P1A: The Historical and Clinical Evolution of Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics (15 Sessions)

Course Description: This course is designed to introduce French psychoanalytic Psychosomatic theory in general and to help students become aware of Freud’s economic point of view in the interplay of soma and psyche, between the drives and the other. By the end of this course, the candidate will appreciate the historical and clinical evolution of French psychoanalytic psychosomatics and place this understanding in the context of the Freudian economic point of view, as well as to locate it in the contemporary psychoanalytic landscape. Lectures and clinical presentations are employed.

Course Objectives: By the end of this 15-week period, candidates will be able to define and understand Freudian concepts spanning theoretical works from Freud’s early oeuvre through 1905. Key concepts will include the discovery of the psyche from the soma, actual neurosis and psychoneurosis, the definition of the drives as understood through language and the concept of the unconscious.

P1B: Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics and Psychoanalytic Diagnosis of Contemporary Patients (15 Sessions)

Course Description: The emphasis in this course is on the diagnostic impressions of the initial consultation in order to determine what clinical presentation is consistent with a psychosomatic profile. The candidate will familiarize themselves with a variety of psychosomatic symptoms and explore these as psychosomatic solutions to defects of representational activity.

Course Objectives: The candidate will also be able to explore via clinical vignettes the link between narcissistic vulnerabilities, suppression of affect, concrete thinking and psychosomatic symptoms and discuss alterations of analytic technique during the initial phase. The candidate will be able to become familiar with obtaining diagnostic impressions of a wide range of clinical presentations for both adults and children/adolescents.

F1A: Early Freudian Theory from the Soma to the discovery of the Psyche(15 Sessions)

Course Description: The purpose of this course is to begin to familiarize candidates with the early phase of Freudian theory and the discovery of the drives and unconscious processes. Freud’s early theory of trauma and the distinction between actual neurosis and psychoneurosis will be explored via the close readings of the texts.  The emphasis is on how these early discoveries impacted Freud’s development of psychoanalytic theory and technique and in particular his theory of drives and the unconscious. The major texts of the interpretation of dreams and the three essays of sexuality will be explored in helping the candidates to discover the implications for clinical work as well as human development.

Course Objectives: By the end of this 15-week period, candidates will be able to define, understand and discuss Freud’s theoretical works from his early oeuvre through 1905. Candidates will be able to understand and discuss key concepts that will include the discovery of the psyche arising from the soma as well as the impact of sexual trauma and sexual seduction. Candidates will master the distinction between actual neurosis and psychoneurosis in the intersection of the drives. Candidates will appreciate, understand and be able to discuss in detail the connection of the sexual drives to symbolic representation and the object as delineated, for example, in Freud’s most fundamental works, The Interpretation of Dreams and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.

F1B: The Drives and Further Elaborations of Clinical Freud (15 sessions)

Course Description: During this term, the variety of psychodiagnostics will be studied via Freud’s clinical cases in helping the candidates develop analytic listening and the appreciation of affect and representation in the interplay of language and the drives.

Course Objectives: By the end of the 15-week period candidates will be able to define and understand Freudian concepts spanning theoretical works from 1905 – 1919. Candidates will deepen their understanding of the metapsychology of the drives as it relates to infantile neurosis and psychosis and as these also relate to narcissism, masochism and melancholia. Candidates will also become familiar with Freudian analytic technique as laid out in Freud’s Papers on Technique, covering transference love, counter-transference, repetition compulsion and the analytic setting.

T1A1: Psychoanalytic Diagnosis and Introduction to the Theory and Technique of the Transitional Psychoanalytic Treatment – The Frame and the Setting (10 Sessions)
and
T1A2: The Initial Phase of Working Analytically with Children (5 sessions)

Course Description: The purpose of this course, divided into two parts, is to present the analytic theory and technique of working with non- neurotic, difficult to engage in analytic process, patients and in particular patients who present with concrete thinking, inability to use fantasy to elaborate on primal anxieties, addictions, somatic pain, diffuse anxiety, panic, and blank depression. The psychoanalytic approach here aims at building preconscious activity prior to uncovering repressed wishes and conflicts. This approach is informed in particular by the French Psychosomatic school and the work of Winnicott, Anzieu and others.

Course Objectives: The course familiarizes students with the theory and technique of transitional psychoanalysis as well as to be able to identify what kind of patients will be benefited from this analytic approach. By the end of this section, candidates will be familiar in using their analytic diagnostic skills to conduct the initial interview and to develop their initial formulations. Candidates will also be able to discuss the importance and clinical use of setting the frame and establishing the analytic relationship within the frame of transitional psychoanalysis. Readings will be elicited to discuss the clinical material presented.

T1B: Clinical Case Conference: Psychoanalytic Diagnosis and Introduction to the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalytic Treatment (12 Sessions)

Course Description: The purpose of this course is to present the analytic theory and technique of working with patients who present with a more neurotic organization as indicated of their capacity to develop and use transference and free association to access unconscious conflicts and affects. This course aims to contrast these clinical presentations during the initial interview to patients more suitable for transitional psychoanalysis. In particular the beginning phase will be discussed from Freud’s economic point of view of working with hysteria.

Course Objectives:At the end of this section, candidates will be able to identify and discuss the beginning phase of the analytic process as well as to present an overview of the analytic process in working with resistance, transference-countertransference, and dream material. Lectures alternate with clinical case presentations to provide the candidate with a solid introduction to the theory and technique of analytic process.

P2A: Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics (15 sessions)

Course Description: This course builds on the first year’s introduction to psychoanalytic psychosomatics from Freud’s and post Freudian economic point of view with focus on the metapsychology behind the psychosomatic clinical presentation of contemporary patient who present with flat affect, concrete thinking, diffuse anxiety, and difficulty to invest in their object world with or without somatic complains. The role of primary masochism as a protective factor will be examined as well as its failure via clinical vignettes of patients with an acute difficulty of tolerating pain and discomfort.

Course Objectives: By the end of this course, the candidate will be able to define and discuss the importance of primary masochism, ego ideal, ideal ego, primary representation and symbolic thinking in working with psychosomatic, disaffected patients. The candidate will also be able to apply the understanding of the metapsychology of these clinical presentations to facilitate the analytic process in working as a double.

P2B: Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics (15 Sessions)

Course Description: During this course, the candidate will continue to learn and apply the theory and technique of psychoanalytic psychosomatics with a focus on disaffection and alexithymia.

Course Objectives: By the end of this term via the clinical material, the candidate will be able to use their understanding of the various theoretical points to work analytically with flat affect, lack of associative material and obstacles in developing of the transference and to help the patient play with representations.

F2A: The late Freud of the Second Topography: The Death Drive and Beyond (15 sessions)

Course Description: The purpose of this course is to expose candidates to the richness and depth of late Freud as the theory evolves to the second topography of the drives. Like Freud himself, who was constantly concerned with clinical research and continued to revise of his own psychoanalytic theory as his clinic informed him, accordingly the course will aim similarly to help the candidate develop critical thinking with a pulse for scientific inquiry in their own analytic work. Freud’s later theory and technique will aim to inform candidates’ analytic listening like ‘a telephone receiver’ into the contemporary patients’ unconscious processes and affects.

Course Objectives: By the end of this course, candidates will be familiar with the later phase of Freud’s theory of the second topography in order to sharpen analytic listening in the interplay of language (representation) and the drives (affect) on a case-by-case basis. At the same time, the candidate will be able to discuss the Freudian concepts of the primal scene, the uncanny, masochism and perverse fantasies and how these appear in their clinical cases as well as social problematics of the moment, the ego ideal and the social group.

F2B: The Later Works of Freud (15 sessions)

Course Description: This seminar completes the two-year survey of Freud’s major works by exploring some of the most important contributions to the Freudian canon, penned in the later stages of his life, starting with his introduction of the second theory of anxiety, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, from 1926 and continuing until his death in 1939. Along with studying major theoretical and clinical advances, the seminar will also focus on how, in this period of Freud’s writing, his attention turned more than ever before to social, anthropological and religious themes.

Course Objectives: By the end of this course, the candidate will be familiar with the later works of Freud in order to deepen their understanding of Freudian metapsychology, sharpen their analytic listening, and be able to use analytic tools in and outside the consulting room.

T2A: Clinical Case Seminar: Theory and Technique of the Transitional Psychoanalytic Treatment for Non- Neurotic Adult Patients – Analysis of Resistance, counter-resistance, Transference and Countertransference (15 sessions)

Course Description: The purpose of this course is to present the transitional analytic theory and technique of working with resistance and counter-resistance with non- neurotic adult patients (narcissistic, disaffected, psychosomatic, etc.) who present with concrete thinking, inability to use free association to access unconscious material and resistance to the experience of the transference. The psychoanalytic approach here aims at building preconscious activity prior to uncovering repressed wishes and conflicts. This approach is informed by the French Psychosomatic school as well as by the post-Kleinians. Readings will be presented to discuss the clinical material.

Course Objectives: By the end of this course candidates will be familiar with the theory and technique of mid-phase of transitional psychoanalysis and in specific how to use playful interventions to engage the patient in the analytic process. In addition, the candidates will learn how to pay close attention to the countertransference and the ways in which the lack of engagement from the patient elicits lack of engagement from the analyst, as well as other subtle ways of resistance and counter-resistance.

T2B: Clinical Case Seminar: Theory and Technique of the Transitional Psychoanalytic Treatment -Transference/Countertransference and Resistance/Counter-resistance in working with non-neurotic children and Adolescents (15 Sessions)

Course Description: This clinical case seminar is designed to facilitate candidates’ familiarity with theoretical understanding and clinical application of the ways in which transference/countertransference and resistance/counter-resistance can be used in transitional psychoanalytic treatment (the ways in which a patient without the capacity for free association and phantasy can be transitioned into a psychoanalytic patient). This course addresses child and adolescent patients as well as adult patients.

Course Objectives: By the end of this course candidates will be familiar with the theory and technique of mid-phase of transitional play psychoanalysis in working with difficult to engage children and adolescents. Candidates will be able to present case material that demonstrate playful interventions that facilitate deepening of the analytic work in listening to the countertransference especially when there is a lack of engagement and suppression of affect.

3A1: The Other of The Drives and the Other of the Social (Autrogeny) (7 sessions)

Course Description: seminar delves into the origins of Autrogeny [the genesis of Otherness from within and without] in relation to the economics of the drives. A developmental analysis, from a Freudian/Post-Freudian and Lacanian/Post-Lacanian perspective addresses Autrogeny from Infancy through Adulthood. In keeping with this analysis, the development of Misautreny [the hatred of Otherness from within and without] is also be studied from the perspective of generalized hatred of otherness as a projection of hatred of the Other within and from the perspective of specificities that pertain to unique groups (e.g., African Americans, Asians, Latinos, etc.) Class as an important component in the exploration of racism and otherness will be highlighted.

Course Objectives: By the end of this seminar the candidate will have mastered a developmental approach to the understanding of the genesis and course of Otherness and the hatred of Otherness from within and without. The candidate will be able to apply this understanding to the clinical treatment pertaining to various unique groupings (of race, ethnicity, religion and political views, class, immigration, etc.).

3A2 The Work of Julia Kristeva and Literature (8 sessions)

Course Description: This seminar approaches the works of the philosopher and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva to read major literary works to develop an understanding of what the content and stylistic presentation of these works might contribute to an understanding of the economics of the drives and to the manner in which a psychosomatic psychoanalytic reading of the texts sheds light not only on the creative/sublimatory process itself, but also on the interaction/internalization between this process and the psychesoma of the reader. One of Kristeva’s most important contributions is that signification is composed of two elements, the symbolic and the semiotic. Kristeva’s semiotic is closely related to the Freudian pre-Oedipal and Lacan’s pre-mirror stage. It is related to the drives, which dwells in the fissures and prosody of language rather than in the denotative meanings of words. Furthermore, the semiotic is a realm associated with the musical, the poetic, the rhythmic, an integral part of the “dough” and figuration of symbolization and language. Consideration is given here to ways in which reading literature through the lenses of Kristeva’s work may be useful to enhance analytic listening for transitional psychoanalytic work.

Course Objectives: By the end of this seminar the candidate will gain a deep psychoanalytic appreciation via Kristeva‘s work of the ways in which many great literary works shed light on and deepen our understanding of prominent aspects of the human psyche. The candidate will also be able to articulate a Kristevian psychoanalytic perspective on the creative process as well as the ways in which a text may function in the psychesoma (drives) of the readers. The candidate will also understand ways in which literature might be of use in transitional psychoanalysis when it is brought ‘into play’ by the patient.

3A3: Klein/Post-Kleinians and The Body (8 sessions)

Course Description: This seminar explores the theoretical and clinical contributions of Melanie Klein, the early influences on her work and some of the post-Kleinians to a psychoanalytic understanding of the soma-psyche. Klein’s seminal elaboration of the complexities of an early Oedipal complex led to the development of a new approach to the treatment of both children and adults. Her work on the clinical significance of projective identification and, linked to it, countertransference established a foundation for the building of theory and clinical practice for psychoanalysts for nearly a century, a lasting contribution eclipsed only by Freud himself.

Course Objectives: By the end of this seminar candidates will be able to describe and apply both theoretically and clinically the approaches of Melanie Klein, her predecessors and her followers, and their relations to the body of the drives. Candidates will be able to impart in detail the elements and significance of the early oedipal configurations and their implications as well as those of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, envy and gratitude, projective identification and countertransference.

3A4: Lacan and the Body(7 sessions)

Course Description: This seminar focuses on Lacanian reconceptualization of Freudian drive theory, language, jouissance and the Other. In revisiting Lacanian topography of the subject, the three registers – Imaginary, Symbolic and Real – we approach clinical material and theorizing of clinical phenomena in a new way. Early Lacan of language and the Other will be contrasted to the late Lacan of the body and Jouissance. Clinical vignettes will be presented to discuss the readings.

Course Objectives: By the end of this 7-week period, the candidates will be able to present the basic Lacanian theoretical concepts and to demonstrate a psychoanalytic listening to clinical material in a way consistent with the Lacanian clinical theory. The candidates will be able to discuss the patient’s (subject’s) position in three registers and their implication on the patient’s life, i.e., pursuit of pleasure, desire, inhibitions etc.

3B1: Advanced Freud and the Other of the Body: Psychosexuality and Gender in The Contemporary World – A Drive Based Perspective (8 sessions)

Course Description: This seminar focuses on the exploration of gender identity and its relation to the body, the drives/psychosexuality, language and the Other in the contemporary world of multiplicity of genders. By reviewing selected parts of the Freudian texts, the seminar will aim to identify the study of the unconscious, identity, and sexual difference in Freud, and to discuss further elaborations by post Freudians, such as Kristeva, Schaeffer, and others. Gender identity here will be explored as an event of language in identification with others and culture as it concerns the body and sexuality.

Course Objectives: This course will provide candidates with a broad knowledge of advanced, drive-based, developmental psychoanalytic theories and their interplay with contemporary societal norms. By the end of the 8 weeks, the candidates will be able to define and discuss the complex relationship between unconscious representations, sexuality and gender identity and to deepen their analytic listening of patient’s free association. In addition, candidates will be able to appreciate their patients’ struggle in relation to others as it concerns their drives, anxieties and the contemporary signification of gender identities. Candidates will be able to formulate their own case conceptualizations and interventions under the consideration of a constant dialogue between the individual and the social.

3B2: Advanced Freud and Sociocultural Influence on Growth: Developmental Psychology, Psychosexuality and Generational Difference in the Contemporary World – A Drive-Based Perspective (7 sessions)

Course Description: This course addresses developmental psychology and generational difference in the contemporary world from a psychoanalytic point of view. From Boomers to Alpha, generational difference presents an undeniable reality within the context of the passage of time and the interplay between the individual and the social in any given historical and cultural context. As with the hatred of Otherness, generational difference presents a challenge for every individual of a particular generation to degrade the other. This seminar aims to raise awareness of the disavowal of generational difference and its consequences for both the individual and the group. In following Freud who brilliantly brought our attention to the complementary series in development, this awareness of the unique challenges in various developmental stages from infancy to older age highlights the importance of recognition of generational difference for every subject.

Course Objectives: This course will provide candidates with a broad knowledge of advanced, drive-based, developmental psychoanalytic theories and their interplay with contemporary societal norms. Candidates will be able to formulate their own case conceptualizations and interventions under the consideration of a constant dialogue between the individual and the social.

3B3: The Body, The Drives and Affect in Andre Green’s Writings (8 sessions)

Course Description: Some difficult patients can be labelled as suffering from a “blank depression” when their lack of regression in session, resistance to associative process and negative transference make the analytic process at risk of not developing. This elective explores Andre Green’s theory on the role of the frame in the analysis of narcissistic patients and on the interpretative work of the analyst. We explore notions such as the role of preconscious activity and of negative defense mechanisms that interfere with the mobility and flexibility of mental functioning. We focus on early issues of development and interactive disorders that could be associated with narcissistic disorders, and how that association could inform techniques of intervention and interpretation. Reading Green on the Negative and on the role of Absence in the analytic setting, we explore the consequences of limitations in the capacity for representation. We will read the Dead Mother paper to work on the theory of this narcissistic issue and on analytic technique. Clinical cases from Bollas and some readings from Winnicott will help illuminate how to understand severe early depression and to develop adequate techniques of intervention and interpretation. Course Objectives: After completing this elective, participants will be able to appreciate Green’s perspective when reading Freud’s classical theory and critically evaluating contemporary theories. They will recognize and be able clinically to apply the multilayered dynamics present in transference and countertransference in narcissistic depression and identify the role of the frame and different techniques of interpretations when working with narcissistic patients.

3B4: Post Lacanians – Le Soldat and Laplanche (7 sessions)

Course Description: In this seminar we will explore Freud’s theories of infantile sexuality, drives and psychoeconomics from the novel perspective of the Hungarian-Swiss psychoanalyst Judith Le Soldat (1947-2008) and Jean Laplanche. In one of Le Soldat’s major works Grund zur Homosexualität (Reason for Homosexuality, 2015) she emphasizes the centrality of the Oedipal conflict in the language, body and affect of adult patients. Liberating the infantile wish from anxieties of castration, guilt and angst is what Le Soldat considered the main goal of psychoanalysis. This notion was already articulated in Freud’s ‘was Es war soll Ich werden’ (Where It (Id) was, shall I (ego) be). Jean Laplanche (1924-2012) is widely recognized as one of the most esteemed psychoanalysts of the past 60 years. His pioneering The Language of Psychoanalysis co-authored with J.B. Pontalis remains one of the standard bearers of psychoanalytic scholarship. Like Le Soldat, Laplanche devised a complex theory built on the shoulders of Freud and Lacan. Remaining truthful to a concept of Drive, Laplanche returned to a version of Freud’s original seduction theory, emphasizing the psyche built around an intrusion from without (from the Other in the form of the repressed infantile sexuality of the other) rather than following Freud’s later development of an individually centered nucleus of the psyche with the drive circulating around the object. This intrusion from the other takes the form of an ‘enigmatic signifier’, in which the enigma constitutes a seduction from the unconscious of the other.

Course Objectives: By the end of this seminar, candidates will be able to understand and clinically apply readings of Laplanche and Le Soldat. The candidate will understand both the theoretical basis and the clinical application of Le Soldat’s recasting of the Oedipus complex as well as her notions of Voluntary servitude, Homosexuality and Masochism. Candidates will also be familiar with and be able to apply clinically Laplanche’s revised Seduction Theory together with its essential component, the enigmatic signifier.

T3A: Clinical Seminar – Mid phase in Working with Resistance, Transference, and Countertransference with Analytic Adult Patients (15 Sessions)

Course Description: During this clinical seminar, mid phase analytic process material will be presented weekly. Readings are presented to supplement and deepen the discussions of clinical material thereby coordinating with other elements of the curriculum.

Course Objectives: By the end of this course candidates will be familiar with the theory and technique of mid-phase of psychoanalytic technique and, in specific, how to think about the handling of the transference, free association, and emergence of unconscious material (dream material) to deepen the analytic process and to engage the patient further in the analytic process. In addition, the candidates will learn how to pay close attention to the countertransference and the ways in which ‘stuckness‘ might speak to subtle ways of resistance and counter-resistance.

T3B: Clinical Seminar – Mid Phase Analytic Work with Children and Adolescents- Working in The Transference (15 Sessions)

Course Description: During this clinical seminar, mid phase play/transitional analytic process material will be presented weekly. Readings are presented to supplement the discussions of clinical material.

Course Objectives: By the end of this course candidates will be familiar with the theory and technique of mid-phase of psychoanalytic technique with children and adolescents and, in specific, how to use prior acquired knowledge on play, transitional psychoanalysis to work the handling of the transference, free association, and emergence of unconscious material (dream material) to deepen the analytic process and to engage the patient further in the analytic process. In addition, the candidates will learn how to pay close attention to the countertransference and the ways in which disengagement, acting out and acting in the transference might speak to subtle ways of resistance and counter-resistance.

Workshop – The Pulse to Write (non – credit workshop through Year 3 and 4)

Course Description: In this ongoing workshop, we attend to the composition of psychoanalytic writing with the express goal of converting our own clinical experience, through drafting, revision, and workshopping, into structured texts. Theoretical concerns and questions of technique are subordinated to discussions on how pieces are made and remade, which implies that understanding this might not only be useful in maintaining our own writing practice, but rather essential to deepening our understanding of patients and case material. Articles and essays will include contemporary analysts and writers who demonstrate exemplary skills in composition and craft or who may propel our thinking on these themes. In emphasizing the practice of writing, we hope for you—acting as readers and receivers of material—to develop your own ways of observing clinical phenomena and writing from a perspective that is singularly your own. This group is for clinicians who would like to concretize their writing practice, develop habits of editing and revision, and think through questions of genre and form.

Course Objectives: Upon completion of this course (spanning Fall Year 3 through Spring Year 4), participants will be able to demonstrate exemplary clinical writing based on an understanding of the creative process involved in converting therapeutic phenomena into structured texts. Participants will also be able to apply compositional and editing skills acquired in writing exercises to compose long-form clinical text of publishable quality. Participants will learn to describe one’s experience of attending to unconscious processes during the clinical encounter and subsequent selecting, drafting, editing, and revising of material.

Workshop – The Pulse to Write (non – credit workshop through Year 3 and 4)

4A1: Professional Ethics and Boundaries(15 sessions)

Course Description: This course concentrates on professional ethics and the ethical practice of psychoanalysis. To take a deep look at contemporary ethical standards, questions and issues, the course begins by tracing their history and development. Once candidates are grounded in professional standards, they are exposed to multiple perspectives on psychoanalytic ethical questions, clinical situations, and the specific important issue of boundaries and boundary violations. The course includes published case material to guide in depth discussions of ethical and boundary questions as they arise in clinical practice. The fourth-year candidates draw on their clinical work and their prior coursework on psychoanalytic process and technique.

Course Objectives: By the end of this fifteen-week course, the candidates will be able to define contemporary professional ethical standards, national and international, as well as situate these within a historical perspective. They will be able to discuss contemporary questions and debates in professional clinical practice. Candidates will also be familiar with how to maintain, and how and when to seek professional guidance and/or supervision about, ethical standards and boundaries in clinical practice.

4A2: Economic Approaches to The Drives and Affect: From Freud’s Project of Scientific Psychology to Contemporary Neuropsychoanalysis (7 sessions)

Course Description: This seminar will review Freud’s “Project for a Scientific Psychology” to contrast and discuss considering contemporary neuroscientific knowledge which in turn will help the candidate to listen to the economics of complains in a more enhanced way. In reading and discussing side by side, Freud’s project and the contemporary discoveries of neurology as presented by Mark Solms and others, this seminar will add more texture to the analytic listening of the patient’s presentations and the economics of pleasure and pain which were Freud’s constant preoccupation during his lifetime. In specific Freud’s conception of “quantity” and “free energy” “entropy” “homeostasis” and the “principle of neuronal inertia” “contact barriers” “excitation” “arousal” “satisfaction” “bound (inhibited) cathexis” “secondary process” “working memory” “freely mobile cathexis” and finally “consciousness” are going to be discussed during the lectures as well as during the presentation of clinical material.

Course Objectives: By the end of these 7 weeks, the candidate will be able to define and discuss in Freud’s project as well as in the contemporary neuropsychoanalytic literature the psychoanalytic concepts of the Freudian economics (mentioned above) in order to deepen their understanding of the intersection of the soma and the psyche. The candidates will be able to demonstrate this understanding during their discussion of their clinical material.

4A3: Psychosis and Ethno-Analysis: Freudian, Lacanian and Post-Lacanian Perspectives on the Research and Treatment of Psychosis and Psychotic States (8 weeks)

Course Description: For Freud transference served as the sine qua non of psychoanalysis. From his theoretical perspective meaningful object relations emerged after traversing the oedipal situation and transference was in the realm of object relations. Thus, since psychotics had not successfully resolved oedipal dynamics, their object relations remained so impoverished that transferential object configurations could not be established, hence psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis was impossible. Since Freud’s time psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis has been approached from a myriad of different approaches and by countless prominent psychoanalysts. This seminar presents a brief survey of several prominent psychoanalytic approaches to the treatment of psychosis as a backdrop to detailing a psychoanalytically/transference based ethnographic study of the sociocultural dynamic and treatment of psychosis in the community. The seminar investigates this question of the treatment of psychosis and transference using techniques in ethno-analytic research. Ethno-analytic research combines: 1. an anthropological and ethnographic approach to considering psychosis in social context using observation of the clinical experience of those who work with psychosis and psychotic states; 2. a clinical approach to examining techniques for working with psychosis that derive from Freudian, Lacanian, and Post-Lacanian orientations. We pilot this methodology by forming working groups (three to four members each) who present findings at the seminar’s completion.

Course Objectives: By the end of this fifteen-week course, the candidates will be able to define contemporary professional ethical standards, national and international, as well as situate these within a historical perspective. They will be able to discuss contemporary questions and debates in professional clinical practice. Candidates will also be familiar with how to maintain, and how and when to seek professional guidance and/or supervision about, ethical standards and boundaries in clinical practice.

4B1: Research Methodology on The Psyche-Soma in the Contemporary Overload of Excess of Stimulation – The Viral and the Virtual Impact (8 sessions)

Course Description: The contemporary world, imbued with incalculable threats (pandemics, racial discords, chaotic rise of populism, telescopic wealth, climate change and virtuality) has birthed new forms of enjoyment, desire, and jouissance. Based on the findings from an analytic-ethnographic research group On the pandemic and its vicissitudes at Rose Hill this seminar explores the phenomenological, clinical and metapsychological phenomena revealed by the pandemic. In keeping with the Lacanian notion of the Real and Freudian unheimlich, we examine the Real Traumatic of the pandemic and how it affects our capacity to work analytically, our transference, countertransference, defenses, our soma-psyche, ultimately our drives, in as much as the pandemic transposes analytical setting from the couch into the virtual. In weekly meetings the research group delves into the vicissitudes of the pandemic, and virtuality in relation to clinical vignettes, and revisits concepts of disavowal, somatization, hypochondria, melancholia, addiction, disaffection, perversion, psychosis and jouissance as some of the pandemic related phenomena we have registered to date. Psychoanalytic research methodology is explored.

Course Objectives: Candidates will learn about psychoanalytic research methodology and the specific manner, in which this methodology is used in the research that is studied. Metapsychological and clinically highly relevant concepts such as disavowal, hypochondria, melancholia, disaffection, psychosis etc . from clinical material and lived experience of analysts and clinicians from the study group will be investigated. Candidates will be able to relate their own (clinical and private) experience (transference and countertransference) to the pandemic as an incursion of the Real into the mind and body.

4B2: Research Methodology and The Psyche-Soma in the Contemporary Overload of Excess of Stimulation in Children and Adolescents (7 sessions)

Course Description: The contemporary world with its exigencies (pandemic, virtuality, metaverse etc.) poses insurmountable tasks on our psyche-soma in navigating the contemporary forms of pleasure, usually expressed in instant gratification, especially in children and adolescents as their drives and bodies are yet to become formed. In keeping with our research group on Infant and Adolescent Language and using Lacanian and post-Lacanian notions of the Unconscious, this seminar will address the contemporary articulations and significations of children and adolescent psychological suffering from a clinical research material.

Course Objectives: This course will provide candidates with a psychoanalytic research methodology and the specific manner in which this methodology is used in the research that is studied. Metapsychological and clinically highly relevant concepts such as disavowal, hypochondria, melancholia, addiction, disaffection, psychosis etc. in children and adolescents, from clinical material and lived experience of analysts and clinicians from the study group will be investigated. Candidates will be able to reflect on their own clinical and private experience (transference and countertransference).

4B3A: Sociocultural Influence on Growth and Psychopathology of The Crisis of Ideals of The Paternal Order: Contri with Freud – The contemporary Subject and the Formation of the Contemporary Psychoanalyst (8 sessions)

Course Description: Giacomo B. Contri further develops Freud’s thoughts on ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ around five terms: friends, tomorrow, Freudian syllogism, partnership, vocation/calling. Contri starts by declaring as false the Freudian/Lacanian idea that man’s experience revolves around lack and introduces a notion of friendship of thought. Contri goes on to offer a new definition of the drive (Trieb), which Freud articulated as drive-source-object-aim. It is a device of thought in its own sense: the drive is Freudian syllogism. We only exist in partnership with each other. Being partners in thought is a vocation/calling. In following Freud in ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, Contri suggests that the formation of a psychoanalyst is a vocation/calling. Finally, Contri proposes recommendations for psychoanalytic training.

Course Objectives: Upon the completion of this seminar, the candidates will be able to discuss the formation of the analyst following Contri’s recommendations on friendship, tomorrow, Freudian syllogism, partnership, and vocation/calling in our contemporary world of crisis of ideals and of the paternal order.

4B3B: Sociocultural Influence on Growth and Psychopathology of the Crisis of Ideals of the Paternal Order – Le Soldat(8 sessions)

Course Description: The contemporary subject has been desperately trying to survive and secure some satisfaction in combating the overwhelming climate of ethical and political impotence, and the lack of a solid paternal order, especially highlighted in the pandemic, where tweet and truth have become fungible. This seminar explores the new ideals of the contemporary world, the psychopathic patriarch and its impact on the mind and body of the individual that ostensibly finds solution in identification with the impotent rules of the psychopathic leader, like Eichmann in his (in)voluntary servitude towards the Nazis. The relation between the ego and ego-ideal in the individual and group formation processes will be addressed. Psychoanalytic ethics may open a breach out of subjective servitude.

Course Objectives: Candidates will be able to theorize the contemporary subject, the malaise of the contemporary individual in the interplay between the social and the psyche, i.e., the drive and the Other/the Environment.

4B4: Totem and Tattoo – Contemporary Signification in Adolescence (7 sessions)

Course Description: Freud’s 1912 masterpiece brought psychoanalysis to the study of social morays, to the signifiers and prohibitions of cultures and institutions. In the contemporary world of technology and virtuality, the signifiers of a body without limits and a disaffected psyche outside the confines of the social have led to a vast alteration/annihilation of the subjects of Freud’s study. This seminar explores the psychoanalytic and psychosomatic consequences, both theoretical and clinical, of the search for pleasure in this altered world of totems of virtual limitlessness and infinitely customizable taboos.

Course Objectives: By the end of this seminar, candidates will be able to apply clinically an understanding of the complications, particularly for adolescents, of the contemporary world in which the signifiers of a body without limits and a disaffected psyche have brought to our consulting rooms a new patient, requiring an altered form of therapeutic engagement. T4A Clinical Seminar – Late Phase in Analysis with Adult Patients- Terminable and Interminable Phase (15 sessions) Course Description: During this clinical seminar case material of the late/advanced phase in analysis is presented. The focus remains in the tracking of the transference-countertransference interplays as well as in the listening to the resistance-counter-resistance during the advanced phase in analysis with adult patients. Dream material and capacity for free association will be the indicators of the deepening of the material expected to be present at this phase in analysis. This phase being a time of mourning, recognition of limitations and lowering of castration anxieties will be crucial factors to entering termination phase. Resistance and counter-resistance will be discussed as the stopping points to the work of mourning and to the resolution of the transference.

Course Objectives: By the end of these 15 weeks, the candidates will be able to locate moments of impasses in their case material and to discuss the transference-countertransference behind these stalemates that impede the advancing of the process to later stages of analysis. Candidates will also be able to discuss the work of mourning and the regressive pulls in analysis in general. The candidates will be able to locate the indicators when an analytic case reaches its final phase. The candidates will also be able to discuss the analyst’s resistances to termination and the regressive pulls that could impede the process if these were to stay undetected.

T4B: Clinical Seminar – Late Phase and Termination Issues in Working Analytically with Children and Adolescents (15 sessions)

Course Description: During this clinical seminar, children and adolescent case material will be presented of late/advanced phase in analysis. The transference-countertransference interplays will be presented and discussed as these relate to acting(s) in the transference and the body as well as various examples of acting(s) out during the late phase and regressive moves. Play and dream material will be assessed as the children’s and adolescent’s developing capacity for free association. These will be the indicators of the deepening of the material expected to be present at this phase in analysis. Termination as the phase of mourning will be discussed. Resistance and counter-resistance will be discussed as the stopping points to the work of mourning and termination.

Course Objectives: By the end of these 15 weeks, the candidates will be able to discuss issues of difficulties to mourn the analyst, separation/individuation and regressive acting outs during the late phase of their children and adolescent case material. Candidates will be able to discuss the transference-countertransference behind these stalemates impeding the advancing of the process to advanced stages of analysis. The candidates will also be able to discuss the analyst’s resistances to termination and the regressive pulls that could impede the analytic process