Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies in Context

This course foregrounds the complex influences that race, gender, sexuality, and class play in the contemporary clinical encounter. This course aims to engage a discourse that looks back at the field’s concepts, misconceptions and blind spots in the sociopolitical realms while making use of recent multidisciplinary progress so that we can better situate the clinical encounter in the complexity from which these moments of meeting arise. What are the particular ways that the wider socio-political-cultural world impacts therapeutic praxis and the problems that people bring to therapy? What deformations of development, of sense of self, of authenticity, of autonomy, and of relationships are wrought by such facets of social injustice as racism, sexism, economic oppression, cultural “othering”? How do these injustices emerge in therapy, in the issues patients explicitly present or in the ways that therapist and patient implicitly position themselves toward each other? When therapist and patient have very different life experiences, or come from different socio-political, cultural, racial or gendered positions, how does this appear in treatment and create impasses or opportunities for growth (for both patient and therapist)? What are the benefits and dangers of a shared socio-cultural background? (Blocks 3-6)

Psychoanalytic Concepts and their Application

This course focuses on theoretical concepts necessary for developing a deepened understanding of the complexities of the human experience (normative, developmental, psychopathological, sociocultural) and how these concepts inform psychoanalytic clinical work. (Blocks 2-6)

This course examines a range of selected topics from the lists below that can be loosely sorted into three categories.

• Topics regarding human psychology that are relevant to therapy. These include theories of the dynamic unconscious (repression, dissociative, splitting models of mind), development and levels of psychological functioning (psychotic, neurotic, borderline); trauma; conceptions of affect; the ways that psychological states and processes are embodied, unformulated, linguistically or symbolically formed, etc.

• Topics regarding what happens in therapy. These include topics of enactment, containment, the roles of support and insight; questions regarding what is mutative in psychoanalytic therapy; questions regarding the aims of psychoanalytic therapy: what constitutes a good outcome? Does analysis always have “therapeutic” aims? What “better forms of living” are implicitly on offer in psychoanalytic treatment that go beyond the treatment of psychologically defined problems? Are analytic aims psychological, ethical, political—all of the above together?

• Topics regarding support for psychoanalytic theories and practices. Is psychoanalysis a scientific theory, an interpretive discipline like philosophy or cultural studies, a hybrid discipline that includes claims about human psychology combined with the promotion of various ideals? Are there psychoanalytic “facts”? What role does scientific research (neuroscience, psychological research on development and cognition, clinical research on therapeutic process and outcome, etc.) play in justifying psychoanalysis? What are the limitations of such research?

Weekend Workshops

Workshops occur at the end of each block and provide an extended opportunity to come together as a group to discuss theoretical topics and clinical material in more depth. Weekend Workshops are Sundays from 9am to 3pm and include a mixture of theoretical didactic discussion and clinical case presentations. (Blocks 1-6)