Psychoanalysis Certificate

The certificate program consists of a four-year curriculum of coursework and case conferences, three supervised analyses, and a personal analysis.

The academic year is divided into four quarters of eight weeks each, for a total of thirty-two weeks of class meetings. Classes are held on Wednesday mornings and case conferences on Tuesday evenings. There is one weekend course per semester. Required courses are emphasized in the first two years, electives in the third and fourth years.

Clusters and Course Descriptions

PINC Curriculum Revision 2013

Every few years, PINC reevaluates its Curriculum. In September, 2008, a Curriculum Review Task Force was established, upon the recommendation of the Curriculum Committee, the Faculty, and the PINC Board.

The task force was composed of members of the faculty, candidate, and graduate constituencies including: Martine Aniel, Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Victor Bonfilio, Bob Carrere, Suzanne Chassay, Francisco Gonzales, Stephen Hartman, Dvora Honigstein, Tom Rosbrow, Angela Sowa, Annie Sweetnam, and Dana Wideman. The task force co-chairs were: Deborah Melman (a member of the Curriculum Committee) and Rachael Peltz (chair of the Faculty).

THE REPORT

Review of Mission

We began our review process by thinking together about PINC’s original mission and the ways it informed the original curriculum. The group reaffirmed the commitment to providing a pluralistic psychoanalytic education that fostered the capacity to think critically, to integrate multiple perspectives and to use the emotional experiences during training to enhance candidates’ analytic ability. We also discussed how the culture of psychoanalysis at PINC has shifted over the past twenty years with a movement from establishing the legitimacy of a comparative curriculum to the current focus on what intellectual, emotional and mental capacities enable the development of a well functioning psychoanalyst.

Survey

The task force then designed and conducted an Institute-wide survey about the current curriculum which yielded useful information as we undertook the curriculum revision (see Addendum 1). In additional to the overall very favorable review of the PINC curriculum by the survey respondents, a number of problems were sited:

1. Repetitive courses
2. Criticism of case conferences
3. Confusion about timing and organization of the Freud series
4. Questions about the efficacy of weekend courses
5. Lack of electives

Newly Formed Objectives

In reviewing the survey and our critical evaluation of the curriculum we decided to create a rigorous core curriculum while allowing for more flexibility and individualized learning. We generated new, more inclusive categories in the place of our current theory, technique, development and psychopathology tracks. The three new designations/axes included:

• Conceptual core: These courses include the major theoretical trajectories and critical junctures in the history of psychoanalysis. The proposed curriculum reflects an effort to introduce the different theoretical strands within psychoanalysis by the end of the third year. The order in which classes are offered doesn’t reflect a ranking of importance but is rather a reflection of the complexity of offering multiple languages within psychoanalytic thinking. The goal is to help the candidates develop a critical engagement with thinking analytically.
• Clinical core: These courses address two clinical areas: 1) the analytic process, phases and dynamic vicissitudes; 2) psychic structure and development.
• Experiential core: These courses promote the internal capacities of the candidates to do analytic work and function in a group.

REVISED CURRICULUM

There is a summary of the Core Curriculum on this one page chart.