TECHNIQUE
Technique II
This course covers basic techniques, concepts, and assessment strategies in psychotherapy. Topics include getting started, empathy, transference, countertransference, resistance, enactments, and analytic listening.
Working with Dreams
Course description to be published at a later date.
Writing Case Reports
Course description to be published at a later date.
PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
Substance Abuse: Psychodynamic Perspectives
This course provides an overview of the psychoanalytic concepts and theories of substance abuse and addictive disorders. Emphasis will be on current ideas and approaches. Issues including differentiating symptomatic substance abuse vs. addiction, etiologic factors in addictive disorders, the biology/psychology interface in addictions, integration of 12-Step programs with psychotherapeutic approaches, and trauma, helplessness, and addiction will be explored.
Depression and Masochism
This course will explore the theoretical underpinnings of depression, both as a clinical state and as an affect. The course begins with Freud's concepts of depression as rooted in early object loss and its relation to mourning, through Freud's differentiation of mourning from the state of depression. Brenner's reformulation of depression as an affect state in response to an experienced calamity will be presented in contrast to Freud. The relationship of masochism to depression through identification with a hated object will be discussed. The theoretical principles will be applied to case materials presented by the students
Trauma & Dissociative Disorders
This course provides an overview of contemporary analytic thinking about trauma, linking it with classical psychoanalytic views, trauma theory, and current psychiatric thinking. There is particular emphasis on such topics as developmental considerations (with an emphasis on attachment), repetition, enactments, reconstruction, traumatic memory, trauma-related disruptions of memory, the inter-generational transmission of trauma, the impact of trauma upon transference and countertransference, dissociative psychopathology, and modifications of technique in response to trauma-related psychopathology.
Eating Disorders
This course integrates psychoanalytic psychotherapy with other treatment modalities (cognitive/behavioral/educational, cultural/feminist, and family work) to help the patient make sense of his/her disordered eating. The instructor and students will discuss the historical and cultural origins of eating disorders and learn how to identify, assess, and treat eating disorders with both the culture and individual in mind.
Narcissistic & Borderline Disorders
This course explores the dynamic and descriptive understanding of the borderline condition as contrasted with its overlapping diagnostic categories, especially narcissistic personality disorders. Topics include the interactions and dyad between mother and infant, the development of a “true self” in contrast to a “false self,” psychic organization and its defensive structures and internal object representations, perversions, neurosis, drastic defensive measures, “projective-identification,” and differentiation and the establishment of firm boundaries in borderline pathology.
Psychosomatics
This course facilitates a descriptive understanding of the psychosomatic phenomena as well as focus on the underlying character context from which it emerges. Course work will involve discussing both the literature on the subject as well as a hands-on clinical approach that we will be able to deepen our understanding of the psychosomatic phenomenon.
CLINICAL
Continuous Case #1
Continuous Case #2
Course descriptions to be published at a later date.