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 interpersonal struggles as expressions of unresolved individual assumptions and anxieties that may be unconsciously shared and transposed onto relationships. These conflicts can interfere with healthy bonds and with navigating developmental phases in couples and families.

Training helps participants organize clinical material at a deeper theoretical level and develop the technical skills needed to foster insight and change. The aim is to help couples and families move from polarized struggles toward resolving shared underlying anxieties and developing more adaptive ways of relating.

The program has a 40-year history of training 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 curriculum also incorporates insights from attachment studies, neuroscience, and contemporary research.

Two Training Options

Option One: Two-Year Certificate Program

First year

1. A 30-week seminar meeting Tuesdays from 7:00 to 9:30 p.m., October through June. Selected readings are integrated with observation and discussion of recorded faculty interviews with couples and families.

   • Clinical observation: Participants view recordings of couples and families and relate the clinical material to weekly theoretical readings.
   • Theoretical readings: 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 oedipal attachments, separation, and the effects of unresolved oedipal issues on relationships.
   • Treatment technique: The course examines the beginning, middle, and later phases of treatment. Subjects include establishing and maintaining the treatment frame; transference and countertransference; resistance; enactments; disillusionment; family transitions; and premature or mutual termination.
2. Weekly individual supervision of work with a couple or family, totaling 30 hours with selected program faculty.

Second year

1. A rotating group case conference held every other week for 15 weeks from October through June, meeting from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. The conference reinforces first-year concepts through participants’ clinical work and includes specialized readings on topics selected by the group.
2. Weekly individual supervision of work with a couple or family, totaling 30 hours with selected program faculty.

Option Two: Continuing Medical Education for Advanced Clinicians

This option is intended for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists with postgraduate training, and experienced clinicians seeking exposure to this approach. Participants attend the first-year weekly seminar without a supervision requirement. This option does not award a certificate, but provides 50 continuing medical education credits.

Further Information

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