Wilma Bucci, Ph.D.
Wilma Bucci is Professor Emerita, Derner Institute, Adelphi University where she was Director of Research and chaired 89 doctoral dissertations. She is an Honorary Member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA), the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYPSI), and the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR). She was Visiting Professor in Psychoanalytic Research, University College, London, and is on the Faculty of the International Psychoanalytical Association Research Training Programme. She is Director of Research at NYPSI and Co-Director of the Pacella Research Center; Co-Leader with Bernard Maskit of the Referential Process Project, and Co-Leader and organizer with Maskit and Leon Hoffman of the Practitioner/Researcher seminar at NYPSI. Her research has been funded by the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA), the Forty-five Foundation, the Pacella Institute, and others. She is the author of Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science: A Multiple Code Theory (1997); Emotional Communication and Therapeutic Change: Understanding Psychotherapy through Multiple Code Theory (2021), and author or co-author of over 100 clinical, theoretical and research papers.
Christopher Christian, Ph.D.
Dr. Christian, Ph.D. is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Psychoanalytic Psychology; Assistant Clinical Professor, Yale School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry; and a Training Analyst and past Dean of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR). In collaboration with Attà Negri, Rachele Mariani and the Referential Process Research Group, Dr. Christian has been studying and writing about the language of body dysmorphic disorder. His forthcoming book is titled: Psychoanalysis and the Corporeal: New Studies on the Psyche-Soma Connection, Somatization, and Body Dysmorphia to be published by Routledge.
Oded Hadar
Currently a Clinical Psychology PhD student at The City College of New York (CUNY), Mr. Hadar began his journey of becoming a clinician in 2017 when he enrolled in the Clinical Psychology Master’s Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. During his graduate studies, he was a research assistant at the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab. He also gained clinical experience as a psychology assistant at Montefiore Hospital, where he worked closely with several clinicians and had the opportunity to engage in research related to the efficacy of a behavioral integrated modal of psychotherapy. Since he began his doctoral studies in 2020, Mr. Hadar has provided psychotherapy to people from diverse backgrounds, and has gained experience in numerous different therapeutic settings, including individual, couples, and group psychotherapy. His training has focused mainly on psychodynamic psychotherapy but included other modalities, such as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). Mr. Hadar has been involved with The Pacella Research Center since 2021, taking part in research related to The Referential Process and its relationship to different variables in psychotherapy. Prior to his psychology studies, Mr. Hadar had a career as a professional Cellist and performed regularly in concert halls around the world.
Leon Hoffman, M.D.
Leon Hoffman is a psychiatrist, child and adolescent psychiatrist; Training and Supervising Analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; Co-Director of the Pacella Research Center of NYSI; President, Center for Regulation Focused Psychotherapy; and Psychiatrist/Psychoanalyst, West End Day School, NYC. Among many publications he is co-author with Timothy Rice and Tracy Prout of Regulation Focused Psychotherapy for Children (RFP-C): A Psychodynamic Approach; with Timothy Rice Defense Mechanisms and Implicit Emotion Regulation: A Comparison of a Psychodynamic Construct with One from Contemporary Neuroscience, and Analytic Process from the Perspective.
Charles M. Jaffe, M.D.
Charles M. Jaffe, M.D. is a supervising and training psychoanalyst at the Chicago Psychoanalytic institute and retired Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Rush University Medical Center. His interests are in complex dynamic systems approaches to development, and the psychotherapy process. He is in private practice in Chicago.
Rachele Mariani, Ph.D.
RACHELE MARIANI is a psychologist, psychotherapist and member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytical Association. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical, Dynamic and Developmental Psychology from La Sapienza University of Rome. She is currently a researcher in the Department of Dynamic, Clinical and Health Psychology at La Sapienza, teaching psychodynamic theories and models. She has been a member of Wilma Bucci’s Referential Process Research Group since 2004. Her main research interest is investigating, process research in psychoanalysis, symbolic processes and the mind-body relationship in psychopathology. Together with FASS group led by Bastianini and Ferruta she is conducting a Research project on free associative functioning and method extension in psychoanalysis, one of 12 projects funded by IPA Grant 2021.
Bernard Maskit, Ph.D.
Bernard Maskit received his Ph.D. in Mathematics at NYU in 1964. He held a post-doc at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ; was junior faculty at MIT, full professor at Stony Brook University since 1971, and was made Leading Professor in 1993. He was a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He wrote a book on Kleinian Groups, an advanced topic in current mathematics; co-edited several volumes; and published about 70 research articles in mathematics. He retired from Stony Brook in 2008. For about the past 20 years, he focused on research in psychoanalysis and psycholinguistics, as well as his field of complex analysis in mathematics, until his death, on March 15th, 2024. He had been working with Wilma Bucci on computational psycholinguistics, modeling aspects of Multiple Code Theory and the Referential Process, designing measures and writing computer programs to implement them; they published several papers on these subjects together; these are listed on this website.
Attà Negri, Ph.D.
Dr. Negri received his Ph.D in Clinical Psychology at University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. He is associate professor in Dynamic Psychology at University of Bergamo, Italy, where he teaches Clinical Assessment, Psychological Interview and Dynamic Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. He is certified in Adult and Couple Psychoanalysis by the Italian Society of Relational Psychoanalysis (SIPRe). His main research interests are focused on the relationship between meanings, relational contexts, and psychopathologies; linguistic analysis of the therapeutic conversation; epistemology of psychotherapy practice and research; psychotherapy process-outcome evaluation; and therapeutic assessment. Since 2012 he has been involved with the Referential Process Research Group in collaborative studies developing the Referential Process measures in Italian and investigating the Referential Process in narratives told on the projective tests and in conversations of individuals suffering from different psychopathologies and specific interpersonal settings; he is the co-creator of DAAPLab, an app for applying the measures of Referential Process language for the purpose of clinical supervision and routine monitoring of the psychotherapeutic process.
Henry Peterson
Henry Peterson is a Pacella Research Fellow at the Pacella Institute/NYPSI, and a third year doctoral student in Clinical Psychology at The City College of New York. Prior to starting his PhD, he worked as an assistant research scientist with the Global Psychiatric Epidemiology Group, at Columbia University. And prior to entering the field of psychology, Henry received his MFA in creative writing in 2019 from Brooklyn College, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow, and his BA in philosophy from Wesleyan University in 2014. His interests include the study of language-use in clinical settings, the relationship between language and non-linguistic forms of thought, and the role of aesthetic forms in both psychotherapy and the field of psychology.
Elena Petrovska
Elena Petrovska is a Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow at NYPSI. She is a Clinical Psychology Ph.D. candidate at the Derner School of Psychology and has earned a Master’s degree in Psychology with a concentration in Mental Health and Substance Abuse Counseling from The New School, and a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology en passant from Adelphi University.
You Zhou, Ph.D.
You Zhou completed her MSc Psychoanalytic Developmental Psychology at Anna Freud Centre/University College London (UCL), UK in 2011 and later received her Ph.D in Psychoanalytic Studies at Psychoanalysis Unit of UCL in 2015. Since 2014, she has joined the Tavistock and Portman’s Psychotherapy Evaluation Research Unit working on the Tavistock Adult Depression Study.
Her main research interests are mental representation of self and other in personality development, attachment studies especially intergenerational transmission of attachment patterns and psychotherapy process and outcome research. She currently works as the Associate Director of Research and Learning at ParentChild+, a national early-childhood-home-visiting program for low income families in the US. She also works in a few research projects in China focusing on identifying underlying mechanisms including mentalization that help improve effective prevention and intervention of mental health problems in healthcare workers.
She has been a member of the Referential Process Research Group at the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute since January, 2017. Her current work involves the development and validation of computerised discourse measures of the referential process. She is also working on the application of the computerised discourse measures on a few other projects.
