Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Curriculum

The Child and Adolescent Training Program integrates child, adolescent, and adult psychoanalytic study. Candidates examine development across the life cycle while learning how psychoanalytic theory and technique apply to patients at different developmental stages.

The curriculum emphasizes distinguishing normal development from pathology, understanding environmental and constitutional influences, and recognizing how unconscious processes shape clinical interventions with children, adolescents, and their families.

Required Courses

Psychoanalytic Theories of Development

This course considers major psychoanalytic theories of development and the interaction between maturation, constitutional factors, and environmental experience. It explores how disruptions in development may contribute to pathological compromises in mental functioning. Play, fantasy, and action are studied as ways to deepen the analytic process and encourage self-reflection.

Development Illustrated Through Clinical Material

Clinical material is used to examine psychosexual and psychosocial development throughout the life cycle. The course addresses the intrapsychic and interpersonal phenomena associated with the oedipal period, latency, pre-adolescence, middle adolescence, and late adolescence.

Adolescent Continuous Case

An adolescent psychoanalytic case is followed from assessment through the beginning, middle, and termination phases of treatment. Discussion highlights the technical challenges associated with adolescent development.

Child Continuous Case

A child psychoanalytic case is studied longitudinally, allowing candidates to consider assessment, treatment progression, clinical interventions, and developmental change.

Continuing Case Seminar in Psychoanalysis

This required course is offered in conjunction with the Baltimore-Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. Candidates and graduate analysts discuss one or more psychoanalyses, with particular attention to how technique affects treatment progression.

Topics may include:

• Transference and countertransference
• Defense analysis
• Alternative clinical interventions
• The potential effects of interventions on treatment
• Contemporary perspectives on therapeutic action

Clinical Training

Adult-program candidates may undertake a supervised child case even if they are not formally enrolled in the Child and Adolescent Training Program. The case may count toward the clinical cases required for graduation from the adult program when supervised by an approved child and adolescent supervising analyst.

Progression and Graduation

Progression reflects both the candidate’s supervised clinical experience and an evaluation of the candidate’s ability to understand the complexities of psychoanalytic work with children and adolescents.

Graduation requirements include supervised analyses of three patients: one adolescent and two latency-age or pre-latency children. The program indicates that representation of more than one gender is highly desirable. Candidates must complete at least 150 supervisory hours, distributed reasonably among their cases, and are encouraged to work with three different supervisors when possible.

Graduation is based on the candidate’s demonstrated capacity to conduct autonomous psychoanalytic work with children and adolescents.