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As
stated on our philosophy page, it is upon 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.
Below
we have listed classes that our local faculty is prepared to
offer at any time there is enough interest expressed by our
students.
Freud
I – IV
The
teaching of the work of Sigmund Freud in this series takes the
position that not only is Freud still necessary but that
Freud’s discoveries are still at the heart of psychoanalysis.
This point is difficult to make clearly enough in a few words.
Some say that Freud’s teachings are best understood and
practiced when they are “re-worked” through the lenses of
later theoreticians. This course takes the position that
later works serve as addenda to Freud. Sex and aggression,
, the life and death drives, libido and destrudo, the dual drive
theory – however one names them and their expressions, remain
crucial. Transformations of the libido, the defenses
including repression and sublimation; transference and
narcissistic neuroses; the illusory transference cure, free
association and evenly suspended attention: vital concepts all.
Condensation, displacement, overdetermination, manifest and
latent content, the dreamwork, drive derivatives all are still
necessary knowledge. The Oedipus and castration complexes,
metapsychology including the topographical, structural, dynamic
and economic models of the mind, primary and secondary process
thinking, the repetition compulsion and negative therapeutic
reaction are all vibrantly active in society and in the
consulting room.
These
courses will ambitiously undertake a study of the major concepts
Freud developed during his life time.
The
End of Analysis
This
course will begin with the question: How do we know when we have
affected a cure? What becomes of the transference? What is the
best possible outcome for our analysands? In short, we will
explore our aims and goals as analysts. The course will bring
together the defining elements in Lacan’s concept of the end
of the psychoanalytic cure: the crossing of the fundamental
fantasm, the fall of the object, subjective destitution and
mourning. Questions dominating our discussion will center on the
desire of the analyst. We will examine several essays from the
Ecrits: “Variations on the Cure Type,” “Direction of the
Treatment,” and “Position of the Unconscious.” Ms. Linse
will bring in untranslated material from “La Conclusion de la
Cure.”
Interpersonal
theory and psychotherapy of Harry Stack Sullivan
This
course explores the place of Sullivan's interpersonal theory in the
development of psychoanalysis. Basic concepts such as
anxiety, dynamisms,
self-system, and interpersonal developmental theory will be
presented. Additionally, Sullivan's unique contributions
to mental isorder
and psychotherapy will also be covered.
Language
and Psyche
This
course will focus on Lacan’s theory of the relation between
language and the psyche and his use of “the cut” to
terminate sessions and maintain an opening onto the unconscious
as well as such Lacanian techniques as “floating hearing”
and “askew” interpretation. Readings from Lacan’s Ecrits
will include: “Function and Field of Speech and Language,”
“Instance of the Letter,” “Signification of the
Phallus,” “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of
Desire,” and “Logical Time.”
The
Logic of Psychosis
This
course will examine Lacan’s reconceptualization of psychosis
through case studies presented in The Courtil Papers (available
on-line). Covering such concepts as foreclosure of the paternal
function and its consequences, metaphor and metonymy, the mirror
relation, and suppleance or the substitutive structures that can
serve to stabilize the psychotic subject, teaching will center
on the cases to give us grounding in the concrete realities of
the clinic.
Readings
will include Lacan’s Seminar III: Psychoses, “Some Questions
Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” and I
will bring in untranslated materials such as Lacan’s doctoral
dissertation and paper on Les Soeurs Papins. Students should be
familiar with Freud’s case study of Schreber’s memoirs.
Modern
Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice
This
course will explore the relatively little known but steadfastly
nourished theory of personality and treatment as originally
developed by Hyman Spotnitz, Phyllis Meadow, and others, and
being further developed today by Robert Marshall, Jane Snyder,
Rodrigo Barahona and others. The term “Modern
Psychoanalysis” originated to distinguish it from classical
psychoanalysis with the publication of Spotnitz’s Modern
Psychoanalysis of the Schizophrenic Patient. That book,
seminal for this school of thought, address analytic cure with
psychotics, a thing held at the time by classical analysts to be
impossible. This work was quickly applied to the
narcissistic neuroses in general and then, eventually, to an
amended understanding of and treatment of neurotics.
Whether its adherents are in conflict today with Freudian,
classical thought is a matter of dispute and speculation.
Relying primarily on non-interpretive techniques of
psychological reflection, emotional induction as a/the primary
source of data about the analysand, and the ego’s capacities
to bear existence, Modern Psychoanalysis as developed primarily
at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies, the Colorado
Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies, the Philadelphia
School of Psychoanalysis, and the Boston Graduate School of
Psychoanalysis will be studied and explored for its unique
contributions, its potential integration into a more classical
theory versus its possible rendering obsolete certain
quintessential Freudian principles.
Object
relations theorists- Fairbairn, Guntrip, Winnicott
These
three British object relations theorists made important contributions
to psychoanalytic theory and practice. Their work will be
presented in the context of Freudian psychoanalytic theory,
especially an object relations perspective on structural theory,
the understanding and treatment of schizoid conditions, and the
understanding and treatment of children. Special attention
will be paid to their unique contributions on transference and
countertransference.
Psychoanalysis,
infant research, and attachment theory
This
course will explore the importance of infant research,
especially attachment
theory, to psychoanalysis. The contributions of John Bowlby,
Stanley Greenspan, Joseph Lichtenberg, Daniel Segal, Daniel
Stern, and Philip Shaver will be featured.
Psychopathology
in psychoanalytic thought
The
word pathology comes to us from the Greek pathologia, which
means the study of emotions and is defined in Webster’s as: 1.
the study of the essential nature of diseases and esp. of the
structural and functional changes produced by them. 2. something
abnormal a : the anatomic and physiologic deviations from the
normal that constitute disease or characterize a particular
disease. Freud’s papers that are usually classed under the
heading psychopathology might be summed up in general as those
papers dealing with anxiety, the part played by sexuality and
differentiation between neurosis and psychosis, the ultimate
essay being “Inhibition, Symptom, Anxiety.” We will begin
our course this semester with a discussion of what
psychopathology means in terms of our practice: i.e. the
practical uses and the pitfalls of diagnosis. Then we will
explore the structural and functional elements of the neuroses,
psychoses and perversions. The course will end with student
presentations of case studies you have written on current cases,
or literary sources, using what you have discovered through the
course.
Psychopathology-
severe personality disorders (schizoid, borderline, and
narcissistic)
A
unique contribution that psychoanalysis has made to the understanding
of psychopathology has been the elucidation of severe
personality disorders such as schizoid, borderline, and
narcissistic states.
The course will explore the development of this understanding through
the works of Fairbairn on schizoid personality, Kernberg and
others on borderline personality, and Kohut on narcissistic
personality. Both theoretical and psychoanalytic treatment
perspectives
will be presented.
Seminar
XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
This
course will cover the four key concepts of Lacan’s rereading
of Freud. Beginning with the unconscious and repetition, which
is to say symptom formation, we will strip away the concrete and
metaphorical ideations surrounding these concepts and recast
them as functions rather than things. Likewise the object will
submit to this scrutiny, as will drive and transference. In
addition to Lacan’s Seminar XI, students will need to be
familiar with Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,”
“Group Psychology and Ego Analysis,” “Remembering,
Repeating and Working Through,” Totem and Taboo, “Moses and
Monotheism,” Three Essays on Sexuality and the cases of Dora,
Wolf Man, Anna and the female homosexual. A copy of Holbein’s
painting, The Ambassadors will be made available.
Special
Topics
Special
topics courses can arise out of student request, such as the
course on dialectic in Hegel and Lacan, or out of our
discussions in other classes, as the course on sexuation did.
Special topics courses might cover other seminars such as
Anxiety or RSI, or they might be team-taught and cover general
issues like ethics, transference mgt., etc. from a variety of
schools of thought.
Teachings
of L’École Freudienne du Québec (EFQ)
The
EFQ has been, for more than twenty-five years now, elaborating
and emending certain core principles of theory and practice as
developed by Sigmund Freud. The clinic of the psychotic
and its discoveries and applications of jouissance and the
psychotic’s development of delirium have informed the theory
of and work with the neurotic and the pervert, as those terms
are conceived in Freudian and Lacanian thought. These
courses will explain and explore jouissance, the drives, the
Oedipal or seduction fantasy, the primal scene or originary
fantasy; the likenesses and differences and integrations of
Freudian and Lacanian thought regarding castration and the
castration complex, penis envy and castration anxiety, phallic
and feminine jouissance; primary and secondary process thought,
primary and secondary repression; the symptom, the signifier,
and the fantasy, and the rock of jouissance on which the
signifier fails; lack in being, traversal of the fundamental
fantasy, and construction of the object a. All of these
concepts will be presented in experience-near ways and made
demonstrably relevant to students’ clinical work, personal
lives, and social and cultural life.
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