The Carter-Jenkins Center is a non-profit organization devoted to education on a local, national, and international scale. Its informational and educational efforts are directed to the members of the local Tampa, Fla., community and, via “distance learning” technology, the mental health community worldwide.
The center opened on December 8, 2001, hosting the Scientific Program of the Tampa (South West Florida) Psychoanalytic Society. For the occasion, the center's director, Humberto Nagera, read his paper “Reflections on Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: Normality and Pathology in Development, Brain Stimulation, Programming, and Maturation.” Since then we have offered more than eighty community and professional education programs.
Our mental health educational efforts take in psychiatry, psychoanalysis, neurobiology, and genetics. We are a freestanding psychoanalytic organization devoted to the international dissemination of psychoanalytic knowledge in pure form and in its applications to art, literature, neurobiology law, politics, and other fields.
The Carter-Jenkins Center has created the International Virtual Psychoanalytic Society. We had become increasingly concerned at the very limited number of training facilities and psychoanalytic societies in the United States and even more so in the rest of the world. In the United States only a few very large cities have training facilities and psychoanalytic societies. Seventeen states have fewer than four analysts.
The International Virtual Psychoanalytic Society lists its high quality programs on the center's Web page—usually one or two new programs on psychoanalysis, applied psychoanalysis, and/or related topics every month. Many of these programs are lectures by various distinguished speakers. Frequently, the PowerPoint presentations that the lectures were based on and assigned papers can be downloaded from the Web site. Programs are added constantly and are available to anyone with a computer and fast Internet connection anywhere in the world.
In the 2002-03 academic year, the Web site has had more than 14,000 visitors. Many of them viewed lectures, downloaded presentations, or read papers.
We invite our analytic colleagues and all psychoanalytic societies to submit contributions of high quality to the International Virtual Psychoanalytic Society for consideration for placement on our Web site. If individual psychoanalysts or societies are willing to contribute programs for consideration and do not have video facilities, the center will lend you one of our “traveling videocameras” so that you can record the program.
We are able to hold a videoconference with connections from as many as eight countries simultaneously and are planning to develop international study groups on Psychoanalysis and Art, Psychoanalysis and the Law, Psychoanalysis and Politics, Psychoanalysis and Neurosciences, and the like. We hope to assemble experts in these various areas from many different countries. Such study or discussion groups may eventually lead to valuable papers and books.
We are developing a historical section of the International Virtual Psychoanalytic Society where short vignettes of the 1929 Psychoanalytic Congress in Oxford will be shown. These include a short film of Sigmund Freud interacting with his grandchildren. We plan to include as well the 1966 symposium on “Obsessional Neurosis” in Amsterdam with the contributions of Anna Freud, ArthurValenstein, Max Schur, Paul Myerson, and Philip Weissman. We also plan to make available a number of video interviews with distinguished psychoanalysts of the past discussing their careers and the development of psychoanalysis in their geographic areas.
A new section is being added on “Life Long Learning for Mental Health Workers,” where psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, counselors, and others can update their knowledge. We are preparing a series of HIV lectures by Frank Fernandez, chairman of the University of South Florida Department of Psychiatry, and a presentation by Selim Benbadis on “Psychogenic Epilepsy.”
The Carter-Jenkins Center has a partial affiliation with the University of South Florida, and members of our faculty teach and supervise at the USF Department of Psychiatry. Given the requirement by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education that psychiatry training programs demonstrate that psychiatry residents have achieved competency in various forms of psychotherapy, our downloadable programs are a significant resource—particularly in dynamic psychiatry and dynamic psychotherapy—for departments of psychiatry, social work, and psychology at any university.
The center was established through the generosity of various members of a local family who wanted to contribute to the welfare of people all over the world while memorializing a deceased family member.
At you can access extensive and detailed information about all our programs and activities.
Humberto Nagera, M.D., is a professor of psychiatry at the University of South Florida and director of the Carter-Jenkins Center. Frances Marton, LCSW, M.Sc., is a child/adolescent and adult psychoanalyst in Tampa, Fla. She is the associate director of the Carter-Jenkins Center and director of psychotherapy training at the University of South Florida's Department of Psychiatry.