Child Psychotherapy Training

Laurie A. Goldsmith, Ph.D., and Christina Lapides, M.S.W., Co-Chairs
Graeme Hanson, M.D., Consultant

Latency and Adolescence

Psychoanalytically oriented treatment of children and adolescents makes demands on the therapist that are different than treatment of adults.  Older children are on the thresholds of new experiences of their minds and bodies.  How do we reach these inner worlds when they often can't use words to tell us about their experience?  The current year of this two-year program addresses school-age children and adolescents.  Children often communicate through play, but some can't play.  Adolescents may express themselves through actions, including actions on their bodies.  The therapist has to bring together the child's behaviors, and their own countertransference reactions, to try to arrive at the underlying meanings of the child's world. This two year series of seminars addresses the relational, environmental and intrapsychic processes for both child and parents, and offers in-depth examples of interventions.  The seminars use class discussion, readings, and case presentations by instructors and participants. Attention will be paid to different theoretical orientations and to cultural and sexual diversity. Students may enter at either year. Students are entitled to attend all child colloquia held at SFCP.

Certificate Program Option
Beginning this year, the Child Psychotherapy Training is offering interested students the option of completing a certificate program.  Upon completion of the program the student will be awarded a certificate from SFCP stating that they have complete the program in Child Psychotherapy Training.  In order to receive the certificate, the student must:

1. complete the two year curriculum; and
2. complete 40 hours of supervision with a supervisor chosen from any Child Psychotherapy Training faculty, including those not currently teaching.  Reduced fee supervision may be available if needed.

PROGRAM  COORDINATORS
Tina Lapides, L.C.S.W. (510-654-6430);
Laurie Goldsmith, Ph.D, (510-652-1223)

Orientation/Latency in the Consulting Room

The first day of this course will begin with an orientation to the Child Psychotherapy Training year, with all faculty attending to introduce their seminars.  The course will focus on the intriguing developmental stage of Latency.  What do we mean by latent? Are we thinking of an age, a stage, a position, a construct, or a state of being? Clinical material will illustrate these different aspects of the “latency period” as they emerge between therapist and child. We will discuss assessment of latency development in the context of recommendations for treatment and treatment goals, and consider the parent’s role in the child’s treatment.

Celeste Schneider, Ph.D., Member & Faculty, SFCP
Wednesdays, September 12, 19; October 3, 10, 17, 24, 2012
This seminar has been awarded 9 CME/CE credits.

Educational Objectivs:

Participants will be able to:

1. Describe the developmental stage of Latency and the associated states and traits through case material.
2. Explore the interrelations between the emotionally vivid interactions between therapist and the latency age child in the consulting room.
3. Describe various theoretical perspectives on infant observation, including the complexity of the latency aged child's cultural identity.
4. Describe the complexities of working with parents of the latency age child.

Thinking Clinically: Pre-Adolescence and the Transition to Adolescence

The transition to adolescence is a dynamic and intense one. It is a time of gathering and transforming oneself while confronted by changes in one’s body and one’s thinking. At the same time, infantile issues always are present with more evolved processes and feel particularly ripe in this transitional process to adolescence. Concepts such as the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, container/contained, and après coup can provide a scaffolding for thinking about these development processes and help highlight the ways that one is negotiating multiple ages at one time. This class will develop these ideas as we look at the world of the pre-adolescent and the approach to adolescence.

Reyna Cowan, L.C.S.W., Faculty, SFCP; Member, PINC.
Wednesdays, October 31; November 7, 14, 28; December 5, 12, 2012
This seminar has been awarded 9 CME/CE credits.

Educational Objectives:

Participants will be able to:

• Understand how to think about paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions as a way to understand the emotional life of the child.
• Comprehend the concept container/contained and how it can be used to understand development.
• Participants will be able to formulate an idea of how to use one's countertransference in clinical work.
• Participants will learn how to use the squiggle game as a way to understand the internal world of the child.
• Develop a working understanding of the no entry defense.
• Students will utilize these developmental concepts while listening to clinical material in class

Psychological Movements in Adolescence

This tour of adolescence will focus on some of the developmental tasks considered “normative” in the adolescent period of development.  These tasks are familiar to many of us and include subjects such as gender identity consolidation; sexual orientation and sexual experience; the development of abstract thinking and the capacity to use one’s mind; a reworking of oedipal fantasies and feelings in the service of a separate self.  These psychological movements will be discussed within the context of the social realities of middle school and high school with an eye on the intersection between the social and the psychological.  The use of clinical material will be encouraged as ways to illuminate the challenges and demands for children during this period of growth.

Diana Fuery, Ph.D., Member & Faculty, SFCP
Wednesdays, January 2, 9, 16, 23, 30; February 6, 2013
This seminar has been awarded 9 CME/CE credits.

Educational Objectives:

Participants will be able to:

1. Give an overview of the developmental stage of adolescence
2. List the major normative tasks of adolescence
3. Describe the social context of early, middle and late adolescence with an emphasis on the influence this context has on development
4. Discuss some of the significant developmental changes in adolescent development with a focus on sexuality and cognitive changes
5. Recognize the clinical presentation of some of these normative adolescent developments as distinct from clinical conditions

Bodily Centered Psychopathology in Adolescence

This course will examine the frequent presentation of symptoms by adolescents, which are played out in, or on, the body, such as anorexia and bulimia, cutting, drug use and overdosing.  We will consider the profound and concrete physiological changes of adolescence, and the resultant anxieties, fantasies and repercussions on the personality.  The bizarre and disturbing presentation of bodily-based symptoms will be understood within the construct of the more general shift of the personality in adolescence, sometimes revealing more primitive parts of the self.

Mary Brady, Ph.D., Member & Faculty, SFCP
Wednesdays, February 13, 20, 27; March 6, 13, 20, 2013
This seminar has been awarded 9 CME/CE credits.

Educational Objectives:

Participants will be able to:

1. Describe the normal developmental processes related to the integration of the changing body in adolescence.
2. Assess the relationship between adolescent development and the frequent presentation of adolescent patients with bodily symptoms, such as anorexia, bulimia, cutting, substance abuse and overdosing.
3. Describe the manner in which symptoms in adolescence can represent aspects of primitive object relationships which have remained unintegrated to this point.
4. List issues relevant to male adolescent development.
5. List issues relevant to female adolescent development.
6. Explain some dynamics underlying eating disorders.

Case Conference

Participants will have the chance to present their own case material to their fellow classmates and to two experienced clinicians.

Era A. Loewenstein, Ph.D., Member & Faculty, SFCP
Jack Giuliani, Ph.D., Member & Faculty, SFCP
Wednesdays, March 27; April 3, 10, 17, 24; May 1, 2013
This seminar has been awarded 9 CME/CE credits.

Educational Objectives:

Participants will be able to:

1. Become involved in an intensive & appropriate therapeutic interaction.
2. Observe and reflect upon the processes within the therapeutic interaction.
3. Identify the most appropriate points for therapeutic interventions.
4. Observe and listen for the responses to their therapeutic interventions.
5. Integrate this response into further interactions, reflection and interventions.
6. Consider and adjust their interventions to the developing therapeutic process.

Working with Parents

This seminar will look at child psychotherapy from a dual perspective on parent work and child work.  We will address the difficult issues with which child therapists struggle.  How do we best create an optimal environment for a working alliance with the child and the parents?  How do we attend to the interplay between the child's inner world and the physical world in which he or she lives?  How does the therapist work within the existence of two overlapping "universes", the ideal and the real? How does one manage the enormous transference and countertransference surges? And how do we modulate our omnipotent fantasies of intervention? Participants' cases and quandaries are welcomed.

Myrna Frankel, L.C.S.W., Member & Faculty, SFCP
Wednesdays, May 8, 15, 2013
This seminar has been awarded 3 CME/CE credits.

Educational Objectives:

Participants will be able to:

1. Assess differences between latency and adolescent parental needs
2. describe beginning, middle and termination phases of parent work
3. Compare parent involvement and theraputic outcomes