Contemporary Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Therapy Training Program

Overview

This program is designed to enhance clinicians’ ability to work with couples and families. Its focus on relationship treatment examines the interface between interpersonal and intrapsychic experience.

The program views interpersonal struggles as expressions of unresolved individual assumptions and anxieties that may be unconsciously shared and transposed onto relationships. Participants learn to organize clinical material at a deeper theoretical level and develop techniques that help couples and families move from polarized conflict toward insight, change, and more adaptive ways of relating.

The program has a 40-year history of training area clinicians. Its approach grew from research with couples and families at the National Institute of Mental Health and integrates psychoanalytic, object-relations, and small-group theory. The contemporary curriculum also incorporates insights from attachment, neuroscience, and research literature.

Two Training Options

Option One: Two-Year Certificate Program

Year One

1. Weekly seminar: Selected readings are integrated with observation and discussion of recorded faculty interviews with couples and families. The seminar meets on Tuesdays from 7:00 to 9:30 p.m. at the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis for 30 weeks, from October through June.
2. Clinical observation: Participants view recordings of couples and families, connecting the presentations with weekly theoretical readings.
3. Theoretical readings: The work of Freud, Bion, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Kernberg, and others is applied to couple and family treatment. Topics include sexual health and dysfunction, infidelity, acting out, inhibition, unresolved oedipal attachments, and separation.
4. Treatment technique: Participants review the beginning, middle, and later phases of treatment, including establishing and maintaining the treatment frame; working with transference, countertransference, and resistance; exploring enactments and disillusionment; navigating family phase transitions; and managing premature or mutual termination.
5. Individual supervision: Weekly supervision of work with a couple or family is provided by selected program faculty for 30 hours.

Year Two

1. Rotating group case conference: Participants meet every other week for 15 weeks from October through June. The conference reinforces first-year concepts through participants’ clinical work and includes specialized readings on topics selected by the group.
2. Individual supervision: Weekly supervision of work with a couple or family is provided by selected program faculty for 30 hours.

Option Two: Educational Experience for Advanced Clinicians

This option is intended for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists with postgraduate training, and seasoned clinicians seeking exposure to this therapeutic approach. Participants attend the first-year weekly seminar without a supervision requirement. No certificate is awarded, but 50 continuing medical education credits are available.

Further Information

Contact Linda Grey, MSN, at 703-533-1359.