Directors
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; and Co-Leader and organizer with 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.
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.
Principal Investigators
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.
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.
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.
Co-Investigators
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.
Research Associate and Administrator
Michael Peral, LCSW
Michael Peral has been involved across multiple projects with the Referential Process Group assisting with statistical analysis and data visualization; technical needs regarding DAAP; and clinical group discussions. He assisted Bernard Maskit in co-developing the first iteration of TimeDAAP, the temporal-based Discourse Attribute Analysis Program (DAAP). In addition, Michael is in private practice in New Jersey.
Members
Stefano Milesi
Doctoral Student
Laura March
Master’s Student
Tyler Redlitz
Master’s Student
Riccardo Bianchi
DAAPLab Developer
Visiting Faculty and Scholars
Galit Harel, Ph.D.
Galit Harel is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a member of the Israeli Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (IAPP). She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Social Work from Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan. Currently, she is a researcher in the Department of Social Work at Ashkelon Academic College, where she teaches psychodynamic theories and models of treatment and supervision. She is also working on the Hebrew DAAP version of the Wilma Bucci Referential Process Research Group. Her main research interest is in investigating symbolic processes in psychotherapy and supervision. She is in private practice in Tel Aviv and has also worked at the Geha Mental Health Center.
In Memoriam
Benard Maskit, Ph.D. (1935-2024)
Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Referential Process Group with Wilma Bucci. 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 designing measures and writing computer programs to implement them; they published several papers on these subjects together. A memorial tribute and dedication can be found here and here .
