SPECIAL LECTURE SERIES
CAPA offers special lectures, seminars and courses for students, graduates, and members. A variety of topics will be covered by distinguished members of CAPA's faculty. Upon completion of the Special Lecture Series lecture, seminar or course, student and graduate participants will receive a certification of participation.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speaker(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of CAPA.
Title: The Plasticity of the Individual Regulatory Signature: Trauma, Immune Tolerance, and the Development of Psychic Signature
Presenter: Danielle J. Dronet, DSW, LISW-S
US Seminar Dates: Friday, May 15, 2026
US Seminar Times: 9am – 10:30am (US Eastern Time)
China Seminar Dates: Friday, May 15, 2026
China Seminar Times: 9pm – 10:30pm (21:00 – 22:30 Beijing Time)
Prerequisites: All CAPA members, students and graduates
Course size: Open
Description: This presentation explores trauma not only as something that is remembered, but as something that shapes the ways individuals regulate emotion, bodily experience, relationships, and meaning. The concept of “psychic signature” offers a way of thinking about how people gradually develop the capacity to hold difficult feelings, memories, uncertainty, and conflict without becoming overwhelmed by them. Like a person’s signature, it becomes a symbol of totality.
By bringing psychoanalysis into dialogue with contemporary research in neuroscience and immunology, the presentation invites reflection on the remarkable plasticity of both mind and body, and on the ways that safety, relationship, and symbolization can support growth and recovery over time.
Trauma can be understood not only as a disorder of memory, but as a disorder of regulation. This presentation proposes that traumatic experience reorganizes what may be called the individual regulatory signature: the evolving pattern through which the person manages arousal, affect, bodily stress, interpersonal safety, and symbolic meaning. Drawing from psychoanalysis, developmental theory, psychoneuroimmunology, and trauma studies, I present how trauma may alter autonomic functioning, HPA-axis regulation, inflammatory signaling, and tolerance for internal experience.
A central metaphor and organizing model for this paper comes from immunology. In the immune system, tolerance is not passive; it is an active and highly regulated achievement. Regulatory T cells help prevent destructive overactivation, while inflammatory states may destabilize this balance. By analogy, psychic life also depends on forms of tolerance: the capacity to bear affect, ambiguity, dependency, conflict, and memory without treating them as annihilating threats. When trauma disrupts this capacity, internal states may be experienced as dangerous, foreign, or intolerable. I refer to this clinically as a kind of psychic signature, a standard way of being, without question.
The presentation argues that trauma treatment often requires more than insight or recollection. It requires the gradual development of tolerance through relational safety, co-regulation, affect naming, containment, symbolization, and mentalization. This model is especially relevant for complex trauma patients whose regulatory systems may be too strained for immediate interpretive or directive interventions. I will propose a developmental sequence for treatment and consider how psychoanalytic work may help expand the patient’s tolerance basin across bodily, affective, and symbolic domains.
This talk aims to open dialogue between psychoanalysis and contemporary biological models without reducing psychic life to biology, and to consider how plasticity in both body and mind may support recovery.
Course Objective:
Describe the concept of the “individual regulatory signature” and explain how traumatic experience may reorganize patterns of autonomic, endocrine, immune, and psychological regulation.
Explain the role of immune tolerance, particularly the balance between regulatory T cells and inflammatory processes, as a metaphor and framework for understanding the development of psychic tolerance.
Identify clinical manifestations of “psychic autoimmunity,” including chronic shame, dissociation, reenactment, defensive avoidance, and the misrecognition of internal experience as threatening.
Discuss how findings from trauma research—including alterations in HPA-axis functioning, inflammatory signaling, autonomic regulation, and neuroimaging—may inform psychoanalytic understanding without reducing psychic life to biology.
Apply a developmental sequence of trauma treatment—relational safety, co-regulation, containment, affect labeling, symbolization, mentalization, and reflective agency—to work with individuals with complex trauma histories.
Bio: Dr. Danielle J. Dronet, DSW, LCSW-S, is an American psychoanalytic clinician, clinical director, and educator with more than 21 years of experience in psychotherapy, supervision, child welfare, and psychoanalytic training. She is the Clinical Director of the Center for Advanced Mental Health Practice & Research (CAMHP), serving individuals and professionals in both the United States and internationally, with a particular emphasis on trauma, identity, relational development, and cross-cultural mental health care.
Dr. Dronet provides psychotherapy, psychoanalytic consultation, and supervision to U.S. expatriates and international communities, drawing on psychoanalysis, neuropsychoanalysis, affective neuroscience, and trauma theory. Her work focuses especially on the psychological effects of abandonment, developmental trauma, colonial identity conflict, and the ways individuals struggle to create meaning under conditions of overwhelming affect and instability.
She is a poster presenter at the Neuropsychoanalysis Association Congress 2026 in Barcelona, where she will present her poster, “Managing Internal Chaos: Trauma, Colonial Identity, Alpha-Function, and Dopaminergic Sensitisation in a Neuropsychoanalytic Case Vignette.” The poster is based on her written paper and examines the relationship between trauma, colonial identity formation, Bion’s concept of alpha-function, Fairbairn’s internal object world, spiritual oscillation, and dopaminergic sensitisation within a complex neuropsychoanalytic case.
Currently based in France and transitioning to permanent residence in Chénérailles, Dr. Dronet offers remote and in-person services to Americans and international clients worldwide.
If you have any questions about the seminar, please contact Dr. Dronet directly at danielle@camhp.us.
Title: The Philosophy of Wittgenstein: Implications for Psychoanalysis
Presenter: John Maier, M.S.W., Ph.D.
US Seminar Dates: Friday, June 5 and June 12, 2026
US Seminar Times: 9am – 10:30am (US Eastern Time)
China Seminar Dates: Friday, June 5 and June 12, 2026
China Seminar Times: 9pm – 10:30pm (21:00 – 22:30 Beijing Time)
Prerequisites: All CAPA members, students and graduates
Course size: Open
Description: The work of Ludwig Wittgenstein constitutes a landmark of 20th-century philosophy. In his later work, Wittgenstein develops a genuinely novel conception of language and the mind that has had a profound influence on subsequent thinkers. Wittgenstein also has a lifelong fascination with the work of his compatriot Sigmund Freud, and many have noted the similarities between Wittgenstein's methods and those of psychoanalysis. This seminar will give a brief introduction to Wittgenstein's later philosophy with special attention to his views on language, psychology, and method. We will then consider contemporary work that explores the implications of Wittgenstein's work for clinical practice. In addition to the intrinsic interest of Wittgenstein, this seminar may be thought of as a case study in what it means to approach the project of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in a philosophical way.
Course Objective:
Understand the basic elements of Wittgenstein's later philosophy
Become familiar with contemporary work on Wittgenstein's relevance to psychoanalysis
Learn the significance of philosophical approaches to psychoanalysis
Acquire an understanding of bringing philosophical approaches to bear on clinical work
Bio: John T. Maier is a psychotherapist in private practice in Cambridge, MA. He trained in community mental health, working primarily with individuals with psychosis. He has also held several academic positions in philosophy, and was previously Associate Professor of Philosophy at Peking University. He is the author of books on agency (Options and Agency, 2022) and addiction (The Disabled Will, 2024), as well as a number of articles on language, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mental health.
If you have any questions about the seminar, please contact Dr. Maier directly at john@jmaier.net.