Elective: Field

Adult Psychoanalytic Training (APT)
2019-20, 3rd Trimester — Fridays, 3:30-5:00pm
Ann De Lancey, PhD
Ronald W. Levin, MD
Margaret Crastnopol, PhD
Píyale Cömert, PhD
Steve Engelberg

View Whole Syllabus

Introduction

This course, designed by the cohort, has three distinct yet related sections. The first four weeks will focus on learning some of the most recently remerging psychoanalytic theory. The next four weeks will be “Coffee with an Analyst”. During this time, we will interview four analysts on their perspectives on theory, their practices over decades, and the development of their sense of analytic identity. The final three weeks will be focused on our own emerging sense of analytic identity in ourselves as psychotherapists. We will address our own development as a learning cohort, as individual professionals, and our emerging identities as psychoanalysts.

Section I – Field Theory: Maureen Pendras, MSW and Ann De Lancey, PhD

Classes 1-4.

[Detailed Learning Objectives, Clinical Impact of the Knowledge or Skills Learned, and References will be distributed to class separately]

Introduction and Overview

Welcome to the Field Theory part of your elective. We are excited to explore and learn about this topic together.

Antonio Ferro has likened the analytic process to cooking, and to the unique character of what any dyad creates together.  We consider this course in a similar vein: our own attempts to create something together with you: something that is changed through the process of being and talking together and that is different from and more than the sum total of its ingredients.

Civitarese’s Two Favorite Metaphors

From Civitarese, G. (2019). An Apocryphal Dictionary of Psychoanalysis.  New York: Routledge.

Three Blind Mice

Three blind mice. Three blind mice.
See how they run. See how they run.
They all ran after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,
Did you ever see such a sight in your life,
As three blind mice?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGfH1lhAZbA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sbCjq3csWc

Peanuts

A Penny for your Thoughts?

Google Search — Charlie Brown and Lucy: A Penny for Your Thoughts

Section II – Coffee with an Analyst

Classes 5-8 will address the following topics regarding development of analytic identity: Changes over time in regards to theory and practice, how the work of psychoanalysis has impacted sense of self and intimate relationships, wisdom gained over time, the intersection of psychoanalysis with social and political issues, beliefs on the healing effectives of psychoanalysis.

Section III – Goodbye Process
Maureen Pendras, MSW

Learning Objectives

1. Clinical associates will learn the primary concepts of psychoanalytic field theory, thus enabling them to expand their theoretical repertoire and practice options for enhanced patient outcome.
2. Clinical associates will reflect on the deeply personal practice of psychoanalysis with some of our most experienced analysts. Reflection on the deeply personal practice of psychoanalysis will result in greater reflective functioning and increased capacity to illicit and contain patient and one’s own material.
3. Clinical associates will reflect on the four years of training as a group process, practicing the active self-reflection, critical thinking, and communication of affective experience so integral to the practice of psychoanalysis. Engagement in group process discussions, on the four years of training, will result in increased capacity for interpersonal communication of affective understanding, a key aspect of the patient’s and analyst’s experience of the therapeutic relationship.
4. Clinical associates will practice and reflect upon the act of termination with each other as individuals and a cohort, as an experience of the parallel process of termination with patients, and the active process of mourning. This will result in an increased capacity to metabolize patients’ experience of grief and loss.

March 20, 2020 — The Spirit of Field Theory

Presenters: Maureen Pendras, MSW, Ann De Lancey, PhD

[33 pages]

“Das Heimlich.” The Uncanny. (2015). (Il Perturbante). Societá Psicoanalitica Italiana.

Ferro, A. & Nicoli, L. (2017). Identity. The New Analyst’s Guide to the Galaxy. New York: Routledge, 1-9.

Ferro, A. & Nicoli, L. (2017). The rules of the game. The New Analyst’s Guide to the Galaxy. New York: Routledge, 11-23.

Ferro, A. (2010). Simone’s Complaisant Mutism and the Monsters: A Clinical Illustration of How to Work in the “Field of Dreams”. Canadian J. Psychoanal., 18(2):216-224.