Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program Curriculum

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The mission of the psychoanalytic psychotherapy training program is to provide advanced training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Students will learn to assess patients' levels of development and functioning on a continuum from understructured to normal and to apply corresponding interventions on a continuum from ego-supportive to insight-oriented.

The emphasis is on treatment that promotes insight into unconscious processes and the conscious use of relationship, including attention to transference and countertransference. Students will learn psychoanalytic theories including drive theory, ego psychology, object relations theory, self-psychology, attachment theory, trauma theory and relational theory.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy training consists of three parts:

classroom study

having one's own psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy, either completed or concurrent with training

treating patients in psychotherapy under close supervision

Required Courses:
The didactic curriculum consists of approximately 200 hours of classroom teaching. Most courses will be 16 weeks long. The following is a currently proposed list of required courses. As the curriculum is still in development, these courses may be modified. The curriculum assumes that students will have taken "Thinking Psychoanalytically: the Basics" or will have an equivalent coherent introduction to basic psychoanalytic concepts.

• Psychodynamic Assessment

• Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis: Overlap and Differences

• Putting the Analytic Attitude to Work

• Psychoanalytic Theories of Development, Parts 1 and 2
  • These courses cover birth through later adulthood, including normal and abnormal development.
  
• Psychoanalytic Models of the Mind, Parts 1 and 2
  • These courses are an overview of how our current ways of conceptualizing how the mind is organized emerged from an attempt to solve clinical problems found in prior theories. The aim will be to examine the clinical and cultural/historical contexts in which each theory arose and the application of the resulting model to treatment of patients. Theories covered include drive, ego, object relations, self psychology, and relational.

• Transforming Destructiveness: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with the Difficult-to-Treat Patient
  • The 2008-2009 course, Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Borderline Personality: Theory and Technique, will fulfill the requirement for this course.

• Electives -any 12 hours of a variety of short courses offered

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