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Wendy Katz, Ph.D.
Chair, Admissions Committee
Why Columbia?
Find out what Columbia trainees and faculty think most distinguishes the Center as a place to learn, teach, and grow.
Upcoming "Why Psychoanalysis?"
The course will address contemporary issues in psychoanalysis from the vantage points of body, mind and brain. The goal is to enhance critical thinking in inter-disciplinary discourse in areas of central interest to psychoanalytic theory and practice. The opportunities and risks of this endeavor will be explored through careful examination of the pertinent literature on embodiment, affect theory, evolutionary biology, memory systems, dreams, mentalization, metaphor and fantasy.
Fourth year process has four segments. Segment one discusses Various Uses of Countertransference. In segment two the focus is termination of an anysis. Segment three, Methodology,examines the epistemological commitments that underlie an analyst's interventions using a continuous case from the previous year. Segment four: Listening in terms of the macroprocess: will track a segment of an analysis from its first, second, and third years. From each year within the analysis we will choose an expression of a (conscious or unconscious) fantasy, the manifestations of a defensive constellation, and/or selected lived object relationships. We will then compare how these emerged in the various years, and also how the patient and the analyst dealt with them (differently) depending on the stage of the treatment. At the conclusion of fourth year process, candidates will be comfortable conceptualizing and describing the elements of psychoanalytic process in terms of major transferences and resistances, identifying and working with countertransference with a range of concepts particular to the termination phase of psychoanalysis, exploring the reasons for and the technical approaches to apparent stalemates and difficulties in the ordinary course of analysis, the use of dreams in psychoanalysis and looking at the arc of a treatment over years and tracing the themes throughout.
Reading list for countertransference (subject to change)
Reading liist for termination (subject to change)
Two classes for senior candidates provide an opportunity for candidates to hear faculty present clinical material and debate issues of technique. These two classes are designed to provide a forum for candidates from different years to hear each other’s ideas and to hear faculty articulate their ways of thinking about controversial questions of technique in relation to clinical process.
The educational goals of four classes taught at the beginning of fourth-year theory are to introduce candidates to epistemological questions, to familiarize them with points of view about epistemology, and to familiarize them with methods in two traditions, the empirical and the hermeneutic, which aid critical and systematic thinking about psychoanalytic knowledge
view course syllabus here (subject to change)
see course description for M9127
This course focuses on the role of developmental thinking in clinical psychoanalysis. Using clinical material from adult and child cases, the class will consider how a perspective from the viewpoint of the mind of the child can illuminate the mind of the adult. At the conclusion, the candidates will have refreshed their awareness of naive cognition and problematic childhood solutions to conflict, as these are manifested in adult mental life.
This course will consider the application of psychoanalytic ideas to non-clinical topics, by Freud and by later analytic theorists. Each session will focus on a particular topic in the areas of art, literature, religion, or culture, and the readings will include an important work of Freud’s, as well as a more contemporary contribution to the same topic. At the end of this section, the students should: be acquainted with an important part of Freud’ work which is not covered in the current first-year course, recognize both the extent of his influence and the limitations of his contributions, and appreciate the evolution in psychoanalytic thought on these topics since Freud
