Curriculum

The PPTP's innovative, comprehensive and challenging didactic curriculum involves seven seminars: three in the first year, and four in the second year. These courses are carefully organized around the aim of deepening each trainee's understanding and practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. There also are four case conferences per program year, each facilitated by a seasoned psychoanalytic clinician. Case conferences provide a forum for in-depth consideration of trainees' clinical work and for the application and further extension of ideas explored in the didactic seminars.

2012-13 FIRST-YEAR CURRICULUM

Seminars

Seminar 1: Disturbance and Change in the Patient's Inner World
This course introduces a range of perspectives that are useful in conceptualizing the patient's inner world. We will start by considering the aim of enduring, personality-wide change, which distinguishes open-ended psychoanalytic psychotherapy from psychotherapies that focus on relief of acute symptoms. We then will survey a range of approaches to conceptualizing psychological disturbance and to understanding the nature of improvements that evolve over the course of a productive psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Seminar 2: Beginning Treatment
This seminar focuses on the process of evaluating new patients and beginning psychoanalytic psychotherapy. We will focus on special issues that arise when conducting initial sessions; on how (or whether) to take a history; on getting a feel for the patient's underlying level of personality disturbance; on deciding whether to treat a given patient; and on setting up a useful psychoanalytic frame.

Seminar 3: Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Practice
This seminar will explore the moment-to-moment work of psychoanalytic psychotherapy from multiple perspectives. We will consider the therapist's use of his or her intellectual and emotional faculties to apprehend the patient's inner world, the countertransference, the words and actions of both parties, and the unique dyadic field that emerges in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. We then will consider the tasks of listening and intervening, focusing on how the therapist may adapt these activities to the patient's needs as sensitively as possible.

Case Conferences

Jonathan Dunn, Ph.D., Training & Supervising Analyst, SFCP
Stephen Purcell, M.D., Training & Supervising Analyst, SFCP
Schedule: September 4, 11; October 2, 9, 16, 23, 30; November 6, 13, 2012

John DiMartini, Ph.D., Member and Faculty, SFCP
Michael Wagner, Ph.D., Member and Faculty, SFCP
Schedule: November 27; December 4, 11, 18, 2012; January 8, 15, 22, 29; February 5, 2013

Lisa Buchberg, Ph.D., Training & Supervising Analyst, SFCP
Julie Ruskin, Ph.D., Member and Faculty, SFCP
Schedule: February 12, 19, 26; March 5, 12, 19; April 2, 9, 16, 2013

J. Samuel Chase, M.D., Training & Supervising Analyst, SFCP
Wendy Stern, D.M.H., Training & Supervising Analyst, SFCP
Schedule: April 23, 30; May 7, 14, 21, 28; June 4, 11, 18, 2013

2013-14 SECOND-YEAR CURRICULUM

The second year curriculum builds upon and extends ways of thinking introduced in the first year, focusing on deeper and more sophisticated approaches to psychoanalytic work. Like the first year curriculum, the second-year curriculum will include three courses and four nine-week case conferences. The following are abbreviated course descriptions:

Seminar 1: Conceptualizing the Patient's Inner World (9 weeks)
This goal of this seminar is to help students to conceptualize their patients' mental functioning in an increasingly sophisticated way. Students will explore such fundamental clinical questions as: How do I understand the experience of this patient? What is the nature of his or her mental functioning? What aspects should be a focus of my clinical attention?

Seminar 2: The Nature of the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Situation (9 weeks)
This course will consider various ways of understanding the fundamental intrapsychic and interpsychic psychological processes at play when patient and therapist engage in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Students will develop a deepened understanding of concepts such as transference, countertransference, play, projective identification, enactment, the field, the psychoanalytic third, intersubjectivity, and therapeutic action.

Seminar 3: Creative Approaches to Technique (9 weeks)
The goal of this course is to address innovative clinical approaches in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Students will be able to apply the concepts taught in this course to useful clinical questions such as: What sorts of technical approaches are available to me at this moment? What interpretive and non-interpretive interventions are likely to be helpful? What are the relative implications of alternate ways of engaging the patient?

Seminar 4: Clinical Challenges (9 weeks)
The goal of this course is to address specific challenges and difficulties that arise as part of work as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. The difficulties may be conceptualized as rooted in the patient's psychology, the therapist's psychology, factors that arise out of the unique dyad, or any combination of these. Trainees will develop a more sophisticated understanding of concepts such as defense, resistance, counterresistance, narcissism, perversion, impasse, and negative therapeutic reaction.