A Note from the Director

life starts all over again

Though G.K. Chesterton said that “Fall is the year’s last loveliest smile,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”  And I think that’s true for us too—with the annual renewal of the Center’s cycle of training excited, new students in the art and science of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapies. Like Fall, our Center is indeed bountiful in our offerings, given our talents, our intellectual richness and our community’s dedication to fostering, in our trainees, an understanding of psychoanalytic ideas and their enriching power to change lives.  Likewise, the new year brings us a cornucopia of talented, bright, new trainees who invigorate our community and challenge us to think and experience more deeply.

Our focus this year will be two-fold—as reflected in our name ‘Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research’. We will continue to strive for excellence in all of our teaching, supervisory and organizational functions with our on-going evaluation of all aspects of the training we offer as well as continuing to develop, define and execute our research mission.  

Research has a long and proud history at Columbia as well as a history of being embraced by our Center Directors.  

• Our Institute was the first American Psychoanalytic Association-affiliated psychoanalytic institute to be established in a medical school within a university.  
• Our first Center director, Sandor Rado, had a longstanding curiosity in the neighboring discipline of biology, evidenced by his papers on addiction and melancholia and his interest in adaptational psychodynamics, his theories heavily influenced by Darwinian principles.  
• Our 6th director John J Weber received national and international recognition for outcome studies conducted from the 1950s into the 1980s in which hemethodically followed up on psychoanalytic treatment effects to determine the degree of its success or failure for a given patient.  
• In 1996, Dr. Roger MacKinnon, our 8ththCenter Director, set out on an ambitious task to revive psychotherapy and psychoanalytic research in the style of Dr Weber using updated clinical trials methodologies.  For the next 17 years, continuing under our 9thDirector Dr Robert Glick, we studied a wide range of topics including psychoanalytic education, the life and post-graduate career paths of our graduates, medication use in psychoanalysis, characteristics of the patients we were treating were beginning to apply both structural and functional neuroimaging methodologies to the study of psychanalysis.  

There are 4 main areas of research interest I hope to pursue this year.

1. Continue and build upon ongoing studies such as Dr Sabrina Cherry’s research on career paths of our candidate graduates.  Our PIP will be launching the first American study of a manualized Parent Centered Psychotherapy based on dynamic principles that is already in clinical trials in Switzerland. 
2. Study the changes to training that we developed and discussed as a community during the last year regarding advisory, evaluative, and regulatory functions and modification of our graduation criteria.  Within a year, be the only psychoanalytic institute in the country to have actual data about patients who begin analysis 3 vs. 4 times weekly and can inform our discussions of frequency with data.
3. Return to the across-the-board data collection that helps us to characterize and study our candidat’s patient population. Feedback shows that patients find our collection of research data helpful and not intrusive.  Initial structured evaluations suggest to them that we take our work very seriously and value our treatment methods.  Later this fall, all patients wishing to start psychoanalysis as a control case at the Center will be receiving a thorough, structured evaluation of Axis I diagnoses, defensive structure and level of personality organization, interpersonal problems, symptom checklists for depression and anxiety, screening for trauma, adult ADHD and sexual functioning.  
4. Finally, we will focus on developing research collaborations. Even in year 1 of my Directorship, we have been able to form some important research partnerships with other people at Columbia.  For example, Dr Kimberly Noble at Teacher’s College studies cortical development in high and low socioeconomic children, showing significant differences in cortical surface are at one year of life. Dr. Noble’s project involved the use of a computer-like device, called LENA, which does Language  ENvironmentAnalysis.  By audio-recording their interactions with caregivers at home. By helping plan a pilot project involving transcription of the LENA data, we can look at things of interest to analysts in her sample, such as how often parents label feelings or attribute emotional states or motivations to their young children, combining this perspective with biological data.  

Similar collaborations with the Sackler institute and researchers at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute on the Manhattanville campus.

I’ve always liked the movie Field of Dreams, in which a baseball field built in a cornfield in Iowa brings legendary players for the game of a lifetime.  I believe that’s true of our Center also, that if we build it they will come.  If we approach our Center’s present and future with optimism, energy and new ideas, then new trainees, new faculty, new researchers and new projects and ideas will come and they will enrich us all.  Welcoming our new trainees  represents a renewed rebuilding of all that is and has been great about Columbia.  Our best days are ahead of us as we welcome new students and celebrate our riches together as a vibrant and resourceful community.