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 relationships examines the interface between interpersonal dynamics and intrapsychic experience.

The program approaches relationship 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 foster both intrapsychic and interpersonal change.

The curriculum integrates psychoanalytic, object relations, and small-group theory with insights from attachment, neuroscience, and research literature. It is intended for clinicians seeking expertise in couple and family therapy.

Two-Year Certificate Program

Year One

The first year runs for 30 weeks, generally from October through June.

1. Weekly seminar: Selected readings are integrated with observation and discussion of recorded faculty interviews with couples and families. The seminar covers clinical observation, theory, and treatment technique.
2. Clinical observation: Participants view and discuss recorded couple and family consultations in conjunction with weekly readings.
3. Theoretical study: Psychoanalytic ideas associated with Freud, Bion, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Kernberg, and others are applied to couple and family treatment. Topics include sexual health and dysfunction, infidelity, acting out, inhibition, unresolved attachments, and separation.
4. Treatment technique: Participants examine the beginning, middle, and later phases of treatment, including the therapeutic frame, transference, countertransference, resistance, enactments, disillusionment, family transitions, and treatment termination.
5. Individual supervision: Participants complete 30 hours of weekly supervision with selected program faculty while treating a couple or family.

Year Two

The second year extends the first year’s concepts through supervised clinical application.

1. Group case conference: Participants attend a rotating case conference every other week for 15 weeks from October through June. Specialized readings address subjects selected by the group.
2. Individual supervision: Participants complete another 30 hours of weekly supervision with selected program faculty while treating a couple or family.

Continuing Education Option for Advanced Clinicians

An educational option may occasionally be available to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists with postgraduate training, and other experienced clinicians. Participants attend the first-year seminar without the supervision requirement.

This option may provide continuing education credit for eligible physicians, psychologists, and social workers, but it does not lead to a certificate of completion. The full two-year program is required to learn the modality comprehensively.

Introductory Course: Couple and Family Therapy Core Concepts

The introductory course offers a brief orientation to working reflectively with couples and families. It is intended for clinicians considering work in this modality or seeking a review of its central concepts.

Learning Goals

1. Explore theoretical concepts used in the program, including projective identification, basic unconscious assumptions, marital fit, and therapist countertransference.
2. Learn a framework for organizing information that emerges during couple and family sessions.
3. Study recorded consultations, with attention to relationship dynamics, the clinician’s reactions, and the therapist’s technique.
4. Meet colleagues interested in psychoanalytic couple and family work.