31st Annual Day in Psychoanalysis
Book ticketsOrganised by:
Toronto Psychoanalytic Society & Institute
Description
31st Annual Day in Psychoanalysis: Fathers, Sons and Intergenerational Transmission of Masculinity
Hybrid Event
Presenters: Louis Rothschild, PhD and Donald Moss, MD
Moderators: Klaus Wiedermann, PhD, CPsych and Batalvi Batool, MSc., MEd., RP, FIPA
Saturday, April 25, 2026: 9:00 am – 3:00 pm EDT
Fees: In-person attendance $300 | Virtual attendance $250.00
(The registration fee is in Canadian funds. In person registration includes lunch and coffee breaks.)
Preregistration is required.
** HYBRID EVENT: Offered via Zoom or in person. In person registration is limited to 80 participants.
In person location: Hart House, University of Toronto – 7 Hart House Circle, Toronto, ON, M5S 3H3
What do we mean by “the father” today – clinically, culturally, and psychically? In many contemporary contexts, paternal authority is no longer taken for granted, and masculinity no longer reads as a self-evident inheritance. Yet in analytic work the father does not simply disappear. He returns sometimes as ideal, sometimes as threat, sometimes as absence; organizing questions of recognition, prohibition, rivalry, tenderness, and shame. Freud’s early attention to the “father complex” (before the later consolidation of the Oedipal triangle) already suggests that “father” is not only a person but a dense psychic position: a set of demands, identifications, fantasies, and constraints that can be transmitted, contested, and rewritten across generations.
Later theoretical and social shifts have complicated where, and how, the paternal is located: e.g: in families, institutions, and within the analyst’s own mind.
In this panel, Donald Moss, MD and Louis Rothschild, PhD; both of whom have written incisively on the role of the father, explore how masculinity is passed on as a demand that can organize anyone’s psychic life: what is encouraged, forbidden, admired, or ridiculed in relation to dependence, vulnerability, aggression, and tenderness. They will consider father – son life as it emerges in transference and countertransference, and how analysts are inevitably implicated as witnesses, inheritors, and sometimes as parental figures within the analytic scene.
Learning objectives:
At the end of this presentation participants will be able:
To trace the development of the father image from Freud’s early theorizing to modern, c0ntemporary versions of the internal(ized) father.
To articulate defensive and non-defensive aspects of masculinity.
To appreciate the role of the father in the transmission of versions of masculinity.
Program
9:00 – 9:15am Welcome/Introductions
9:15 – 10:00 am Louis Rothschild, PhD
10:00 – 10:15am (Moderator)
10:15 – 10:30am Break
10:30 – 11:15am Open discussion for audience
11:15 am – 12:15 pm Lunch
12:15 – 1:00 pm Donald Moss, MD
1:00 – 1:15 pm (Moderator)
1:15 – 1:30 pm Break
1:30 – 2:15 pm Open discussion for audience
2:15 – 2:45 pm Open discussion for audience and panel
2:45 – 3:00 pm Closing Comments
