Curriculum Goals

At the end of the program, participants will have grown as clinicians in the following ways:

1. They will have gained a greater in-depth grounding in selected classic and contemporary psychoanalytic, object relations, and small group theory. Additional readings will be selected from the growing attachment, neuroscience, and couples research literature informing normal individual and relationship development, psychopathology, and treatment.

2. They will have deepened their therapeutic skills with couples and families. They will have become more proficient at:

   • Assessing couples and families and evaluating their process
   • Enhancing constructive communication within the family group
   • Transforming conflict and blame into reflection and introspection
   • Developing a therapeutic frame and working alliance
   • Working with individual and couple resistance to treatment and insight
   • Using an understanding of transference, countertransference, and unconscious assumptions
   • Recognizing and managing intrapsychic and interpersonal splitting
   • Facilitating adaptive affect and behavioral regulation
   • Using interpretation
   • Thinking more flexibly about how the intrapsychic underlies the interpersonal and how the interpersonal provides a window into the intrapsychic

3. They will have strengthened their capacity to contain and process intensity within the therapeutic hour. The externalized interpersonal drama of couple and family therapy sessions develops new skills in recognizing unconscious and projective processes. This enhanced ability also benefits and deepens work in individual psychotherapy.