PPSC’s History and Mission
Historical Overview
The psychoanalytic landscape in 1986, the year New York State provisionally chartered PPSC as a training institute, looked vastly different than it does today. Fragmented according to clinical disciplines and theoretical persuasions, most institutes nonetheless hewed to a normative developmental scheme that excluded a great many individuals. Openly LGBTQ+ candidates were either tacitly or explicitly barred from training. “Non-standard patients” — people with complex developmental traumas, with substance abuse, with psychotic symptoms — were routinely dismissed as “non-analyzable” or “non-trainable.” While major thinkers around the globe were working to challenge the field’s hidebound assumptions, such innovations all too frequently led to competing sects, siloed communities who either did not listen to one another, or, when they did, often seemed more interested in scoring points than in meaningful collaboration.
Openly lesbian analysts trained in different psychoanalytic traditions, PPSC’s Founders, Judy Levitz and Lee Crespi, sought to create a school that would be a home for students and faculty of diverse sexualities, genders and races, and would embrace a wide multiplicity of psychoanalytic ideas. They envisioned an environment where students would develop a personal psychoanalytic idiom over time by learning about and “standing in the spaces” between the fractious array of analytic approaches, and where theories could be blended with insights from non-psychoanalytic sources to allow candidates to reach even supposedly “untreatable” populations. While there are numerous multi-theoretical institutes in New York and elsewhere, none teaches as wide a range of perspectives as does PPSC.
PPSC is also committed to helping candidates harness their visceral, emotional — even “irrational” — responses to readings, coursework and patient care as an integral part of their learning. Weekly reflection papers, known as “logs,” serve as a direct conduit between candidates and instructors, and encourage critical engagement with the material. PPSC’s emphasis on written reflection, culminating in a final graduation paper, has led to its graduates winning an unprecedented number of awards in various professional conferences; they and our gifted faculty have made important contributions to the literature. We aim to be a home where graduates can return to teach, give back, and learn from subsequent generations.
Finally, cognizant of the demands of life in a city as taxing as New York, PPSC has always been committed to offering students the possibility of doing training on either a full or part-time basis, and, since the Covid pandemic, via hybrid classrooms.
Mission Statement
PPSC is a community that aims to promote learning by providing exposure to a wide array of psychoanalytic perspectives, including Contemporary Freudian, Self Psychological, Relational/Interpersonal, Kleinian, Winnicottian, Intersubjective, Attachment Theory, Jungian and Modern Psychoanalytic orientations. We believe that no school of thought has a monopoly on psychoanalytic wisdom, that analytic relationships are inevitably more complex than our theoretical models suggest, and that treatment approaches should constantly be updated in light of new advances. At the same time, we help our graduates to acquire a rigorous understanding of psychoanalytic history, going back to Freud’s earliest cases, to enable them to see both the innovations and the prejudices that have shaped the profession from 1900 to the present.
Although PPSC has long been in the forefront of training LGBTQ+ clinicians, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the institute redoubled efforts to engage with communities of color and populations whose economic or immigration status have led to poor representation in psychoanalytic spaces. This urgent work, which includes funding for scholarships, updating curricula, and providing monthly DEI workshops and discussions about systemic privilege, is ongoing.
Finally, PPSC aims to be of service to our profession and wider communities in the following ways: by maintaining a moderate-fee Treatment Service staffed by PPSC candidates (under supervision from faculty); by providing training to non-analysts through intensive One-Year Programs (the Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Program and Clinical Journeys); by offering Continuing Education workshops for mental health practitioners and others through the PPSC Annex and the Learning Lab; and by hosting other initiatives, such as the PPSC Refugee Project, that make a demonstrable difference in people’s daily lives.
PPSC Accomplishments: 1986-2023
CONFERENCES & LECTURES
1989 • Alcoholism Treatment & Psychoanalysis: A Meeting of the Minds • 1994 • Whose Therapy Is It? • 1996 • The Many Faces of Infidelity • 2000 • Storm Warning: Treating Mild to Moderate Forms of Manic Depression in Analytic Patients • 2002 • Psychoanalytic Frame Issues • 2003 • Religion - Sexuality - Prejudice • 2004 • The Cushion & the Couch: Explorations in Buddhism & Psychoanalysis • 2005 • Balint: His Influence on Contemporary Psychoanalysis • 2005 • Poetry & Psychoanalysis • 2006 • Hide & Seek: When Secrets Haunt the Treatment • 2007 • False Self, Alcoholism & Anti-Semitism • PPSC Honors Lawrence Epstein: “The Talking Cure” • 2008 • PPSC Honors Martin Bergmann: "Psychoanalysis Past, Present, and Future • 2009 • PPSC Honors Paul and Anna Ornstein ▪ 2012 ▪ PPSC Honors Frank Lachman ▪ 2013▪ PPSC Honors Edward Khantzian: “Understanding Addiction as Self-Medication” ▪ 2014 ▪ PPSC Honors Fred Pine ▪ 2017 ▪ PPSC Honors Sheldon Bach: “Anatomy of Betrayal: Some Thoughts on Trust and Betrayal” ▪ 2019 ▪ PPSC Gala Honoring Judy Levitz ▪ 2020 ▪ PPSC Honors Judith Kuspit: The Mentor Internalized
CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO GENDER & SEXUALITY
1997-1998 • Bodies, Acts & Sex: Thinking Through the Relational • Dare to Keep Your Kids Off Gender • Thoughts on (Post ) Modernism & Pleasure • Erotic Transference -Countertransference • Dynamic Issues in Gay Male Development • 1998-1999 • Shame: A Hidden Dimension in Women's Ambition • The Politics of Passion • Reproductive Technologies & the Post-Modern Family • Exploration of Male Gender Identity • Racism & its Repression in Freud's Theory of Sexuality • 1999-2000 • Gender & Intersubjectivity • Enhancing the Erotic in Lesbian Couple Relationships • Psychoanalysis & the Gay Man • Gender as a Luxury or Symptom • Thirty Years of Gender • Sex, Race & Gender • 2000-2001 • Cultural Hierarchies, Splitting & the Heterosexual Unconscious • How “Gay Friendly” Psychoanalysis? • Thinking Relationally about Desire • Lesbian Mothers: New Identities • Gender Performance and Transference & Countertransference • Ungendered Bodies & the Violated Self • 2001-2002 • Idealization, Mourning & Masochism • Infecting the Treatment: HIV Disclosure & Dissociation • Configuring the Family • Body Language • 2008 • Exploring the Role of Fatherhood in the 21st Century • Let’s Talk About Sex” • 2009 • Pornography & Anxiety: An Interdisciplinary Series
COMMITTEE ON PSYCHOANALYTIC ADDICTIONS TREATMENT
2003 • Relational Psychoanalysis & Chronic Substance Use • Multiple Meanings of Substance Abuse: A Psychodynamic Harm Reduction Approach • 2004 • Engaging the Whole Person in the Treatment of Substance Abuse • Sexual Compulsions through a Psychoanalytic Lens • 2005 • A Behavioral & Psychodynamic Approach to Treat Money • Risky Business: Patients Who Engage in Life-Threatening Behavior • 2006 • Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Crystal Meth • Cutting: The Deliberate Dissociation • 2007 • Disorganized Attachment, Trauma, & the Addictive Solution • Hidden Eating Disorders & Attachment Theory • 2008 • Internet Pornography: Eroticized Addictions • Spirituality in Recovery • 2010 • Addiction, Psychoanalysis and the Brain • 2011 • Winner of the Caron Foundation Award for Educational Excellence • 2012 • Countertransferential Dilemmas with Our Addicted Patients • 2017 • Working with Shame States in Addictions Treatment • 2018 • Beyond Tough Love & Enabling: Helping Parents & Partners Respond to Substance & Other Addictive Disorders
PPSC Annex™
2009 • Four Approaches to Working with Couples: EFT, Imago, Systems and Psychoanalytic Theory • 2010 • Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy • Speaking from the Body – Somatic Experiencing • Using DBT to Treat the Multi-Problematic and Suicidal Individual • CBT: Bridging Psychodynamic and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies • Sexual Issues in Couple's Therapy • Restore the Trust: How to Treat Infidelity in Couples • 2011 • How to Succeed in Business...By Trying! • Using Attachment Theory and Neurobiology with “AEDP” • Working with Challenging Couples • The Growing Mind: Working with Children, Adolescents and Young Adults • Helping Parents and Children with the Child's Angry Feelings: A Modern Analytic Perspective • Sexless Marriage: It Takes Two...or Maybe Not • An Exploration into the Lives of Adoptive Parents and Adoptees • 2012 There Are Two Bodies in the Room: Expanding Clinical Capacity Through Body Awareness ▪ The Newest Wave in CBT: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for the Psychodynamically Trained Professional ▪ Understanding the Stages of Change: Motivational Work in Mental Health Treatment ▪ The Pleasures and Perils of Porn: A Clinical Perspective ▪ Money, Money, Money, I Have a Plan! The Fundamentals of Money and Financial Planning for Psychotherapists Building a Private Practice ▪ 2013 ▪ Psychotherapy with Style (in Mind) ▪ Conducting a Relapse Analysis ▪ Making Sense of Clients' Stories: A Narrative Approach to Therapy ▪ 2014 ▪ Clinical Encounters with Polyamory ▪ Psychoanalysis Through the Lens of Transgender Experience ▪ Calming Couples ▪ Mixing Metaphors ▪ 2015 ▪ Normality, Perversion and Countertransference ▪ Why EMDR? ▪ Projective Identification: Blind Foresight ▪ The Embodied Analyst: An Experiential Demonstration ▪ Couples and Money ▪ Psychotherapy and Couples Counseling When Pornography is an Issue ▪ Nostalgia for the Light ▪ Sexual Desire in Committed Relationships ▪ Intimate Partner Violence as Transgenerational Trauma and the Creative Role of Activism in Healing ▪ Relationships: What is the Glue that Holds People Together, For Better and for Worse? ▪ Therapeutic Writing: Memoir As a Tool for Reflection, Processing, and Discovery ▪ 2016 ▪ Medical Transition Without Social Transition: Flexible Treatment with Transgender, Transsexual and Gender Nonconforming Individuals ▪ Couples in Transition: Couples Therapy with Transgender Couples ▪ Versing the Analyst and Patient in Sound and Silence: Deadness, Aliveness and Transformative Truth ▪ Mind to Mind: Clinical Encounters with the Uncanny ▪ Finding The Sex You Lost: Transforming Limiting Beliefs ▪ Beyond Sex Addiction: Expanding our Understanding and Treatment of Problematic Sexual Behavior ▪ Engaging the Extremely Dissociated Mind: Working With Anger, Aggression and Self-Harm ▪ Sexual Intelligence: A New View of Sexual Function & Satisfaction ▪ Promoting Optimal Erotic Intimacy ▪ Developmental Moments: The Look, Sound and Feel of Connection ▪ Modern Psychoanalysis: Its Past, Present, and Future ▪ Cyber Infidelity: Understanding And Management ▪ Embodied Intimacy, Emotional Closeness, and Erotic Pleasures A Neurobiological-Relational Integration of Couples & Sex Therapy ▪ FREUD INC: The Psychoanalytic Origins of Modern Advertising ▪ S/He’s Just Not into You: Understanding Lost Sexual Attraction in Couples ▪ Don’t Tell Anyone: How We (Don’t) Deal with Sexual Boundary Violations ▪ Sex and the Millennial Man: Why Are So Many Males Sexually Avoidant in Relationships? ▪ Integrating Psychoanalytic Ideas into Harm Reduction Therapy for Substance Misuse ▪ 2017 ▪ Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Couple Therapy But Were Afraid to Ask ▪ Cherishment: A Psychology of the Heart ▪ Emmy Grant: Immigration as Repetition of Trauma and as Potential Space ▪ Mostly Straights: Who They Are and What They Tell Us About Sexual Orientation ▪ Mutual Recognition in Illness: Finding a Relational Pulse ▪ East Meets West: Integrating Eastern Healing Methods in Modern Psychotherapy ▪ Understanding Bestiality and Zoophilia ▪ A Field Study on Vulnerability in the Creative Process ▪ Sexual Fluidity in Women and Men ▪ Modern Psychoanalysis…Relational Psychoanalysis: A Lot Closer than You Think ▪ EMDR: Why and When ▪ Six Tools to Improve Outcomes in Couples Counseling & Sex Therapy ▪ Don’t Touch Me!: Understanding Sexual Aversions ▪ EFT for Analysts: Translating Relational Work into Emotionally Focus Therapy for Couples ▪ He/She…Me?: Understanding Gender & Shame in the Therapeutic Dyad ▪ Integrative Sex and Couples Therapy ▪ 2018 ▪ Attachment Trauma and Split Off Sexual Lives in Systemic Sex Therapy ▪ Emails, Texts and Beyond: Communicating Analytically in the Digital Age ▪ The Present in Couples Therapy: Moments of Transformation ▪ The Changing Face of Empathy: Harnessing Unconscious Resonance in the Countertransference▪ On Safari With Blue Gazelle: Escapades Between Ego and Unconscious ▪ When the Body Speaks: An Introduction to Somatic Psychotherapy ▪ A Trans-Psychoanalyst Questioning Harris’s “Gender As Soft Assembly" In Men’s Locker Rooms. The Rebirth Of Shame ▪ The Mental Health of Bisexual Men ▪ Applying AEDP to Couple Therapy ▪ Understanding Somatic Counter-Transference Reactions ▪ Adult Sexual Sequelae of Childhood Sexual Shame ▪ Angry White Men: Men's Rights Activists, Incels, and White Nationalists ▪ 2019 ▪ Psychoanalytically-Informed Treatment with Children Affected by the Trauma of Early Loss ▪ Blow-Up: Fashion and the Culture of Terrorism▪ Alcoholics Anonymous Through the Lens of Attachment Theory▪ Beyond Patriarchy: The Elusive Feminine, #MeToo and the Eros of Free Speech ▪ Trauma and Countertrauma, Resilience and Counterresilience ▪ The Trouble with Lust▪ Ketamine Therapy for Major Depressive Disorder: 2019 Treatment Guidelines ▪ Childhood Trauma and the Drive to Attain Greatness ▪Embodied Sexuality: Supporting Sexually Traumatized Clients to Reclaim Healthy intimacy ▪ Sexual Rupture and Repair: An Approach to Healing Sexual Betrayal ▪ Temperamental Bridges and Boundaries Between Parents and Children ▪ Bisexuality as Map and Mirror ▪ The Third Rail: Working with Shame in Addiction Treatment ▪2020 ▪ Shopping Addictions: Beyond the Primal▪ It’s About the Money, and It’s Not About the Money ▪ Cutting Out Her Tongue: The Impact of Silencing Trauma Through a Non-Disclosure Agreement ▪ Sabina Spielrein: Up Close with One of the Greats of Early Psychoanalysis ▪ Breaking The Frame With Emails And Texts: Some case problems, mistakes, and solutions ▪ 2021 ▪ Trauma and Dissociation Informed Psychotherapy: The Dissociated Self-States Model in Clinical Thinking and Treatment from Janet to Freud to the Present ▪ Understanding the Meaning of Sexual Fantasies in Psychotherapy ▪ Using Mentalization-Based Interventions in Psychotherapy with Substance-Affected Individuals and their Families ▪ Reconsidering Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood ▪ Feeling and Being Felt with, Adult Version: Learning Humility, Taming Tyrants, and Introducing Daylight Between Fact and Feeling ▪ Repairing the Irreparable, Bearing the Unbearable: Clinical Work with Formerly Incarcerated People who Have Served Life-Sentences ▪ Race and Ethnicity within the Transference/ Countertransference Matrix ▪ Enhance Your Clinical Toolbox with Internal Family Systems ▪ The Psychiatric Consultation: What You Need to Know When You Don’t Know ▪ Body Narratives in Sex Therapy ▪ When the World is Consumed by Chaos, Whither the Frame: Patient and Analyst Involvement in Protests During the Pandemic ▪ 2022 ▪ Living to Die, Dying to Live; Another Look at Suicidality ▪ Trauma to the Earth and Unearthed Trauma: An Eco-Psychoanalytic Engagement with Climate Distress ▪ Sexual Trauma Play: Repetition Compulsion, Erotic Excitement, and Traumatophilia ▪ Intersectionality and Therapeutic Neutrality: An interrogation ▪ The Development of Psychoanalytic Theory: Where the Science, the Art and the Personal Converge ▪ The Analyst’s Negation of Self and “Other”: Sex and Love on the Upper East Side ▪ When Racialized Ghosts Refuse to Become Ancestors: Tasting the ‘Blood of Recognition’ in Racial Melancholia and Mixed-Race Identities ▪ The Elephant (not) in the Room: Will Psychoanalysis Survive the Screen? ▪ Emotionally Focused Therapy, EFT, A Real Map for Helping Couples ▪ The Incredible Lightness of Becoming Erotic in Later Life ▪ Siblings, Psychoanalysis and Disability in the Family System ▪ 2023 ▪ Circumcision on the Couch: The Cultural, Psychological, and Gendered Dimensions of the World's Oldest Surgery ▪ The Legacy of a Nazi Past: Memory, Silence and Inhabiting Responsibility ▪ Trauma, Truth and Care: Opportunities for Psychoanalysis ▪ Blooming in December: Trauma and Growth in the Psychodynamic Treatment of Older Adults ▪ Intersectional and Ideological Impasses in Treatment ▪ On Learning to Heal: Psychagogy and Psychosynthesis ▪ Keeping Good Boundaries: Finding Clarity and Negotiating Gray Areas in Clinical Practice ▪ ▪ The Body Is Good: Unpacking and Healing From Christian Religious Trauma
PPSC Learning Lab
2022 ▪ Adolescent Identities: Working with Issues of Gender and Sexuality ▪ It's All in the Family": Working with Family Systems Theory ▪ Working Therapeutically with Special Needs Children and Adolescents ▪ 2023 ▪The Challenge and Enigma of ADHD in Couples ▪The Secret Social Phobia: How to Identify and Treat Paruresis ▪ Dreaming 101: An Introduction and User-Friendly Approach to Engaging with Dreams ▪ Trauma Informed Eating Disorder Treatment; Contemporary Practices in Treatment of ED Symptoms and Underlying Trauma ▪ What to Expect as the Partner or Friend of a Childhood Trauma Survivor
PPSC Refugee Support Program
2022 ▪ Essential Trauma Concepts Resource Tapping: Tapping Through ▪ 2023 ▪ (PPSC RSP in conjunction with Guide to Personal Solutions (GPS): “Linguistic Cultural Sensitivity Presentation for Working with Russian-speaking Clients ▪ Human Trafficking in Ukraine ▪ Restoring Equilibrium: DBT and Trauma Survivors
Non-Discrimination Statement
PPSC does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, age, sexual orientation, marital status, disability or national/ethnic origin in the administration of its admissions and educational policies.