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202 Psychoanalytic Process – 5 seminars

Seminar Leaders: S. Freke, MD and A. Drassinower, PhD

Course Description

This course will include the discussion of major contributions to psychoanalytic technique reviewing and extending concepts from first year. Concepts and clinical approaches to learn include initiating psychoanalysis, listening, transference, free association, interpretation, and the therapeutic alliance.

Course Objectives

Candidates will learn:

  1. Understand and integrate basic concepts related to analytic technique: assessing the training case; initiating the process; listening to the patient with an ear to the manifest and latent content; facilitation of the transference and free association; use of interpretation and the therapeutic alliance. (1.2 a, 1.2.c, 4.5b).
  2. Discuss concepts of technique using clinical examples which demonstrate knowledge of how to apply the core theories of technique in the analytic interview and analytic process (1.2 f, 1.4.b, 4.2.a, 4.2.e, 4.2.k).

Seminar 1

The Analytic Situation: Initiating and listening to presenting problems

The Seminar will review and address the process of finding control cases and maintaining immersion, as well as listening in the process of initiating psychoanalytic.

Required Readings

Etchegoyen, H. (1991). The Fundamentals Of Psychoanalytic Technique (pp.14-59; 605–613). London: Brunner-Routledge. [Review of assessment and initial stage].

Ehrlich, L.T. (2016). Finding control cases and maintaining immersion: challenges and opportunities. Journal of American Psychoanalytics Association, 64(5), 983-1012.

Seminar 2

Transference

The concept of transference and the conviction of its central importance in the therapeutic process is a unifying theme in psychoanalytic theorizing. None of Freud’s epochal discoveries…has proved to be more heuristically productive or more clinically valuable than his demonstration that human beings regularly and inevitably repeat with the analyst and other important figures in their current lives, patterns of relationship, of fantasy and of conflict with the crucial figures in their childhood their parents and siblings.

Required Readings

Zetzel, E.R. (1956). Current concepts of transference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 37, 369-376.

Loewald, H.W. (1971). The transference neurosis: comments on the concept and the phenomenon. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 19, 54-66.

Baranger, M. (1993). The mind of the analyst: From listening to interpretation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 74, 15-24.

Seminar 3

Free Association

Seminar three will include a brief review of assessing analyzability, and readings on free association: its nature, analytic facilitation and its place in clinical knowledge and psychoanalytic theory.

Required Readings

Freud, S. (1904). Freud’s psycho-analysis procedure. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol, 7, 249-254.

(1909). Five lectures on psycho-analysis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 11, 29-33.

(1923), Two encyclopedia articles. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18, 237-239.

Weinshel, E.M. (1992). Therapeutic technique in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy-similarities and differences: indications, contraindications and initiation. Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, 40, 327-347.

Seminar 4

Interpretation

Seminar four will discuss the what, when and how of interpretation in consultations about and in beginning the analysis, as well as observations of associations and the transference, and ideas in the formation of associations.

Required Readings

Arlow, J.A. (1979). Metaphor and the psychoanalytic situation. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 48, 363-385.

Freud, S. (1937). Constructions in analysis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 23, 255-270.

Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, repeating and working-through. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12, 145-156.

Seminar 5

Therapeutic alliance

The seminar explores the therapeutic alliance and the analytic means for establishing and sustaining it.

Required Readings

Etchegoyen, H. (1999). The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique (pp. 232-258). London: Karnac.

Hanly, C. (1994). Reflections on the Place of the Therapeutic Alliance in Psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,75, 457-467.

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