Courses

Clinical Case Conference (Offered Every Semester) This course is designed to support the clinician’s work and offers opportunities to integrate clinical material with psychoanalytic concepts, including ethics, and ways to deepen the psychoanalytic process, with a focus on the therapist’s self reflection, the clinical relationship, and ways to facilitate what is mutative for the patient. Attendees are encouraged to present case material.

Couples Therapy  (Third Year Course) Couples Therapy challenges one to  practice new ways of being and experiencing interpersonal and intersubjective relationships with an immediacy more palpable for the participant than often experienced in individual treatment. Many clinicians are reluctant to treat couples because they consider themselves inexperienced in this valuable treatment modality. This course will encourage participation in experience with couples while providing theoretical background and practical skills to treat them. 

Development  (First Year Course) How we experience ourselves and ourselves in the world, and in relationship, develops over time and transforms with new experience. Whether we think in terms of relational paradigms or transference, experience is organized and encoded (either symbolized/contextualized, or perceptually/ affectively/ procedurally) in the brain and remains over a lifetime until reconfigured anew with the gains made by perspective, experience, and maturity. Earlier experiences may be reconfigured, but they remain with us in some form nonetheless, and they influence our capacity for self- and interactive-regulation. Thinking developmentally impacts a therapist’s way of listening and understanding and, in turn, illuminates particular aspects of the patients with whom we work. It behooves the therapist to feel one’s way into the child-self’s experience as we listen to the adult-self. To do this we must both imagine a child’s experience at each developmental level as well as conjure up our own childhoods. 

Developmental Issues: Attachment and Affect  (Second Year Course)This course will examine the ways in which development informs our clinical work with adult patients. Life events and developmental transformations throughout the lifespan will be explored in terms of their relevance for adult treatment, with an emphasis on attachment styles’ effects on the clinical situation.                    

Developmental Issues: Narcissism and the Development of Shame  (Second Year Course) This course offers a contemporary understanding of narcissism, both its developmentally appropriate and pathological aspects, with an emphasis on its primary affect (shame) and on helping the clinician to avoid engendering shame in the therapeutic situation. It includes discussion of envy and rage and deficits in mentalization. We emphasize recognition, containment, empathy and mirroring.

Electives (Fourth Year Course)Candidates and students have the opportunity for a few weeks each to present to their classmates their focused studies of topics of their individual interests. This semester we will explore the erotic transference and the works of Fairbairn, to name a few.

Focus on Psychoanalytic Contributors and Topics (Fourth Year Course)

Intensive Areas Example: Religious Faith, Spirituality and Psychoanalysis This course will acquaint candidates and students with psychoanalysts who integrate religious faith into their practices. The class will explore ways of working with religious and spiritual material and increase awareness of the impact of religious and spiritual themes on the clinician.

Other examples: Jungian Theory; The Intersubjectivities; Winnicott’s Writings; Bionian Theory.

Gender (Third Year Course) There was an [infamous] time in psychoanalytis when homosexulaity was considered pathology and gender fluidity a ‘confusion” and an “identity disorder.” Gender was once seen as binary. Psychoanalysis has evolved to be much more inclusive, welcoming, and appreciative of the spectrum that is gender. Gender and sexuality have been decoupled. This course will explore theories on gender development as well as how rejection by caregivers of their gender variant children and how ‘othering’ by society at large leads to health problems such as depression, drug use, and unprotected sex.

Group Psychotherapy  (Third Year Course) Group Therapy provides a context for practicing new ways of being and experiencing interpersonal and intersubjective relationship with an immediacy more palpable for the participant than often experienced in individual treatment. At its best, it fosters a sense of belonging, and decreases isolation and shame, and it provides witness. Many points of view are available to the participant and feedback is readily available. Inclusion engenders hope and encourages tenacity for the work at hand. Many clinicians are reticent to create groups for their patients and colleagues’ patients because they consider themselves inexperienced in this valuable treatment modality. This course will encourage participation in group experience while providing skills to facilitate groups.

Hate, Envy, and Destruction in the Clinical Encounter  (Fourth Year Course)This course will continue to explore the effects of relational traumas, insecure attachments, and their sequelae as created in the therapeutic situation. The recognition, welcoming in, naming, and living through together of difficult affects, as well as understanding their origins, in order to strengthen the relationship and the self are necessary components of mutative treatments.

Introduction to Psychoanalytic Concepts I (First Year Course) Courses I and  II offer a contemporary foundation in psychoanalytic theory and application, beginning with ideas about analytic attitudes, clinical process, and how an analytic relationship is constructed. We will consider the analytic relationship in terms of the mutual impact of analyst and patient in conscious, non-conscious and unconscious realms. We will begin to look at contributions from major schools (Freudian, Ego, Object Relations), reading Freud, Klein and Winnicott, and continue in Spring 2021 with contributions from Relational, Interpersonal, Self Psychology, and Intersubjectivity, reading Kohut, Mitchell, Bromberg and Benjamin, et al. Participants are encouraged to bring clinical examples which we will use to illuminate concepts.  

Introduction to Psychoanalytic Concepts II (First Year Course) We continue to look at contributions from major schools (Freudian, Ego, Object Relations, Interpersonal, Self, Relational, Intersubjective) reading works from and about Klein, Winnicott, Ogden, Kohut, Mitchell, Harris, Reis, Bromberg and Benjamin, to name a few. Also included are readings from neuroscience, mother-infant and attachment research, and the Boston Change Process Study Group. Participants are encouraged to bring clinical examples which we will use to illuminate concepts.

Practical Analytic Subjectivity I   (First Year Course) In this course we will rethink clinical practice in contemporary terms looking back on the harm and usefulness of classical authoritarian neutrality, abstinence and anonymity and elucidate some of the differences between classical and postclassical psychoanalytic thinking. We discuss such practical issues as starting an analytic practice, setting, frame and fee.  With an emphasis on the analyst’s self reflection and on ethics we will explore how we locate ourselves in the therapeutic process.

Practical Analytic Subjectivity II (Third Year Course) This course is an experiential one, without a syllabus and with a facilitator, which focuses on therapist experience in the clinical situation. Discussion emphasizes how the therapist locates one’s self in the co-creation of clinical material, what is stirred up in the therapist during sessions, and how one manages the challenges of the intimate relationship engendered by the relationship building necessary in treatment.

Psychosoma (Fourth Year Course)This course explores the interconnectedness between mind-body expression of psychological life from a contemporary perspective. When symbolization of experience and affect fails (e.g. trauma making the hippocampus less able to function), the body can express experience in ‘body memory’ in the procedural, sensorial, and affective encoding (e.g. in the amygdala) of experience. Reading body and other implicit communications as salient material for analysis, and negotiating ways to bring these communications into the relational and narrative realms will be discussed.

Relational Concepts I    (Second Year Course)This course is designed to elucidate some of the differences between classical and postclassical psychoanalytic thinking. We will compare assumptions about the mind, compare ideas about clinical process, and consider how relationship is built, maintained, and repaired. With an emphasis on the analyst’s self reflection we will explore how we locate ourselves in the therapeutic process.

Relational Concepts II  (Second Year Course)This course continues to elucidate some of the differences between classical and postclassical psychoanalytic technique and compare assumptions about minds and about clinical process in relational and other traditions, with an increased emphasis on clinical presence and analytic attitude as well as on the analyst’s subjectivity.

Repetitive Painful States  (Third Year Course) Clinicians often find themselves wondering why it is so difficult to negotiate change with patients who are chronically depressed, hopeless, negative, lonely, and/or angry , who stay in abusive situations, continue to use mind and mood altering substances, and/or persist with eating disorders, that is, patients who find themselves uncannily recreating familiar maladaptive and painful relationships. In this course, we will discuss how psychological pain is managed and mitigated. We will look at memory systems, neuroendocrinology, attachment styles as they contribute to maintaining a less than optimum attempt at homeostasis, and the role of dissociation and enactment as communication of unsymbolized experience.

Trauma (Third Year Course) Most of what we clinicians see in our daily practices is somehow related to trauma, relational trauma and/or event traumas. Trauma has been called ‘the underlying truth.’ As clinicians we are asked to witness unbearable pain of others and to participate in the recrudescence of our own pain alongside that of our patients’ while nearly simultaneously being asked to reflect on our experiences. How do we understand, be with, and manage the unbearable truths of traumas?