TECHNIQUE
Basic Concepts
This course offers a concept of character that helps explain why some clinical interventions result in "resistance" rather than furthering the clinical exploration, as well as why some interpersonal conflicts (i.e. marital conflicts) seem to never get resolved. Clinical material will be presented as the basis for discussion, preferably an interaction that didn't go well, or about which there was great uncertainty as to how to intervene. The instructor will discuss some examples, and the students will be asked to discuss their own.
Evaluation and Assessment
This course investigates psychotherapeutic approaches to effective patient evaluation and assessment. We will explore what can be known and not known at the beginning of treatment and how this information is similar or different from other types of psychiatric consultations. Using articles and clinical experience we consider the methods, purpose, and techniques for effective assessment as well as develop clinically relevant strategies for identifying psychodynamic therapy candidates.
Technique I
This course will describe a basic approach to Psychodynamic Therapy, with some discussion of theory, but principal interest on practical technique. It will cover beginning the treatment, basic psychodynamic principles (such as neutrality, abstinence, anonymity, and confidentiality), the use of dreams; and approaches to the handling of regression, defenses, dysphoric affects, transference, and countertransference. Clinical material will be presented by both students and by the instructor.
Psychodynamic Listening
By applying psychoanalytic understanding to basic clinical issues, this course will focus on technique and the handling of some of the various situations, questions, and problems that arise in the course of psychotherapy. Sessions will focus on creating a therapeutic atmosphere, the initial interview and beginning the treatment, common therapeutic errors, and ending treatment. Students will be asked to respond critically to assigned readings as well as share vignettes from their own clinical experience.
THEORY
Overview
Course description to be published at a later date.
Classical and Modern Conflict Theory
According to Abend who used the term originally, “Modern Conflict Theory” designates our current conceptualization of the elements of psychological conflict and psychopathology and, by extension, the most useful psychodynamically oriented approach to its treatment. Students will address Freud’s earlier concepts of mental functioning, the development of his thinking into the tripartite or Structural model of the mind, and further elaborations of Ego psychology (particularly our handling of defenses) by more contemporary thinkers such as Brenner, Arlow, and others. Clinical examples and case vignettes will demonstrate the ubiquity of normal and pathological Compromise Formations, reflecting the psychological results of the interaction of the different components of intra-psychic conflict. The role of compromise formations will also be considered in our examination of the fantasies underlying different forms of object relatedness.
Object Relations
In this course, students will consider the complexity of the term “object”. The word appears to change meaning in phrases such as “love-object” “sex-object”, “object of the drive”, “object of desire (wish)”. Students will explore the difference between an “object” and a person. Students will question the possibility of a “relationship” with a lost object – one that is not there. Students will also try to place developments in object relations in geographical and historical context.
Attachment and the Development of Self
This is an introductory course that explores the adult psychopathologies that occur as a result of failures throughout the course of pre-oedipal development. A developmental perspective that focuses on early attachment, narcissism and object relations will be explored. The etiology of a wide range of the “chief complaints” and symptoms that adult patients present with will be identified as students explore the development of the self, and what happens when the mother is not “Good Enough” (Winnicott).
Relational Theory
This course will focus on some of the key topics and concepts in Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Relational Psychoanalysis/Psychotherapy draws from a range of psychoanalytic schools of thought, including object relations theory, interpersonal psychoanalysis, self psychology, neo-Kleinian theory, and contemporary Freudian theory. Students will consider how these shifts in theory result in shifts in the meaning of some central psychoanalytic concepts, and the implications for technique.
DEVELOPMENT
Infancy/Early Childhood
A dynamic understanding of the whole person starts with an appreciation of early development. This lecture series examines basic psychoanalytic theory including self-object constancy, the transitional object, gender theory, the genesis of anxiety, the anal phase, the phallic-narcissistic phase, and the oedipal phase. Analytic case material will illustrate these concepts, supplemented by examples from literature, film, and art.
Latency and Preadolescence
This course examines latency from development through preadolescence. Sessions will focus on the transition from the oedipal stage into the early latency phase, the tasks, cognitive changes and the elaboration of defenses of latency, the transition between latency and adolescence, and contrasting the clinical picture of an adult with that of latency age children.
Adolescence
This lecture series will focus on the normal developmental phases of adolescence from middle school through the college years. To begin, prepuberty and puberty will be discussed. Mid-adolescence will be considered via examination of Peter Blas’ description of the second individuation process as a reflection of Mahler’s work on separation individuation. Finally, the period of late adolescence from high school through the early college years will be discussed. Throughout the series, examples are used from the lecturer’s cases and from the student’s own clinical experience.
Female Development
This course explores Freud’s view of female psychosexual development and compares it to more contemporary views of female development. Topics include the effects of hormones on the developing brain, gender differentiation, gender identity, the differences between boys and girls, the development of the superego, the oedipal complex, parental relationships, separation, and female self-assertion and aggression.
Transition to Adulthood
This course will examine what makes young adults a particularly lively, compelling and dynamic population to work with, as they present their therapists and analysts with a unique opportunity to observe, engage and learn from the complexities of their ever-fluxuating internal and external worlds. With childhood waning and the freedoms and anxieties of adulthood beckoning, young adults are often engaged in a complicated dance of neophyte ego strengths commingled with unresolved conflicts and traumas. This makes for a complicated picture of enlivened or painfully inhibited hopes, dreams and ambition; yearning and desire; mourning and loss; and conflict over the past vs. the future, fantasy vs. reality and unbridled potential vs. inevitable defeat and compromise.
Adulthood and Old Age
This course takes an overview of adult development, from young adulthood (ages 20 to 40), middle adulthood (ages 40 to 60), and old age (age 60 plus). The course content contrasts normal developmental milestones with psychopathology at each stage. The instructor liberally uses clinical vignettes to illustrate conflicts which may derail the forward thrust of development. The participant will gain a deeper understanding of the vicissitudes of adult development, as it unfolds throughout adult life.
clinical
Group Supervision
The Group Supervision class provides a forum for the participants to share clinical material from their daily work. In doing so, an opportunity is created to introduce a psychodynamic perspective for understanding the psychopathology of the patient and also the process that unfolds between therapist and patient as the psychotherapy progresses. Input from the group enriches the dialogue by bringing in different perspectives on the problem / issue presented.
Case Conference
This case conference will center on "clinical moments"where the clinician becomes aware of his or her own unsettling, strong, or surprising emotional response to something said, done or enacted in the clinical encounter. This will become a jumping off point for considering the relationship between spoken and unspoken, conscious and unconscious, and past and present in the therapeutic dyad.