Course Descriptions

Development of Analytic Identity I and II
Making the transition from experienced psychotherapist to analytic candidate to analyst is a process that generates anxieties as well as excitement. This course offers theoretical information, practical advice and group support at the beginning of this transition. The candidates get to know each other in the context of discussing the differences between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, learning about comparative views of psychoanalysis, addressing the conversion of therapy cases to control cases, getting acquainted with PINC’s procedures, and working to become a successful learning group. The instructor is as much a group facilitator as a teacher, since this class is the basis for forming a work group, so the instructor should have a good understanding of group dynamics.

Freud I (Theory), II (Technique), III (Cases), and IV (Culture & the Human Condition)
The year-long 32-week sequence of course work devoted to the contributions of Sigmund Freud is designed to provide first-year candidates with a foundation in reading selections from the seminal texts of Freud’s theoretical and clinical papers with a view to examining the evolution and development of his thinking over the course of his lifetime, beginning with Studies on Hysteria (1895) and culminating with “”Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1938). The four terms are roughly divided into theory, technique, case material, and Freud’s more humanistic papers, such as Civilization And Its Discontents, that examine the human condition. Emphasis is given to Freud’s era and his singular point of view, however considerable attention is also devoted to critiquing his theories from a comparative perspective as well as ego psychological considerations.

The Work of Melanie Klein I and II
This two-part course examines the core of Melanie Klein’s contributions to psychoanalytic theory and technique. The course focuses on the interplay between Klein’s devotion to Freud in tandem with her own unique contribution. Themes for discussion include: the paranoid schizoid position; the development and evolution of the depressive position; psychic reality as a feature of object relations and operational from birth; Klein’s contribution to the phenomena of mourning; the idea of identifications, part and whole objects, splitting and projective identification, and the development of pathological envy as a feature of the death drive and other destructive aspects of early development.

Models of the Unconscious
This course is designed as an overview and critique of the concept of the unconscious, beginning with its psychoanalytic prehistory in Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and then beginning with Freud comparing and contrasting the principal models of the unconscious offered by major psychoanalytic theorists, including seminal thinkers such as Klein, Bion, Winnicott, and Lacan, and others. Among the themes candidates are invited to explore include the current debate as to the continuing viability of the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious, epitomized by the “destruction” of metaphysical thinking initiated by Heidegger, Derrida, and other postmodernist thinkers.

Primitive States
This theory course investigates the primitive edge of experience across the range of pathologies: disturbed patients, patients who have pockets of primitive experience, and neurotic patients who regress temporarily into primitive emotional experience. It examines the phenomenology of disturbed states, the anxieties that are active and terrifying, the defenses used in attempting to protect the integrity of the personality from such anxieties, and the consequences to the personality and to internal and external object relationships. The class also considers both innate and environmental contributions to these primitive experiences.

Technique of Working with the Psychotic Core
In conjunction with the theory course, this course invites thinking about how to use our understanding of “primitive states” clinically. This course is not meant to address working with actively psychotic patients, but rather to explore the technical handling of the psychotic part of the neurotic personality as it is played out in analysis. The psychotic part of the personality may be dominant for years or may be revealed gradually or suddenly, but it always represents an emotional and technical challenge for the analyst in the transference/countertransference relationship. The technique of working with primitive states is one of the issues that separates Freudians, Kleinians and the Middle School, so this issue can usefully be addressed from a comparative viewpoint, though the concept of working with psychotic core issues has been favored by Middle School analysts.

Case Formulation
Case Formulation is meant not only to help candidates with their clinical work but also to prepare them for their case write-ups. It teaches the skill of looking at different aspects of a patient while creating a coherent narrative that addresses diagnosis and the psychodynamics of the personality. Family background, early infant experiences, significant events, traumatic incidents, cumulative traumas, sexual orientation and behavior and fantasies, paradigms for object relations, and other issues are woven together to present a dynamic formulation and hypothesis that explains the diagnosis. Some candidates have learned to write case summaries in graduate school, but many have not, and most have not developed formal case evaluations for a considerable period of time.

Winnicott
This course introduces candidates to the contributions of D. W. Winnicott who refused to ally himself with either of the two dominant theorists at the British Psychoanalytic Society, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, when psychoanalysis was first becoming established in London. By doing so, he created space within psychoanalysis for his own brilliant and innovative concepts. Winnicott’s concepts of the holding environment and use of the object in the development of the infant’s emerging self will be treated as an early form of intersubjectivity related to his concept of potential space. Other topics for discussion include the infant’s psychological development as an outcome of innate givens as well as environmental factors; Winnicott’s conception of the true and false self system; primary maternal preoccupation; and the importance of omnipotence in the infant’s early development.

British Middle School
This class explores the emergence in the 1940′s of the British School of Independent Analysts, not a school but a collection of individual members of the British Society who did not want to side with either the Kleinians or the Freudians. However, there are some important principles of understanding, listening and interpreting that they have in common and that distinguish them from the other groups. The Middle group has made significant contributions to the study of object relations, the use of counter-transference, and the importance of the early interpersonal environment. A major contribution of the Middle group is the shift in emphasis from drive to object as motivator beginning historically with Fairbairn. This has technical implications that supports certain types of interventions and interpretations. Harry Guntrip, Michael Balint, Margaret Little and Masud Khan are among the early Middle School theorists.

American Relational Psychoanalysis
This course provides the focus of learning the history and evolution of relational model in the United States initiated by Stephen Mitchell and Jay Greenberg. Concepts such as mutuality, asymmetry, field and ground, subject-object, subject-subject, mutual enactment, and interpretation will be reviewed from this perspective. The historical context of the relational model is reviewed, beginning with Ferenczi and Rank, on through the Interpersonalists in America to contemporary writers including Aron, Hoffman, Renik, Spezzano and others.

Cross Cultural Issues
This course takes a personal look at the candidate’s cultural background as it has influenced the decision to become a psychoanalyst — e.g. cultural attitudes toward knowledge, curiosity, learning, helping, speaking the truth, authenticity, i.e., all the elements of being a psychoanalyst that have imprinted the individual culturally in any way. There is also discussion about the challenges and opportunities presented when working therapeutically with patients from other cultures, including race, class, geography, religion, and ethnicity. The candidates have responded particularly well to this class when they have had the opportunity to explore their own cultural histories.

Adolescent Issues in Analysis
This is not a course on Adolescent Development, but rather a course that is designed to address adolescent issues as they are revealed and enacted in analysis with adults. The course includes issues revolving around the adult patient’s formation of identity during his or her adolescence and related issues, such as acting out, rebelliousness, dating, and romance, in the context of reliving in their lives and in the transference adolescent experiences that were either not possible or were traumatic during adolescence. Many adults are especially affected by how they experienced their adolescence, as a period that may have shaped their choice of partners, their sexuality, and their impulsiveness. Patients may still be living as adolescents, feel guilty for their adolescence, or are trying to make up for a missed adolescence.

Comparative Views on Transference & Counter-transference
This comparative course traces the history of anaytic thinking about the transference/counter-transference matrix. It begins with the major early papers on counter-transference (e.g. Heinemann, Racker) and shows how the concept of counter-transference changed from signaling a problem residing solely within the analyst to signaling important information about the analytic dyad, i.e., from a one-person to a two-person phenomenon. The erotic transference – counter-transference is a just one example of this topic.

Comparative Views on Object Relations
This course provides a historical and comparative review of the development of British object relations theory into other cultural milieus, e.g., Italy, Argentina, and the United States, emphasizing seminal contributors to the field such as Betty Joseph, Antonio Ferro, Heinrich Racker, Otto Kernberg, Thomas Ogden, and others. Emphasis will be placed on how object relations theory has evolved both historically and as a manifestation of the culture in which it is embedded.

Group Dynamics
This course, which was conceived to make candidates more aware of the function of the unconscious in group settings, has two principal aims: to help candidates learn about unconscious process in groups so that they can improve their own capacity to collaborate effectively in work group mentality, and to help them understand the dynamics at work in the professional groups in which they participate — when they teach or take a class, for example, when they participate in or run a case conference, or the role(s) they play when participating in a psychoanalytic institute or other professional organizations. The course is not intended to serve as a group therapy experience or to turn the class into a self-study process group. Instead, the course is designed to introduce candidates to basic issues in unconscious group dynamics — e.g. the group as an unconscious unit that becomes more dominant than a collection of individuals; the oscillations between a basic assumption group mentality (organized unconsciously against growth and learning) and a work group mentality (rational processes that allow for growth and development. The course also explores the role of authority and leadership in groups; creation and effects of subgroups; conflict and competition; how groups develop their own culture; and unconscious group reactions to absences and loss of members.

Psychoanalytic Impasses
This course addresses impasses in analysis, clinical experiences of entrenched, static difficulty. It can be approached from different theoretical perspectives: the classical views of malignant narcissism and masochism; the modern object relations view of pathological organizations and psychic retreats; the self psychological view of self-object failures; the relational view of overlapping vulnerabilities.
Classic Papers in Psychoanalytic Technique
Psychoanalysis does not entail a unified technical orientation but espouses a variety of clinical approaches. The most influential of these include papers that have stood the test of time and stand out as “classics” in the field due to their overriding impact on subsequent analytic thinkers and practitioners. Contemporary analysts are in a dialogue with much of this work in an effort to learn from, add to, and modify or reject their premises. The principal goal of the course is to help candidates understand this dialogue better and to both deepen and sharpen their own clinical technique. Another objective is to fill the intellectual gaps in the candidate’s learning between courses devoted to the work of Freud, Klein, Bion, Lacan and the British Middle School and the shift to more relational perspectives represented by contemporary psychoanalytic practitioners (although some representative papers from any of these perspectives may be included if the instructor deems them relevant).

Mid-Phase of Analysis
This technique course addresses the kinds of issues that typically arise in the middle phase of analysis, i.e., between the initial phase and termination. Themes for discussion include: interpretation and working through; the repetition of patterns in the patient’s life and in the transference-counter-transference situation; how transference deepens over time; regression and defenses against regression; and alternations between progress and stagnation.

Self-Psychology
The main ideas in classical (Kohutian) self-psychology are presented: self-object functions; mirroring, idealizing, and twin-ship transferences; and the two poles of self-development. Topics for consideration include recent developments in self psychology that overlap with contemporary relational and object relations theories.

Integration of Theory and Technique Seminar I and II
This two-semester fourth-year course is designed to help candidates integrate their psychoanalytic learning thus far. Topics for consideration include: how theory and technique work together, how they both inform and limit each other; how some theories suggest specific technical interventions or listening stances whereas technical interventions that arise more spontaneously may suggest new theoretical formulations; how remaining too closely identified with one theory or technique may limit what the analyst is open to critically assessing. Does the analyst, for example, use the same theory and technique with every patient, or does the analyst adapt his/her technique to each patient? Candidates are encouraged to reflect on their reading, supervision, and clinical work with control cases to assess their own beliefs and their functioning as psychoanalysts. In turn, they identify those aspects of training that have been most meaningful to them and think ahead to the direction they want their respective psychoanalytic careers to take.

Obsession
Hysteria has been a lively area of study within the psychoanalytic literature since the early 1990′s. We sample this literature with an emphasis on the Object Relations, Independent, and Contemporary Freudian schools. We explore how problems in preoedipal development blend seamlessly into the oedipal phase conflicts which Freud so effectively described, and consider the gender politics that have characterized the application of this most ancient of diagnostic categories. In the second part of the course, we start with a classic ego psychological paper and then sample the more limited contemporary psychoanalytic literature on obsessional character and OCD, looking at papers written from Contemporary Freudian, Self Psychological perspectives. These readings revise the classical drive-theory view of the disorder as stemming from fixation and regression to the anal phase, emphasizing instead the issue of omnipotence. We also consider the value of integrating psychopharmacological and behavioral therapies with analytic therapy in order to adequately address the difficulties of some patients who struggle with obsessions and compulsions.