Psychoanalytic Training InstituteAn Integration of Training in Adult and Child/Adolescent Psychoanalysis
Our Integrated Training in Psychoanalysis reflects our conviction that exposing all candidates to developmental theory and analytic listening and the possibility of treating all ages will enrich and deepen the competencies of our graduates. We encourage candidates to treat analytic cases from all age groups in order to become ‘life cycle analysts,’ hence it integrates child and adult psychoanalytic training. In so doing, it also enables candidate analysts who plan to only treat adults to have a more detailed understanding and ear for hearing the echoes of infant, toddler, latency and adolescent development as it appears in adult psychoanalytic work.
The primary goal of the psychoanalyst is to understand, as fully as possible, each patient’s past, present and potential future. Gaining knowledge and experience from all stages of development is advantageous, not just to those psychoanalytic clinicians who work with children and adolescents, but to all who provide psychoanalytic treatment.
The integrated training program is based on a child-adult curriculum that is uniform for all candidates, enabling them to train across modalities and study the developmental spectrum in the context of psychoanalytic theories. Candidates train simultaneously in child and adult psychoanalysis and they have the option of doing their control work in either child or adult psychoanalysis or in both.
Throughout the curriculum, both child- and adult-related clinical material is used to illustrate key psychoanalytic concepts. This integrated approach demonstrates that the theoretical foundations of psychoanalysis are grounded in development. Within the matrix of development, which includes psychic structure and maturation, constitutional factors and environmental experience, an integrated curriculum adds depth to the traditional curriculum. More simply, a study of the child’s mind leads to a deepened understanding of the adult’s mind.
Continuous Case Seminars, attended by all candidates, include both child and adult cases and are co-taught by both child and adult analysts. An additional Child Continuous Case seminar is required of those candidates who take on a child control case and/or who want to graduate as a Child Psychoanalyst.
Viewing Freud Through a Contemporary Lens
Integration also denotes that, while we remain grounded in the study of Freud, our curriculum also integrates post-Freudian developments in psychoanalysis, contemporary theory and the questions raised by today’s world. We continue to strive to teach and learn together how to bring issues of diversity into our training, how to reach communities who have not had access to psychoanalysis, and how to incorporate the changes in theory and practice required by contemporary issues. Candidates are able to draw from both classical and contemporary psychoanalytic ideas. Integrated training considers the individual psyche in the context of a dimensional world-one that respects the impact of the familial and larger socio-cultural world on the development of character structure.