannes Ermagan is a licensed psychologist and a certified ISTDP therapist, supervisor, and teacher. He has more than ten years of experience in adult psychiatry, where he has primarily worked with patients presenting with complex trauma and psychological fragility. Since 2019, he has run his private practice, ISTDP Norrköping. Johannes received his ISTDP training from Peter Lilliengren, Tobias Nordqvist, and Allan Abbass. Since 2017, he has participated in post-core training under the guidance of Jon Frederickson and has also completed a Training of Trainers program. Johannes works clinically with patients, supervises therapists, and has extensive experience delivering ISTDP training programs and workshops. He has taught both in Sweden and internationally, including in the United States, Australia, and Portugal. In his clinical work and teaching, he is particularly interested in how therapeutic interventions can be adapted to the patient’s current capacity to support greater agency, internal integration, and meaningful change. He strives to create a natural and down-to-earth therapeutic dialogue that fosters genuine human connection.

About Johannes’ presentation: How can we work with powerful resistance when the patient’s underlying capacity is fragile? This presentation follows a full ISTDP session with a patient suffering from complex PTSD and PTSD, exploring how projection of will can make therapy feel like another relationship in which someone else decides what the patient must do. Through close attention to the patient’s responses, we will examine how repeatedly returning freedom, choice, and responsibility to the patient gradually transforms “I have to” into “I want to.” As the patient begins to experience the therapeutic work as her own project, collaboration deepens and previously avoided traumatic memories, rage, grief, and attachment pain become increasingly possible to face and integrate. The session illustrates how respecting resistance does not necessarily reinforce avoidance. Instead, it can help restore the patient’s will—and create the conditions for genuine therapeutic collaboration.

 

November 5: Diane Byster – Exploring the Intersection of ISTDP and PACT

About Diane: Diane is certified teacher, clinical supervisor and core training teacher with the IEDTA (International Experiential Dynamic Therapy Association). She serves as adjunct faculty for the New Washington School of Psychiatry, Washington, D.C. She is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, National Certified Counselor and Registered Yoga Teacher. Diane currently facilitates 5 ongoing supervision groups: two ISTDP (Intensive Short- Term Dynamic Psychotherapy) advanced training groups for colleagues who have completed core training, and two Integrative Couple Case Consultation groups that are informed by multiple treatment approaches including ISTDP and the Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy (PACT) and a core training supervision group for students attending the New Washington School of Psychiatry. Diane served as the lead trainer for a 3-year ISTDP core training program for the Western Canadian Institute for ISTDP from 2022 – 2024. Prior, Diane was a co- facilitator along with Jon Frederickson for the Western Canadian Institute for ISTDP from 2017- 2021 core training program.

About Diane’s presentation: ISTDP and PACT are both experiential approaches that emphasize facilitating relational safety, regulation of emotional arousal and deactivating defenses in order to build secure attachment. Through exploring a single case working with partners to recover from betrayal trauma, Diane will demonstrate how she integrated ISTDP and PACT approaches in couples’ therapy. This presentation will include an abbreviated version of a seminar she delivered, detailing the intersection of ISTDP metapsychology and PACT principles of secure functioning for the New Washington School of Psychiatry and ISTDP Australia. She will demonstrate her use of ISTDP and PACT interventions to help partners remain collaborative and cooperative, even while under stress, to maintain safety, security and teamwork for healing relational trauma. Seminar will include PowerPoint presentation, video demonstration, brief experiential exercise and group discussion.

 

November 19: Lisa Jeremiassen: A demonstration of Davanloo’s ISTDP

About Lisa: Lisa Jeremiassen began training at the Danish Davanloo Institute in 2006, receiving video supervision of her clinical work from Dr. Sandro Rosseti, an Italian physician, psychiatrist, and psychotherapist. Sandro Rosseti is currently President and co-founder of the Italian Institute for H. Davanloo’s ISTDP, founded in 1996. Jeremiassen has served as President of the Danish Davanloo Institute since 2017 and, since 2012, has participated in mobilization of the unconscious under the guidance of Dr. Rosseti.

About Lisa’s presentation: In her presentation, Lisa Jeremiassen will demonstrate Davanloo’s ISTDP therapy with a full breakthrough of murderous rage.

 

December 2: Christian Pasgaard: Excerpts from an Ordinary Therapy Process in an Ordinary ISTDP Practice

About Christian:
I am a clinical psychologist and specialist in psychotherapy for adults, and I have worked in private practice since 2008. ISTDP has been a central part of my clinical work since I began core training with Patricia Coughlin in 2009. I later completed a three-year training as an ISTDP teacher and supervisor, also with Patricia Coughlin. Since completing my core training, I have received supervision from Jon Frederickson, Allan Abbass, and, most recently, Johannes Kieding. I teach and supervise therapists in ISTDP and have been a partner at the Danish ISTDP-instituttet since 2026.

About Christian’s presentation:
In this presentation, I will share video excerpts from a longer-term therapy process. The treatment has been successful in a number of ways: the patient has developed greater access to, and capacity for, her emotional experience, gained greater insight into her own patterns, developed a more coherent narrative of her life, and experienced significant symptomatic improvement. The treatment has included emotional breakthroughs and portrayals. The clinical work as a whole, however, has not been characterized by particularly spectacular or dramatic ISTDP sequences. Such highly dramatic sequences can be relatively rare in my own day-to-day practice as well. What I want to show is mostly the everyday work of therapy — the steady, bread-and-butter clinical work through which change emerged over time. Using video material from the treatment, I will invite us to look at the process together. My clinical choices reflect what I am seeing and understanding in the moment, and we follow how that understanding shapes what I do next. Along the way, we examine how the patient responds, what seems to move the process forward, and what does not.

 

Previous presentations:

2026

• February 4: Marianne Berggren: When there is no hope left – letting go of omnipotence in therapy
• March 3: Johannes Kieding: The “Intensive” in ISTDP: An Unrelenting Focus on Resistance Across Standard and Graded Formats
• April 14: Sandro Rosetti: Dr. Davanloo’s metapsychology and technique, part 1
• April 21: Sandro Rosetti: Dr. Davanloo’s metapsychology and technique, part 2
• May 7: Deborah Pollack: Existentialism and ISTDP
• June 9: Sandro Rosetti: Dr. Davanloo’s metapsychology and technique, part 3

2025

• February 4: John Rathauser: A Case of Depersonalization Disorder
• March 4: Leo Russell: ISTDP for Functional Neurological Disorders: Theory and Practice
• April 1: Bernt Langvasbråten: Increased precision in detecting and handling mental mechanisms in Depression – What is the frontier of ISTDP Depression treatment in Norway?
• May 7: David Davis: A case from my training with Dr. Davanloo
• June 4: Allen Kalpin: Ketamine-assisted ISTDP
• September 3: Niclas Ravn Perchet: The Graded Format with a Fragile Patient – Building Capacity and Tracking Signals of UTA
• October 8: Javad Naficy: The Express Road to the Unconscious using Dr. Davanloo’s Technique
• November 11: Rudolf Bleuler: Working with Psychosomatic Disorders
• November 12: Glenn Kristoffersson: Treating a Traumatized Patient with the Graded Format
• December 10: Lisa Bendzsa: Working with the Regressive Wish

2024

• February 7: Maury Joseph: Enactment and counter-enactment with a compliant patient
• March 6: Sandra Ringarp: The art of slowness in ISTDP
• April 3: Rob Neborsky: The history and evolution of Attachment Based ISTDP
• May 8: Josette Ten Have-de Labije: The man who was stuck in a pecking order
• June 12: Monica Urru: Working with a severely somatizing patient: ISTDP and REAC neuromodulation—The clown woman
• September 3: Michelle May: From the Cognitive to the Soul: A Case of High Resistance to Hope
• October 2: Jon Frederickson: Systematic Attention to Transference in a Severely Fragile Patient
• November 6: Kostas Monas: Object Relations Theory and IS-TDP – Working in the Depressive Position
• December 3: Nat Kuhn: The importance of Action in ISTDP

2023

• January 9: Johannes Kieding: Leveraging UTA/Connection and Pressure to Awareness of existing Emotional Closeness
• February 1: Patricia Coughlin: handling resistance without contributing to it
• March 1: Brian Kok Ravn: The Stuck Electrician – Working with Syntonic Character Defenses
• March 14: Dion Nowoweiski: Constructing and Reconstructing the Self using ISTDP Techniques and Principles
• April 5: Jody Clarke: Opening the Family Tomb: A Study of the Intergenerational Transmission of Psychopathology
• May 3: Tami Chelew: ISTDP Informed Couples Therapy
• June 7: Niklas Rasmussen: Undervalued functions of the head-on collision in ISTDP
• September 6: Kristy Lamb: Using ISTDP to Understand and Work with Substance Dependence
• October 4: Ola Berge: Superego pathology, Object relations and ISTDP – a perspective
• November 1: Jon Anders Lied: Conscious Collaboration in ISTDP
• December 6: Jeanne Isaksen: What to do when drowning in regressive defenses?

2022

• January 12: Joel Town: The Role of Pressure and Challenge to Resistance in ISTDP: Mobilising the Unconscious in the Trial Therapy
• February 2: Monica Bertinussen: Kintsugi – the art of the golden repair
• April 6: John Rathauser: Man in the wrong place: A case involving projection and syntonic defense
• May 4: Monica Urru: Overcoming complex grief and dissociative disorders
• June 1: Liv Raissi: Undo positioning in therapy – how to replace resistance with heart for both you and the patient
  
• September 7: Johannes Kieding: Working with Conscious Defiance and Character Transformation
  
• October 5: Beata Zaloga: Working with fragile character structure. Special focus on how to restructure regressive defences with ISTDP technique.
  
• November 2: Rudolf Bleuler:The Head-On-Collision
  
• December 7: Nithya Kalyani: Superego identifications: exploring some vicissitudes and mechanisms of interventions

2021

• January 29: Angela Cooper: Treating PTSD with ISTDP
  
• March 17: Thomas Hesslow: Anxiety regulation: the importance of pressure
  
• April 28: Reiko Joseph: Keeping positive feelings in the bank
  
• September 1: Sara Basso: ISTDP principles in childhood psychotherapy
• October 6: Jonathan Entis: Working with defiance in Davanloo’s ISTDP
• November 3: Marvin Skorman: You can’t change anyone, even in therapy
  
• December 8: Peter Lilliengren: Resolving social anxiety with ISTDP