The Washington Psychoanalytic Institute 2008–2009

Sample Advanced Elective Offerings

Brain Science and Psychoanalysis

Recent advances in neurodevelopment, neurochemistry, neuroimaging, and neurobiology are explored for their contributions to understanding cognitive and social learning, memory, affect regulation, responses to trauma, and dream theory. Each session integrates findings from brain science with psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Ten monthly meetings use a salon format, with participants rotating as discussion leaders. Center members and participants from the Baltimore-Washington Center are encouraged to join the effort to synthesize new knowledge.

Contemporary Gender Theory and Clinical Implications

This course studies contemporary gender theory and its clinical implications, emphasizing psychoanalytic literature published since 1990 and representing diverse theoretical perspectives.

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Literature

This course considers what analysts can learn about the human condition from fiction and what psychoanalysis can contribute to interpreting literary texts. Readings may include short stories, novellas, plays, or manageable sections of classical and contemporary novels.

Faculty members and advanced candidates participate. Each member selects a reading and initiates discussion for one session. Enrollment is limited to five advanced candidates.

Psychoanalytic Theory of Creativity

This long-standing group has studied psychoanalytic contributions to understanding creativity in literature, art, history, filmmaking, and biography, usually through the lives, works, and social contexts of exceptionally creative people.

The group now plans to focus more closely on environments in which creative people and outcomes arise, beginning with organizations where innovation in research and development is a psychological and economic priority. Topics include group processes and the conditions that encourage or inhibit unconventional thinking.

Meetings are held on the first and third Saturdays of each month from 10:00 to 11:30 a.m.

Introduction to André Green

An introduction to the work of French psychoanalyst André Green, focusing on his thinking about narcissism and borderline personality.

In Treatment

This monthly discussion group watches and examines clinical sessions from the television series In Treatment, following an adolescent case through a nine-week treatment. Each approximately 25-minute episode is paired with 50 minutes of discussion.

The group compares possible treatment strategies within a single clinical hour, attending to the moment-by-moment process between therapist and patient and the rationale behind different responses to clinical material.

Couple Psychotherapy Case Discussion Group

Participants rotate responsibility for presenting a brief couple-case summary and session process notes. The group explores couple dynamics, develops theoretical understanding, and considers possible interventions.

The group is intended for psychoanalysts experienced in couple therapy and is limited to eight psychoanalysts and candidates affiliated with the Center as full or corresponding members.

Group and Organizational Dynamics Study Group

The group combines readings with discussion of dynamics in organizations familiar to its members. Its central question is what a psychoanalytic perspective can add to organizational consultation.

Participation is open to analyst and candidate members and, with the group’s permission, other interested people.

The Baby in All of Us

Learning about primitively organized patients, as well as our own primitive states, through the lens of infant observation.

This seminar considers how clinicians can work with severely distressed or regressed patients, including those who withdraw physically or experience attacks of rage. It introduces the principles of Infant Observation developed by Esther Bick in London in 1948.

Participants read introductory articles, watch video excerpts, hear accounts from infant observers, and discuss clinical material involving seriously disturbed patients. The seminar examines similarities between infant distress and highly regressed patient states, including how clinicians contain the anxieties these encounters evoke and turn their experiences into meaningful interventions.

Neuropsychoanalysis

This established group includes members of the Washington and Baltimore-Washington institutes. Participants read and discuss four accessible, nontechnical books each year, averaging approximately 125 pages per month.

Past selections included works on stress and coping, neurological disorders, neuroscience and knowledge, and dialogue between contemplative traditions and science.

Case Conference: Classical Technique

This conference for graduate analysts aims to deepen understanding of classical technique. Earle Baughman, MD, presents a case over five sessions, with Stephen Rosenblum, MD, serving as discussant.

Sessions are scheduled for September, October, February, March, and April, with May reserved for inclement weather. Meetings take place at 8:15 p.m. on the third Wednesday of the designated month.

Relationship Between Theory and Clinical Practice: A Kleinian Perspective

Participants study Kleinian thought and technique using clinical material they present. Five principal concepts guide the course:

• Projective identification
• Interpretation
• Transference and countertransference
• Paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions
• The analytic setting

Psychoanalytic Understanding, Treatment, and Research of Anxiety and Panic

This study group examines psychoanalytic approaches to anxiety and panic. It begins with Freud’s classical understanding of anxiety and follows the development of psychoanalytic thinking through later theory, technique, and research.

Because the literature is extensive, participants determine the detailed reading list according to their interests.

Case Conference: Analytic Technique

This conference for graduate analysts and advanced candidates seeks to deepen understanding of analytic technique. Richard Waugaman, MD, presents a case over three sessions, with Judith F. Chused, MD, as discussant.

The group studies material from a series of sessions, considering the meanings conveyed between analyst and patient and the ways an analyst might respond. Meetings are held from 8:00 to 9:30 p.m. on the third Wednesday of the month.

History of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute

This study group examines the history of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute and Society and the development of the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. Topics include the 1948 division into the Washington and Baltimore institutes, the postwar environment in which psychoanalysis flourished, the attempted establishment of the Washington Association for Psychoanalytic Education in the 1970s, and the Center’s development in the early 2000s.

If time permits, the group also considers public ethical infractions that substantially affected the Institute. Its purpose is to understand the forces behind organizational change, their continuing effects, and how historical knowledge may help the organization achieve its goals and avoid repeating earlier problems.

The group meets on the third Wednesday of each month for seven weeks and may continue into the next semester if necessary.

Objectives

1. Participants will become knowledgeable about the history of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute from 1948 onward.
2. Participants will be able to identify how earlier organizational difficulties affect the current functioning of the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis.

Seminar on Dissociative Processes

This three-session survey seminar uses workshop presentations, focused readings, and videotaped patient interviews to examine dissociation. It considers research suggesting that emotional unresponsiveness may be an especially important predictor of adult dissociation.

The course uses infant research, attachment research, affective neuroscience, cognitive theory, and psychoanalytic theory to explore models based on states of mind or self-states. These models are applied to dissociation and to difficult clinical phenomena such as sadomasochism, self-harm, eating disorders, and addiction.

The seminar met monthly from January through March 2009 and was not planned for 2009–2010.

Couple Psychotherapy Case Discussion Group

This group is designed for clinicians interested in discussing couple case material. Its purposes are to explore couple dynamics, strengthen theoretical understanding, and consider possible interventions.

Participants rotate responsibility for presenting a brief case summary and session process notes. The group is limited to eight members to support in-depth discussion and meets from 8:00 to 9:30 p.m. on the third Wednesday of each month from September through April.

Primo Levi’s Contribution to the Understanding of Human Nature

Across seven meetings, participants closely read Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and selections from The Drowned and the Saved. The group examines how concentration-camp conditions affected victims and perpetrators.

Topics include the suppression of earlier moral assumptions, shame, guilt, isolation, survival strategies, self-deception, and the distortions perpetrators may use to explain their actions. The course connects these extreme conditions with clinical work involving people who endured or witnessed severe abuse in childhood.

Levi’s way of coping with his 11-month experience is also considered for what it may reveal about treatment and human nature. Clinical material is presented.