An International Roundtable Series

A collaboration of the Freud Foundation US, the Sigmund Freud Museum, and the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center

Rooted & Displaced: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meaning of Place is a three-part international roundtable series exploring the psychic significance of place for human beings—its capacity to hold memory, shape identity, carry trauma, and act as a site of symbolic transformation. Held across three locations—Vienna, New York City, and Stockbridge, MA—the series brings together psychoanalysts, historians, cultural theorists, and clinicians in conversation about the meaning of place to human beings, considering: displacement, discovery of place, sacred places, virtual place and technology, and the evolving meaning of place in both physical and virtual realms.

As questions of dislocation, ecological loss, technological life, and cultural reclamation take center stage globally, these Roundtables offer a multidisciplinary reflection on how we live in—and with—places, and how we navigate the complex psychic terrain of rootedness and rupture. 

Roundtable I – Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna 

Attachment to Place: Transience, Transference, and the Dispossessed 

Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna
November 8, 2025
 

With: Daniela Finzi, PhD, Brigid Doherty, PhD, Jane Tillman, PhD. Moderated by Thomas Kohut, PhD

Click here to register

Our first roundtable is held in the birthplace of psychoanalysis, the Sigmund Freud Museum and includes presentations related to the current exhibition, “Documents of Injustice: The Case of the Freuds.” The roundtable opens the series with reflections on impermanence, dispossession, and the longing for continuity through place and object. Daniela Finzi discusses the Museum’s current exhibition, using archival and audio materials to trace the bureaucratic trauma of Freud’s forced emigration through archival materials, and his siblings’ deprivation of rights under the Nazi regime. Brigid Doherty explores Freud’s essay On Transience, examining how aesthetic experience mediates mourning. Jane Tillman presents Transference to Place and Identity Formation, illuminating meanings of location in identity formation and the clinical implications of place. Moderated by historian and psychoanalyst, Thomas Kohut, this roundtable considers the psychic work of mourning vanished places, lost rituals, and cultural dispossession. 

Roundtable II – Austrian Cultural Forum New York

Resting Places: Desecration and Restoration of the Sacred

Austrian Cultural Forum, New York City
February 12, 2026
 

With: Pamela Cooper-White, PhD, Suleiman Mourad, PhD, Diane O’Donoghue, PhD. Moderated by: Jane G. Tillman, PhD

This roundtable explores the psychic and cultural significance of sacred places, particularly those marked by religious conflict, desecration, and dispossession. Panelists will explore how sites of violence and loss also become spaces of remembrance, ritual reclamation, and healing.

The conversation includes a reflection on the restoration of a desecrated Jewish cemetery in Vienna, a powerful act of mourning and cultural remembrance, Jerusalem as a sacred site for Muslims, and the meanings of sacred space within the Christian tradition. Through a psychoanalytic lens, sacred places are considered not only as geographic locations but also as symbolic containers of grief, history, and resilience, holding the potential for psychic transformation.

Roundtable III – Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge

Dislocated Presences: Technology, the Psyche, and the Meaning of Virtual Space

Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, MA
May 9, 2026
 

With: Ben Kafka, PhD; Leora Trub, PhD; Christian Thorne, PhD. Moderated by: Hannah Schmitt, PsyD

The final roundtable examines how digital technologies are reshaping psychic life within the context of place and its disembodied absence. What becomes of presence, intimacy, and therapeutic containment in virtual space? Panelists will consider how teletherapy, online rituals, and screen-mediated relationships challenge and extend traditional psychoanalytic concepts, including transitional space, the container-contained, and the skin ego.

This session offers a space for reflection on disembodiment, connection, and the symbolic potential of virtual environments—inviting new ways of thinking about psychic life in the digital age.

A Collaboration by:

The Freud Foundation US
Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna
The Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center

With support by

Austrian Cultural Forum New York