Curriculum

Our curriculum begins with a two-year block taken by all students. For students wishing to continue their training, some may opt to go on to a third and fourth year in accordance with the requirements of full analytic training; others might elect a third year of intensive relational child and family training; and still others might wish to combine these two longer models. 

In keeping with our belief that dialogue and mutual influence should be central to psychoanalysis, we view a Relational curriculum as a manifestation of both core principles and continual change.  Each new cohort brings different life experiences and cultural contexts, and new insights and strengths, as well as differing needs in terms of clinical training.  Faculty themselves are hopefully engaged in lifelong learning and professional development, thus developing new perspectives and fresh ways to approach the material, and we continually engage additional instructors.  

Thus, we see the curriculum as a flexible, though thoughtfully constructed framework--a living document, necessarily responsive to particular cohorts, cultural contexts, and shifts within the field; as much a continually evolving series of questions to be engaged as an attempt to confer a grounding in ethical, thoughtful, and theoretically and culturally literate practice. The essentials of our prototype curriculum appear below:

The following is an outline of what we anticipate offering.  Please note that this is an evolving process, and we may make modifications to what is listed here.

IRPP Curriculum, updated August 2021

Year One:

Semester 1:     

A.  Foundations of psychotherapy from a Relational psychoanalytic perspective

B. Who, what, where we are: hybrid course designed to foster a sufficiently safe yet challenging foundation for the formation of a working group.  Introducing ourselves to each other, considering trauma, social location, and complex subjectivities. Forming a working group, thinking about the influence of race and oppression, changing conceptions of gender and sexuality, and the challenges of the present moment 

*Include one three-hour segment during the fall on the importance of Play in Relational approaches to work with children and adults

C. Small Group supervision (required for year One)

Semester 2:     

A. Development in Context 

B. Clinical illustrations of development in context, and bridging developmental theory and work with adults

C. Small Group supervision (required for year One)

 

Year Two:

Fall:                 

A. History and (R)evolutions in psychoanalytic theory

B. Engaging Difference in the Psychoanalytic Dyad 

C. Individual Supervision

 

Spring:             

A. Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma: From Parent to Child 

B. Building on theory: Elements of Relational technique

C. Individual Supervision

                     

*Optional Child Intensive Year -- can be taken instead of or alongside Year 3 of the full analytic training

Fall:                

A. Child's play embedded in context, working with parental subjectivity

B. Case conference

Spring:           

A. Development Reworked: Emergence and Adolescence  

B. Case conference

 

 Year Three:

Fall:                 

A. Treating trauma and dissociation  

B. Relational theory 2 (e.g., long or shorter courses, more in-depth re particular branches of relational theory)

C. Case conference 

                       

Spring:             

A. Relational Theory 3:  (e.g., Evolution of transference and countertransference; Varieties of intersubjectivity)

B. Advanced Relational Technique

C. Case conference 

Year Four:        

Fall:                 

A. Contemporary topics (e.g., Spirituality; working in pandemic; influences of social media; climate change)

B. Gender and Sexuality

C. Case conference

Spring:            

A. From Consulting Room to Community 

B. Relational Theory: Consolidation and New Questions

C. Case conference