PHILOSOPHY

For the Northern Rockies Psychoanalytic Institute, the discoveries of Sigmund Freud maintain a core or primary position, while subsequent psychoanalytic schools of thought each augment and in certain ways modify the other as well as modifying Freudian thought, all contributing to a complex navigation of what must remain human mystery. As well, these burgeoning developments have not only extended treatment efficacy with the classical neurotic patient but have also extended psychoanalytic reach to the full range of emotional disorders. Particular schools of thought and theorists who occupy the attention of NRPI include but are not limited to - after Freud - Lacan, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Meltzer and British Object Relations in general, Jung, Searles, Ogden, Bollas, A. Green, Spotnitz, Meadow, R. Marshall, and Modern Psychoanalysis in general, Eigen, as well as the contributions of intersubjectivity and relationalism.

Embedded in psychoanalytic thought is the fundamental Kantian revelation that empiricism always is necessary to understanding and experience while it is also limited in its capacity to apprehend what, for brevity's sake, we might call infinity. We are always obligated to validate what we can, while resisting the temptation to misrecognize new discoveries as final answers or as necessarily invalidating earlier conceptual schemata. Thus, NRPI attempts to build bridges with other disciplines in the aim of each occupying its place of expertise and capacity to inform the other.

At NRPI, we have instituted an ongoing symposium, which expresses a core community ethos, in which our differing and sometimes outright competing points of view are presented regularly to one another with the aim of each presenter demonstrating to his or her interlocutors, in as experience-near a way as possible, the elements of his or her theory and practice.

William James described pragmatism as a blending of rationalism and empiricism, of worlds of ideas and worlds of phenomena observable or knowable through the senses, in such a way that a theory is only acceptable or defensible when it can be shown how it manifests itself in a way that is useful and does good.  Ultimately, this is a really simple and elegant idea, but one whose execution ultimately proves to be daunting intellectually.   Such a philosophy can be easily derailed by one’s repudiated but enacted Oedipal and sibling rivalries.  This unconscious motivation of a quest for victory or superiority, when it is denied and enacted, interferes with receptivity to logic and meaning, as well as interfering with  personal responsibility essential to psychoanalytic learning.

When the pragmatically based symposium is deployed, as we have begun at NRPI, speakers are surprisingly challenged to be exquisitely clear, as experience-near in their explanations as possible, and to take no presuppositions for granted.  Topics addressed include:

• What is drive and is the concept relevant today?

• What of the castration and Oedipus complexes, both from Freudian and Lacanian perspectives? And what of the Kleinian?

• Have Sullivan’s contributions “re-worked” Freud’s in such a way that a classical analysis is no longer justifiable?

• Have Klein’s and Bion’s theories replaced the centrality of repression, be it secondary or primary, with splitting, introjection and projective identification? Or are Klein’s and Bion’s oeuvres to be understood as addenda to Freud?

• Do the contributions of the Modern school, with its emphasis on emotional induction, narcissistic and affective transference, and methods of psychological reflection spontaneously accomplish more Freudian undertakings?  Or do those contributions offer something unique which augment others?

• Is there an unconscious fantasy that, if left unconstructed in the sense of Freud’s “Constructions in Analysis” and constituted by primary process thinking, will derail and impoverish even the strongest ego and the most emotionally attuned self?

• Are there archetypal self-elaborations that are not spontaneously addressed through any other than a Jungian perspective, and which we ignore at our own impoverishment?

NRPI’s faculty represents a number of varying schools of thought: Freudian, Lacanian, interpersonal/relational, object relations (especially emphasizing Klein, Bion and Winnicott), Jungian, and “Modern Psychoanalytic.”  Can we effectively intellectually deploy a Jamesian pragmatism that holds our clinical and theoretical feet to a scholarly and experiential fire? In this already demanding task, what will we do with the incursions of rivalries whose enactments blind one or another of us at a given time, especially since one so blinded tends to possess a compensatory and falsely self-confident sightedness? We invite exploration of such questions and hold potential answers in receptive and creative suspension.

It is into our symposium atmosphere that NRPI invites creative, self-starting, independent-thinking and integrative students, who will progress through psychoanalytic training at their own pace. Although students may study with us without applying for candidacy, it is upon application for and acceptance into candidacy that each student is matched with a mentor/advisor.  Once the student has completed a first year of studying Freud (a required sequence that continues through the second year), and after participating that first year in our seven (a minimum of five is required for candidates) symposia per year, the student is free to design his/her curriculum with this advisor.  In addition to the required courses, a student may elect courses in such a way that allows her/him to emphasize one or another psychoanalytic school of thought.  Those elective courses may be taken with resident NRPI faculty, or in tutorial situations.  Also, required courses may be taken in independent study and tutorial form, when a course is needed but not currently being offered in the traditional classroom manner.  The candidate’s advisor will help locate the appropriate tutors.
 

Distance Learning

NRPI welcomes distance learners, who “enter” the classroom via telephone/speakerphone.  We have a number of students who study in this way with us.  Distance learners who are accepted into candidacy must at that point travel to Bozeman twice a year for daylong or weekend seminars, which are offered once in each semester.
 

Curriculum requirements

Courses - Twenty courses are required towards graduation as a psychoanalyst.

Personal or Training Analysis – A minimum of 500 total hours of analysis is required, at a minimum frequency of three sessions a week, with that frequency required to last continuously for two years, with a strong recommendation that the entire 500 hour minimum be completed at that frequency.  Clinical and theoretical exceptions exist and should be inquired about.

Control Analyses – Each candidate must complete two control cases with different control analysts, with the analyses to be conducted at the same frequency requirements as the training analysis.  Each control case will meet for a minimum of 50 supervision hours.  Additionally, another 100 supervision hours must be completed, totaling a minimum of 200 hours.

Symposia – Candidates and faculty members will meet seven times in the academic year for presentation and intensive dialogue about quintessential psychoanalytic concepts and practices.  In in-depth discussion, participants will attempt to demonstrate their thinking to one another as each listener attempts to suspend his own conclusions and profoundly empathically receive the communications of each speaker.  This is decidedly not debate or persuasion, but rather the sincerest effort to understand one another and how it is that one can have drawn the conclusions being presented.

Symposium Schedule for 2008-2009 Academic Year: September 29, October, November, January, February, April, May. Candidates must attend a minimum of five of the seven symposia a year.

Throughout the duration of their candidacies, students must be:

1. Continuously enrolled in at least one course per semester, in addition to the semesterly weekend seminars;

2. Continuously in training analysis; and

3. Continuously in supervision, which can be group supervision, (as long as it is understood that group supervision does not preclude any other supervision requirements).