15 Sessions
This course will trace the development of Freud’s thinking as he struggled to create a distinctively psychoanalytic vision of human experience. Beginning with the earliest works, we will explore his efforts to grapple with the clinical and conceptual problems that confronted a new and evolving discipline. Studying the history of Freud’s struggles and his solutions should illuminate the difficulties and the possibilities that confront psychoanalytic theory and practice to this day.
10 Sessions
The goals of this course are essentially two-fold: an historical accounting of the “life and times” of the founders of Interpersonal psychoanalysis with a view towards contextualizing their notions of theory and praxis in their lived lives; while at the same time, implicitly and explicitly orienting students to think more deeply about their own “lives and times” and how those factors come to bear on their own developing personal metapsychologies and psychoanalytic identities.
10 Sessions
This course will attempt to familiarize candidates with the complex issues involved in beginning a psychoanalytic treatment. I will try to provide a comparative, contextual approach to the clinical issues involved as one’s beliefs about what facilitates mutative experience may determine how one seeks to begin a treatment. I will use a combination of readings discussing conceptual and practical matters and clinical material from both my practice and cases presented by candidates.
10 Sessions
Edgar Levenson’s work represents the most significant advance in interpersonal psychoanalysis since Sullivan, from participant observation to theorizing the analyst’s subjectivity as central in analytic change. As Don Stern has written, he is “more responsible than any other single writer for the current emphasis in North American psychoanalysis on the inevitable, unconscious, personal participation of the analyst on the therapeutic relationship.” Having said this, Levenson, now in his 90’s, is also one of the least well-known major psychoanalytic thinkers in the contemporary psychoanalytic world, despite his prominence in the late 70’s and 80’s, when debates between the two-person interpersonal perspective and one-person classical Freudian model were central, and the idea that we “cannot not interact” was radical. In the next ten weeks we will take a deep dive into Levenson’s work, beginning by placing his work in the development of interpersonal thought, especially Sullivan. We will read a selection of papers from his early work and end with Levenson’s (2019) last paper, Quo Vadis presented at WAWI’s 75th Anniversary Conference.
7 Sessions
In this class, we will focus on select work of Harry Stack Sullivan, one of the founders of the Interpersonal school of psychoanalysis. This course aims to provide an overview of his important contributions to Interpersonal psychoanalysis. Through close textual readings and hopefully vigorous in-class discussion, we will work to understand Sullivan’s interpersonal theory of development, personality, emotion pathology. We will also discuss his clinical technique and the ways of applying his theory towards conceptualizing and treating patients. Further, we will consider his work both within its historical time and context and discuss and explore its relevance and limitations for contemporary practice.
3 Sessions
Given Fromm’s stature as a public intellectual, it is easy to overlook the fact that he was first and foremost a pioneering psychoanalyst who founded psychoanalytic institutes and organizations in Germany, the US and Mexico. This short course sheds light on Fromm’s key clinical contributions. Fromm’s clinical ideas are discussed in their historical context and parallels with contemporary relational psychoanalysis are considered. Fromm’s work helps us to understand that clinical practice, like human experience, can never be separated from the social and political surround.
10 Sessions
We will review ways to integrate inquiry and modified free association with a variety of patients including those who tend to externalize, avoid introspection, act out, self-medicate, etc. We will also consider the 1) transference and countertransference dynamics of inquiry 2) the therapeutic action of inquiry to further the patient’s articulation of inner experience and 3) inquiry as a counterpoint to the therapist’s intuitive assumptions.
5 Sessions
This five-week clinical seminar is devoted to a focus on examining the interaction between patient and analyst. Equal attention is paid to transference and countertransference (the transference-countertransference matrix), highlighting the degree to which this emphasis reflects the heart of therapeutic action. Clinical illustration will liberally accompany presentation and discussion of theoretical concepts.
15 Sessions
This course will study the historical evolution of the theory of psychoanalytic technique. Beginning with Freud’s technical papers, evolving ideas about classical psychoanalysis as a treatment method will be studied, highlighting the history of psychoanalysis and developing and ongoing controversies about psychoanalytic practice. Among the concepts explored are: technical considerations; the analytic attitude; transference and resistance; abstinence and neutrality; the role of interpretation; mutative factors in treatment; self-disclosure and countertransference; the clinical situation and personal interaction.
5 Sessions
This five sessions course focuses on analytic listening, guided by idea that a core feature of the psychoanalytic approach entails working closely with the patient’s own process. During our meetings we will study the concept of analytic listening from different historical and theoretical vantage points including: the therapeutic impact of listening, listening with the third ear, neutrality, empathic immersion, meditative techniques, inquiry and barriers to listening. Clinical material will be shared by candidates to to examine how we listen to our patients.
10 Sessions
A study of personality development from the points of view of intra- and interpersonal factors in the individual, the family, the society and the culture. This course will highlight the clinical implications of early life experiences.
This seminar explores the similarities and differences between in-person and technologically-mediated psychoanalytic care. Among the issues considered are the influence of technology-use on frame setting, transference-countertransference, clinical listening, and processes of mourning. The context contrasts are used to illuminate both what takes place on screen and in-person.
This seminar will take a psychoanalytic look at the history, current status and future possibilities for screen relations. This will include understanding how telepresence works; exploring how to help patients who struggle with screen relations run amok; and when and how to use screen relations to mediate a psychoanalytic treatment, as well as when not to.
5 Sessions
This course addresses ethical issues in psychoanalysis with a particular emphasis on large and small ethical dilemmas that arise for the clinician in the course of practice. Using selected readings and case examples brought in by the instructor and participants, the class aspires to be a non-judgmental forum for the discussion of how the therapist’s inner life can interfere with the capacity to hold onto an analytic stance best suited to the patient’s needs. The necessity for peer supervision as a means to protect against such emotional slippage is discussed. Particular attention will be paid to boundaries and boundary violations, for example the complexities of maintaining confidentiality in training institute settings.
10 Sessions
All clinical events are emergent and involve both patient and analyst. The unpredictable and changing nature of the interpersonal field, especially its unconsciously mediated aspects, determines the experience that patient and analyst can have in one another’s presence; but we can just as well say that patient and analyst, simply by doing their work together, ceaseless configure and reconfigure the field. These principles will be studied in clinical material supplied by seminar members, each of whom will have an opportunity to present their work.
7 Sessions
(For this year only, the second-year class will double up with the first-year class to take classes 114a and 114b)
In this class, we will focus on select work of Harry Stack Sullivan, one of the founders of the Interpersonal school of psychoanalysis. This course aims to provide an overview of his important contributions to Interpersonal psychoanalysis. Through close textual readings and hopefully vigorous in-class discussion, we will work to understand Sullivan’s interpersonal theory of development, personality, emotion pathology. We will also discuss his clinical technique and the ways of applying his theory towards conceptualizing and treating patients. Further, we will consider his work both within its historical time and context and discuss and explore its relevance and limitations for contemporary practice.
3 Sessions
Given Fromm’s stature as a public intellectual, it is easy to overlook the fact that he was first and foremost a pioneering psychoanalyst who founded psychoanalytic institutes and organizations in Germany, the US and Mexico. This short course sheds light on Fromm’s key clinical contributions. Fromm’s clinical ideas are discussed in their historical context and parallels with contemporary relational psychoanalysis are considered. Fromm’s work helps us to understand that clinical practice, like human experience, can never be separated from the social and political surround.
10 Sessions
This course examines the Analytic Interaction both historically and with a contemporary Interpersonal lens.
10 Sessions
In this course we will examine the complexity of character and the ways that characterological styles help to foster and impede the ability of our patients to live their lives in the face of struggles, big and small, through daily living and during major life events. We will consider how we, as interpersonal analysts living within our own characterological styles, use ourselves and the intense reactions that may arise, as we confront the challenge of helping our patients live more fully within their character and in their world. We will also consider the interplay of psychopharmacology with character style and treatment.
10 Sessions
This course will be the third course in a second year survey of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis beginning with Sullivan’s work and taking the student into the present. Both linkages to the past and the uniqueness of current positions are to be defined and compared. This course will build on the two previous courses in presenting contemporary interpersonal and relational views.
5 Sessions
In the mid-1990s, a group of psychoanalysts in Boston theorized that we could better understand therapeutic action and change by focusing on developmental dynamics observed in the infant-mother relation and described in infancy studies. In so doing, they offered a pathway that linked the developmental and the social, that is, the realms of subjective development, intersubjective attachment, and interpersonal relations and affiliations. Framed by that insight, this course explores how it could be useful for thinking through the engagements between psychoanalytic thinking and racial formation. The course organizes both psychoanalytic readings and theoretical accounts of racialization around cases of difficult racialized encounters both in and out of the consulting room. The aim is to help clinicians develop both technical tools and theoretical frames that can help them sit in a tense racialized enactment, recognize racial transferences, contain racialized projections and introjections moving between analyst and analysand, and most importantly, feel safe enough to release all frames to stay alive to the moment and keep thinking, during “hot,” “now,” moments of intra-racial and interracial encounter.
5 Sessions
This seminar/workshop for 2nd Year Candidates will focus on psychoanalytic writing: case presentations/conference presentations/journal writing/and writing with a psychoanalytic lens for blogs and other social media. We will consider the pros and cons of writing as psychoanalysts – including the ethical issues, such as patient confidentiality. What writing factors contribute to strong oral presentations, such as a case or a conference paper? How are psychoanalytic ideas and case material transformed into articles for professional journals? What about using our professional knowledge to write for the lay public? What are the differences and similarities among these psychoanalytic writing opportunities? In addition to readings, this seminar/workshop will include some in-class writing exercises as well as between-class short writing assignments.
10 Sessions
This course addresses various ways issues of race, ethnicity, social class, and difference influence the treatment process. The first section of the course provides a broad conceptual framework; the second section focuses on the Hispanic population of the United States as a case in point.
5 Sessions
In this seminar senior psychoanalysts will present detailed clinical process material to demonstrate both how they work as well as to conceptualize what is transpiring. Candidates will be encouraged to question, explore and critique the material. Candidates will also have the opportunity to present clinical material. There is no formal reading syllabus for this class, though readings may be assigned as the need arises.
10 Sessions
In this overview course about Self Psychology, we will review its particular emphases in terms of understanding patients and clinical practice and how it has evolved. We will begin by considering the contributions of Heinz Kohut, the founder of Self Psychology and highlight his ideas about empathy, selfobject relatedness and the selfobject transferences. ”the leading edge” and “the trailing edge”. Then we will study how subsequent Self Psychologists- Dick Geist, Marian Tolpin, Robert Stolorow, Frank Lachmann, Jim Fosshage and Steven Stern have elaborated upon these ideas by considering how the repetitive dimension of experience is represented, how much development and treatment are two-person processes and the significance of the parent’s and analyst’s role as a separate subject. We also will compare these writers with contributors from the Interpersonal tradition so that the candidates can better appreciate the similarities and differences between practitioners in these two traditions.
15 Sessions
This course provides an overview of object relations theory through a consecutive focus on three major contributors: Klein, The British Middle School and Fairbairn.
10 Sessions
The purpose of this course is to examine and consolidate psychoanalytic thinking in its application both to short- and long-term clinical work, and in particular to work with “difficult” patients posing difficult treatment predicaments. Working psychoanalytically entails an awareness of transference, insight and working through, as well as an interpersonal engagement with patients in whatever ways they choose to present themselves. This way of working effectively integrates psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in a common interpersonal approach. Readings will frame problematic situations for class discussion; presentations of clinical examples by instructors and candidates will provide in vivo application.
8 Sessions
Saturday morning 10:30 am—12:00 pm
March 4th, 11th, 18th; April 8th, 15th, 22nd, 29th; May 6th, 2023.
Zoom
This Seminar raises awareness of unconscious states of mind around race, using a variation of the Balint method. The focus is on collective deep listening to cases where there are significant racial, ethnic and/or cultural differences between therapist and patient (as is often the case). The instructor’s hope is that folks learn and fall in love with the idiosyncrasies of their countertransference leanings. Acceptance and love help us use our internal experience more readily and gracefully. Since there are eight candidates and eight classes, everyone will get a chance to present their work. The extended class time will allow for an in-depth exploration into the material.
10 Sessions
This course will compare and contrast theories of therapeutic action across different psychoanalytic schools of thought. Using the candidates’ knowledge of interpersonal psychoanalysis as a point of reference, forays into some of the other major psychoanalytic theories will involve reading early and contemporary theorists in developing a framework for how theoretical ideas translate into conceptions of mutative action and the presumed processes involved with bringing about change.
10 sessions
This course addresses theoretical aspects of unconscious processes and their communication as seen in dreams. The focus will be, first, on understanding the structure of dreams and the psychology of the dream process, and second, on the clinical use of dreams in all phases of unconscious processes and their communication as seen in dreams.
10 Sessions
Neuroscience and psychoanalysis in theory and practice. What scientific evidence exists to support the techniques and assumptions of psychoanalysis? How has psychoanalysis affected neuroscience? How does the brain host the mind? This course will ask these and other questions through a study of both classic and contemporary research.
10 Sessions
This course covers the major contributions of important neo-Kleinians such as Wilfred Bion, Hanna Segal, Betty Joseph, Ronald Britton and John Steiner, and explores post-Kleinian developments and issues such as contemporary understandings of the Paranoid-Schizoid, Depressive and Oedipal positions, therapeutic action and interaction, and the clinical use of projective identification. These contemporary Kleinian views will be compared and contrasted with interpersonal perspectives.
10 Sessions
The focus of this seminar will be to read contemporary essays on trauma, dissociation, and treatment. All participants will be encouraged to reflect on the readings through the lens of their own work with traumatized patients.
This condensed course will address the challenges that work with patients recognized as “difficult” pose for therapists. Course material will address not only patient pathology, but also the ways in which patient and therapist can become entangled in unproductive forms of engagement together. A review of the dynamics and phenomenology of narcissistic character structure, borderline organization, and forms of developmental deficit or obstruction will both frame and be woven through the various topics covered in the seminar, as they seem necessary to any discussion of difficult treatment situations.
10 sessions
This course will introduce the candidates to non-biologistic, non-heteronormative ways of thinking about gender, sex, drives, desire, and sexualities. Starting with Freud and then moving beyond Freud, we will study conceptualizations that neither reduce the human being to biology nor to sociology or culture.
10 Sessions
This course will focus upon the co-construction and experience of the termination phase of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. We will consider issues involved in other kinds of endings as well, such as terminations due to a variety of external factors, or prolonged impasse. The course will address assessment of readiness (timing), characteristic issues which typically emerge for patient and analyst during the termination phase (e.g., mourning, regression, pride in and envy of growth and achievement, acceptance of limitation and imperfection, etc.), and questions around post-termination contact. Throughout, using clinical material, particular attention will be given to transference-countertransference dimensions of the termination process.
No CE/CME credits available for electives
10 Sessions, Winter
Tuesdays, 11:45 AM – 12:45 PM
Analysts are treating patients who a generation ago would not have been accepted for treatment, including patients who put themselves at risk for harming self or others through substance abuse, unprotected sex, certain impulse disorders, etc. Although the real-life consequences of such actions complicate or sabotage the treatment, analysts often feel conflicted about addressing these behaviors and may avoid doing so. Bringing these problems to patients’ attention can feel incompatible with some of our cherished notions about ideal therapeutic interaction, such as respecting patients’ autonomy, maintaining neutrality, or acting as containers of patients’ aggression. We may also fear hurting or angering patients who will then bolt from treatment; this anxiety about losing patience is particularly germane in training cases. Contrariwise, failing to focus on acting out may result in a pseudo-mutual alliance in the sessions while the patient’s life outside of treatment is falling apart. Using clinical vignettes, this seminar will pose the following questions: (1) Would early and systematic exploration of patients’ destructive actions reduce our countertransference conflicts? (2) Are we imposing our own sense of risk or lifestyle on patients? (3) How can we help patients become curious about their destructive behaviors while we manage their often-heated transference reactions? (4) Is there a danger of our over-identifying with patients’ acting out and unwittingly condoning it, or even vicariously enjoying it? and (5) When setting limits is necessary, how can we find the words and tone to do so collaboratively rather than retaliatory?
10 Sessions
Tuesdays, 11:45 a.m. – 1:15 p.m.
The focus of this seminar will be on how, when appropriate, the exquisite tracking of moment- to-moment shifts in the affective experience of both patient and analyst, as they engage with each other, can allow for opening immediate experience in ways that can become transforming. Theoretical issues relating to how we use ourselves as analytic instrument, given our unconscious vulnerabilities, will also be explored, with special consideration of conceptions of the nature of therapeutic action, and how the choices we make in terms of how we respond (or not) at any given moment may open and close different analytic possibilities. Attention will also be paid to issues of “being” vs. “knowing” in the analytic encounter. Participants are encouraged to bring in clinical process if they would like to.
Second Trimester
Day/Time TBD
Psychoanalytic technique has fallen on hard times. It is generally accepted that there is no received technique, no one right way to handle any given clinical interaction. At the same time candidates come to training to learn general principles, perhaps even specific skills, necessary to conduct a successful analytic treatment. We will explore this tension through readings drawn from conflicting visions of analytic technique – received, improvised, spontaneous. The readings raise questions regarding the definition of fundamental tenets of clinical theory, the technical hypotheses they generate, and the problems they raise. During classes we will analyze transcripts of clinical process in order to explore the controversies raised by each week’s readings and to gain our own perspective into the fundamental problem of learning to conduct a psychoanalytic treatment.
Third Trimester (day and time TBD)
10 Sessions
Community psychoanalysts work with the complex cultural/historical and intersubjective, dynamics common to group and community life. As far back as 1919, with Freud’s call for a “psychoanalysis for the people,” (Danto, 2005) psychoanalytic practitioners have turned their attention to the mental health needs of communities. Founders of WAWI, including Erich Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan, viewed interpersonal relations as inseparable from psychic development and laid the groundwork for thinking about how the influences of the intergenerational transmission of trauma, the social/political surround and the individual’s direct participation in the social world contributes to the construction of subjectivity and identity development. When society fails to act responsibly to contain the suffering of individuals and groups, traumatic levels of hopelessness often emerge. In these instances, the entire unconscious group matrix – dyad, group, family, institution – of communication and relationships can be affected, which in turn influences the organization of the individual psyche (Tubert-Oklander, 2014). These relationships between the individual and the group are constantly at play and influential in the evolution of individual and group identities, as well as individual and group/community psychopathologies. In this class, we will explore the history of psychoanalytic approaches to working in community settings as well as contemporary approaches that emphasize group psychoanalytic theories. Furthermore, we will consider what it means psychologically to be both a community member and a citizen as well as introduce a new concept—‘relational citizenship’, the intersubjective experience of oneself as a generative citizen among citizens, an intersubjective self-state in which the individual and the sociopolitical are psychically linked, and through which the challenges of identifying with and belonging to one or more collectivities are recognized and negotiated [Hassinger & Pivnick. (2022). The ‘Community Turn’: Relational Citizenship in the Psychoanalytic Community Collaboratory. IJP, 103, 1, 120-143]. The following question will guide our explorations: How can psychoanalysts contribute to the nurturing of generative relationships and solutions for persistent toxic problems in our communities?
# of sessions TBD
Zoom/Saturday mornings
Second Trimester 2022-2023
Jessica Benjamin is one of the first psychoanalysts to introduce feminism and gender studies into psychoanalytic thought. In her first book, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination, (1988), she introduces this relationship between gender and psychoanalysis, critiques the Oedipal phase and outlines her thoughts on recognition. In Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (1995), she presents her own developmental theory of intersubjectivity theory. In her 1998, Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis, she continues her social critique by exploring ideas of gender, and authority both in development and in the analytic situation. In her most recent, Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (2018), discusses her ideas of the many forms of Thirdness, witnessing and failed witnessing, play and the lawful world. This elective proposes to give an overview of Benjamin’s major ideas and themes from each of these periods of her work.
10 Sessions (not offered in 22-23)
This course offers a preliminary exploration of the social-collective aspects of subjective life and experience. We will read and think together about the many ways in which subjectivity is structured and regulated by socio-political and historical forces, forces that operate on the level of the collective but impact each of us directly and intimately. Often through the mediation of the nuclear family. We will consider how this always changing reality animates our lives and our experience, and how, therefore, it requires that we keep adjusting our psychoanalytic lenses, both in theory and in our clinical practice.
Our emphasis will be on reading primary sources in social theory,and looking at how they might be engaged by the capacities and needs of psychoanalysis. We will venture into 2nd wave feminist critique (Firestone, Wittig), insurgent psychiatry (Laing, Fanon), French post-structural thinking (Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, Althusser) and the Frankfurt School (Fromm, Adorno, Horkheimer). We will consider some contemporary exploration of subjectivity (Butler, Bauman, Clough, Preciado). We might also read psychoanalysts who have already engaged social theory in their writing. All as time permits, with the understanding that the subject-matter and literature are demanding. (Most of the reading therefore suggested, not required.) We will explore social theory, but try to always remain close to the questions that concern us as clinicians. And so please expect to bring your/our clinical work into the room.
10 Sessions
Tuesdays, 1:45 – 3:15 p.m.
The focal point of this seminar will be the role of the analyst’s personality as it affects the course of the analysis. Candidates will present vignettes from their work for discussion
10 Sessions
Third Trimester/Zoom/Saturdays
This course will focus on current understandings of self development in relational terms. Exploring the functional role of self-other configurations will provide keys to the treatment of many chronically difficult conditions. The clinical phenomena of shame, rage, and hate can often be understood and approached as symptoms of a fragile or overcompensating state of self or identity.
10 Sessions
This clinical seminar will identify and invite articulation of complex, “taboo” feelings about the analyst’s physical self – including visible and invisible physical factors — that patient may resist, dissociate, or deny. It is hoped that expressing such feelings in the context of the analytic relationship will galvanize unspoken and forbidden aspects of the negative transference/countertransference, and thus enliven and enrich the treatment. Technical problems will be addressed, and clinical discussion will pinpoint facets of individual analysts’ physicality that may be difficult to hear and discuss. Both instructors will use their ongoing written work in this arena, and candidates will also use clinical discussions to develop a written project of some sort, i.e., a blog, a paper, or an oral presentation.
10 Sessions
Third Trimester/Zoom/Saturdays
This course will focus on current understandings of self development in relational terms. Exploring the functional role of self-other configurations will provide keys to the treatment of many chronically difficult conditions. The clinical phenomena of shame, rage, and hate can often be understood and approached as symptoms of a fragile or overcompensating state of self or identity.
10 Sessions
Thursdays, 1:30 – 3:00 pm
This seminar includes intensive ongoing discussion of students’ cases that have issues involving sexual abuse and/or dissociation due to trauma. Students should have some familiarity with the work of Bromberg, Davies and Frawley, and Gartner, or expect to read from their work during the course.
10 Sessions
Teaching Fall 2022/Instructor’s Office
Fridays 12:15-1:45 PM
This class invites students to articulate their own developing views of therapy and therapeutic action. It is a writing class, focused on short, informal pieces of writing. Students will be asked to identify quotations from their readings or clinical anecdotes from their practices and to write about them. The goal is to encourage exploration, self-awareness and self-definition. The class atmosphere will be one of creativity and playfulness. Each participant (including the instructor) will contribute about a page a week to the rotating class discussion. There may be some writing prompts or small assignments from the instructor. (For a longer course description, you may contact: clairebasescu@gmail.com.)
10 Sessions
Day/Time to be determined
This seminar proposes collaboratively to construct a notion of psychological stance as a kind of reading, an active and automatic construction of experience into self-in-the-world. Commonalities in the reading of literature, self, and another person will be considered. Literary readings might include Nabokov, Bakhtin, Bromberg, and Winnicott, depending on the interests of the class.
10 Sessions
Mondays, 1:00 – 2:30 PM
Time and dates are negotiable.
This course will examine the psychoanalytic literature on the dynamics of romantic love. We will consider definitions of and developmental precursors to romantic love as well as developmental trajectories that lead to difficulties in love relationships. We will examine the development of sexuality and attachment and its relationship to the development of a romantic object. Subjective dimensions of romantic love such as passion, desire and erotic experience as well as the role of fantasy within these will be examined. Finally, changes over time in long lasting love relationships will be addressed. Clinical examples will be presented.
10 Sessions
Tuesdays, 12:15 – 1:45 p.m. (Flexible)
Will be held at instructor’s office.
We will discuss an integrative psychoanalytic-systemic approach to treating couples in psychotherapy.
10 Sessions
Wednesdays, 12:00 – 1:30 p.m.
The purpose of this course is to assess whether developing a research orientation towards clinical material will increase the range and scope of psychodynamic hypotheses about that material. The development of a research orientation involves enhancing awareness of the limitation of our knowledge and understanding of these clinical materials. Emphasis will be placed upon the tentativeness with which interventions should be made and the capacity to develop tolerance for uncertainty. Sessions for each patient discussed will be presented seriatim for four weeks each.
10 Sessions
Tuesdays, 1:30 – 3:00 p.m.
Will be held at instructor’s office.
This course will be aimed at students who have had no formal training in supervision or have begun doing some supervision. While there is no cohesive model of the supervisory process, it has been more thoroughly studied and conceptualized then many clinicians realize. This course will attempt to acquaint students with that work. This course will attempt to articulate an interpersonal/relational point of view. The main features of that point of view are an emphasis on the supervisory relationship as a collaborative endeavor, and an alertness to the ongoing experiences of both participants in the relationship and the way those experiences can facilitate or hinder learning.
This course will aim to acquaint students with the basic tools of the supervisor and to give them some experiential exposure to their own personally based biases, blind spots, strengths, and weaknesses as supervisors.
10 Sessions
Tuesdays, 3:00 – 4:30 p.m.
When failure in the facilitating environment seems an inadequate explanation for the complexity and severity of a person’s psychopathology, having access to research may enhance the quest for meaning and understanding. This course will review current research about psychopathology including depressive disorders, bipolar disorders, and various combinations of affective disorders with anxiety, attention deficits, and personality disorders. Studies in biological psychiatry, clinical and neuropsychology research will be discussed. The focus will be on the reciprocal interaction of biological and psychological processes especially as it impacts psychoanalytic work (e.g. affect regulation, primitive defenses, object representations, counter-transference, etc.) with people who have severe and complex psychopathology.
10 Sessions
Day/Time to be determined
This elective will explore the ways in which psychoanalysis has been profoundly influenced by, and in turn has shaped public and private “culture”, both yesterday and today. This relationship will be explored critically, but also as a powerful potential. Topics will Include, broadly speaking, shifting notions, experiences, and emphases regarding: sexuality, aggression, agency, authority, intimacy, health, illness, religion, race, and ethnicity, gender…How, finally is psychoanalysis–as both sensibility and method– molded by today’s reality? Has it, or can it be transformative? How?
10 Sessions
Day/Time to be determined
This elective will explore the ways in which psychoanalysis has been profoundly influenced by, and in turn has shaped public and private “culture”, both yesterday and today. This relationship will be explored critically, but also as a powerful potential. Topics will Include, broadly speaking, shifting notions, experiences, and emphases regarding: sexuality, aggression, agency, authority, intimacy, health, illness, religion, race, and ethnicity, gender…How, finally is psychoanalysis–as both sensibility and method– molded by today’s reality? Has it, or can it be transformative? How?
Mondays, 1:00 – 2:30 PM
Day/Time to be determined
As we listen to our patients’ dreams, we will consider their associations and our associations, with an ear to group process, as we understand the unique contribution offered by a dream along the royal road of analytic work.
10 Sessions
Tuesdays, 11:45 – 1:15 p.m.
Familiarity with Harold Searles’ therapeutic sensibility has the effect of enhancing one’s ability to use subjective affective experience in understanding treatment difficulties. This may, in turn, engender a growing feeling of confident functioning so important to the process of consolidating a therapeutic identity and personal therapeutic style. We will be exposed to Searles’ creative mind where developmental thinking is closely tied to clinical understandings and interventions that are unique in the analytic literature. Anticipating multiple self-state theory is Searles’ interest in bi-lateral dissociative experience and the inevitable enactments that lead to their explication. He contends that patient’s impressions of the analyst are rooted in some dissociated “not me” reality concerning the analyst’s personality or self-state and that waking the analyst from this dissociated slumber is prerequisite to growth on the part of both participants. Within his non-dogmatic integration of internal object-relations theory with inter-personal theory as but two sides of one coin, familiarity with his work contributes to candidate’s self-consolidating access to inner process in the face of the inevitable vicissitudes of the treatment situation.
10 Sessions
Fridays, 11:30 – 1:00 p.m.
This will be a small group (limited to 6 advanced candidates) clinical case/process seminar with supplemental readings. The open discussion of what is a particularly challenging, often tangled, sometimes aversive, occasionally enthralling, aspect of clinical work will be central to this training experience. Participants will be encouraged to share questions, concerns, confusions, theories and the random certainty. We will focus on the clinical work of both candidates and instructor.
Comparative Conceptualizations and Treatment Approaches to the Grandiose Patient.
Day/Time/Number of Classes to be determined
How do you understand and work with patients who present with what different clinician writers have conceptualized as defensive grandiosity, defensive omnipotence, false self disorders, manic defenses, and the grandiose pathological self? These patients can present as overtly arrogant, entitled and in control or on top of everything or they can be deflated, and self deprecating while maintaining secret fantasies of perfectionistic grandeur. We will consider and compare Kohut, Stolorow, Winnicott, Bach, Bromberg, Fiscalini, Mitchell, Klein and Kernberg’s perspective about such patients. In the process we will not only think about how these writers conceptualize such patients but also consider how they vary in terms of how to approach these patients clinically. Candidates will be encouraged to evolve their own more integrated and inclusive approach and apply their cases to clinical cases throughout.
10 Sessions
Third Trimester: Time/place TBD
Immigration is a life-altering experience for the individual undergoing it, one that often borders on the traumatic and is quite frequently minimized or ignored during treatment. The intent of this elective is to bring attention to the nature and significance that immigration plays in patients’ difficulties. We will have readings and discussion on topics, such as the inevitable losses and potential gains associated with immigration; the pressures, functions, and ultimate impossibility of assimilation; the challenges that immigration presents in terms of continuity and change in the self.
Designed as a supervision group, the elective will focus on clinical work and use the clinician’s counter-transference to reveal and understand immigration-related dynamics as these emerge for patient and therapist alike. Over the course of the trimester, each participant will be asked to present at least one treatment in which relevant issues either openly surfaced, were avoided, or were discussed but curtailed. We will talk not only about the issues and dynamics themselves but also the anxiety that typically surrounds their exploration.
10 Sessions
Dates and Time by Arrangement.
Will be held at instructor’s office.
How do you decide, when sitting with a patient, or for that matter, when sitting with yourself, what to pay attention to? A foundational assumption of psychoanalysis is that one has more leeway in choosing than at first it appears, and that by choosing differently comes the possibility of living differently. One can alter the nature of self experience. Similarly, a foundational assumption of Buddhism is that the givens of reality are in a profound way illusory, and that realization of how this is so leads to a profound alteration in the nature of self experience. The strategies of Buddhism and psychoanalysis that lead toward such alteration bear comparison. The goal of the course is to highlight attention to attention as an introspective wild card in personality change. Its relevance is both clinical and personal.
10 Sessions
Tuesdays or Thursdays 3:00 – 4:15 p.m.
The intersubjective turn in psychoanalysis has heightened interest in the intergenerational transmission of trauma and its haunting consequences. With a focus on early relational trauma and historical trauma, we will explore how trauma is transferred and complexly manifested in subsequent generations. We will trace the variety of ways the concept of intergenerational transmission is conceptualized and considered within contemporary psychoanalytic adult and parent-infant treatment. We will also explore the relevance of these processes for clinical listening and the patient-analyst interaction. Materials for the course will include case studies and treatment literature, memoirs, and film excerpts.
Day/Time TBD
To be held in instructor’s office.
The goal of this course is to establish a rudimentary knowledge of Lacan’s theory and clinical approach (Lacanian 101) to provide a point of difference (for us) from which to view Freud and psychoanalysis in America, and thereby to bring into focus assumptions that would otherwise remain unquestioned (at least in these unique ways). Some of Lacan’s seminal texts from Ecrits and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis are studied in detail, with the help of accompanying explanations and commentaries by Fink, Zizek, and Winnicott. The expectation is to familiarize ourselves with the language and way of thinking, enough to seem conversant only for the uninitiated, but acknowledging that we could converse haltingly in broken Lacanian to those educated in this mindset. It is hoped that this Lacanian primer will help us expand our psychoanalytic horizons, not just as American psychoanalysts, but also as Interpersonalists.
4 Immersive Sessions
This class has filled its quota for this year.
This class has filled its quota for this year.
Psychoanalytic ideas flourish in a variety of ways: through careful attention to accumulated clinical data over time, observations of child development, open discourse with extra analytic disciplines, accommodation to shifting cultural trends. But innovative theories also form externalized symbolic structures reflecting the theorist’s own self. They can be efforts at self cure. Using Winnicott as illustration, the elective explores how Winnicott’s theory mirrors his own subjectivity. Participants will read together passages from Winnicott’s private correspondences, autobiographical notebook, and public talks to consider the link between his life and theory.
10 Sessions
Fridays 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
This course is designed to enhance participants’ knowledge of the range of issues commonly faced by LGBTQ people throughout the lifespan. The course integrates a developmental/theoretical perspective with an in-depth clinical exploration of the treatment issues specific to LGBTQ individuals. Students will develop an understanding of the intrapsychic and interpersonal issues that arise when working with patients with non-normative gender identification and sexuality. Special topics include: exploration of alternative developmental theories for LGBTQ individuals; understanding the relationship (or lack thereof) between gender experience and sexual desire; transphenomena; the effects of the closet; regulatory anxiety; special topics in transference/countertransference; therapists’ self-disclosure; etc.
Time and place TBD
The concept of translation is foundational to Laplanche’s thought, for both his metapsychology and his clinical theory. We will follow how his careful reading and translation of Freud (he oversaw the translation of his complete works into French) is used as the springboard for the development of his thought. By ‘putting Freud to work’, as he says, he develops the ‘generalized theory of seduction’ from which emerges the core ‘drive to translate the implanted enigmatic message’. Related metapsychological concepts then include the fundamental anthropological situation, sexuality, the unconscious, and the original wound as the opening to the other. In the second section of the course, we will explore how these metapsychological concepts are then translated into clinical theory with such notions as the hollowed out transference, the translation of the analyst’s enigma, and treatment as a dialectic of psychoanalysis (as an anti-hermeneutic) and psychotherapy (as a hermeneutic).
Time and place TBD
Go on a comparative psychoanalysis cruise to the Beyond with stopovers in Freud, Lacan, Sullivan, and Laplanche; with generous portions of unconscious wishes, of the real, of desire, of jouissance, of anxiety, of tension, of the sexual, and of the enigmatic message. While the servings are all-you-can-eat, digestion and metabolization are not guaranteed, not even for the cruise director.
10 Sessions
Tuesdays 11:45 – 1:00 p.m., Room 1B
When sitting with a patient (or when sitting with yourself) how is it your attention tightly focuses, or loosely wanders away? This course explores this question both theoretically and experientially. Readings will draw on Freud, Farber, Ghent, Stern et al., as well as Buddhist writers. Class exercises will tap clinical process, dreams, meditation, visualization, association, and thought/feeling linkages. The goal of the course is to posit attention to attention as an introspective wild card fostering personality change.
Day/Time to be determined
This course schedule is flexible within the first or second trimester
Paul Ricoeur, a philosophical anthropologist, formulated and utilized an interdisciplinary language to understand and examine the clinical psychoanalytic process. In this course we will examine his ideas to explore how creativity affects therapeutic action from interpretation to mutual recognition. Vulnerability and gratitude are among the many complex human experiences we will examine within Psychoanalytic work.
Office in Soho, TBD
This course surveys a body of psychoanalytic thought on how normative as well as perverse and transgressive sexualities are all shot through the infantile sexual. We will engage questions of normality vs. pathology trace a history of ideas as to infantile sexuality, as to what counts as the sexual body and will begin to track how these issues manifest in the consulting room. What you can most hope to gain is learning how to bear sitting with this kind of content in the presence of your patients.
10 Sessions
Place and Time TBD
This course will examine the psychoanalytic challenges of treating a patient who is dying. Death is not a comfortable topic for most people to discuss and, in contemporary society, the process of dying has been sanitized to the point of dissociation. This course is intended to make the clinician more competent in dealing with the subject of death by explicitly and openly examining issues that may arise in the clinical encounter with a dying patient, including how to talk about death, how to practice active listening, and how to deal with issues that arise around acceptance, transference and countertransference, anticipatory mourning, the notion of spirituality, and opportunities for growth and transformation at the end of life. Participants will be encouraged to present clinical material throughout the course and will be asked to write a brief journal entry each week to reflect on the experience of reading that week’s papers.
Office in Soho, TBD
This course surveys a body of psychoanalytic thought on how normative as well as perverse and transgressive sexualities are all shot through the infantile sexual. We will engage questions of normality vs. pathology trace a history of ideas as to infantile sexuality, as to what counts as the sexual body and will begin to track how these issues manifest in the consulting room. What you can most hope to gain is learning how to bear sitting with this kind of content in the presence of your patients.
10 Sessions
Thursdays, 3:00 – 4:00 PM
This introductory course in psychopathology and differential diagnosis (requiring multiple brief class presentations and write- ups) addresses the use of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (“DSM”). Guided by DSM, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders are diagnosed with regard to symptom profiles and course of illness. The complexity of affective spectrum disorders (including bipolar II, bipolar depression, and mixed states) is approached from several orientations: biological psychiatry, epidemiology, and early psychoanalytic models. Various models of affective spectrum disorder in the psychoanalytic literature are discussed in understanding unipolar depression. Anxiety Disorders (including Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) illustrate psychoanalytic theories of anxiety. The complex domain of Personality Disorders is approached from a descriptive and psychoanalytic perspective. The diagnosis and treatment of patients who are actively suicidal, self-mutilating or in other ways actively self-destructive is also addressed.
12 sessions
Tuesdays, 11:40 AM – 12:40 PM
This half-year practicum will involve each candidate doing a minimum of 3 two-session intake interviews in the Institute’s Clinical Services, with a supervisor present during these interviews, primarily as an observer. The candidate will write a report on each case and will also participate in a weekly group supervision. The supervisory group will meet weekly for the first trimester and second trimester until the holiday break in December. Candidates will also be assigned individual supervisors.
5 Sessions
Thursdays, 3:00 – 4:00 PM
Introduces the nature and use of historical data in the interpersonal psychoanalytic approach. A review of basic developmental concepts will support candidates’ understanding of how to take a developmental history with adult patients in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
5 Sessions
Thursdays, 3:00 – 4:00 PM
Introductory overview of the psychoanalytic process, with an emphasis on interpersonal concepts. Candidates will be introduced to key psychoanalytic concepts including: the role of the unconscious, transference, countertransference and the nature of therapeutic action. The emphasis will be on understanding these concepts from a clinical perspective. Additionally, candidates will be introduced to the use of specific interpersonal treatment strategies including participant observation and the detailed inquiry.
5 Sessions
This course will address some of the key aspects of the psychoanalytic frame including confidentiality and privacy, fees and the meaning of money, crises and emergencies, establishing a working relationship, scheduling, breaks in the frame, the analyst’s ethical stance, and boundaries and boundary violations. The Institute offers an LQP Case Narrative Exam Preparation Course to be taken in the year before graduation or after the completion of all Division I requirements.
William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology 20 West 74th Street, New York, NY 10023 | (212) 873-0725