Child and adolescent psychoanalysts across the country will soon have a new resource for planning their courses in psychoanalytic and psychotherapy training programs. Approximately one year ago, under the leadership of Chair Ruth Karush, the Committee on Child and Adolescent Analysis (COCAA) established a subcommittee to collect the syllabi and seminar descriptions from APsaA child and adolescent analytic training programs. The subcommittee members are chair, Nancy Bleiden, Jan Baeuerlen, and me. Sergio Delgado was an original member who has since rotated off COCAA. We have, so far, had responses from 16 institutes, a significant majority of the APsaA institutes that have active child analytic training programs.
The results are exciting! Although most programs cover similar topics, the range of readings and the teaching approaches vary considerably. Some institutes emphasize recent papers from both the mainstream psychoanalytic literature as well as related fields, e.g., child development research. Others primarily focus upon the classic papers. Some programs tie the readings to case presentations, sometimes by faculty. As someone who has read extensively in the field and has been teaching child development and child analysis for many years, I find myself looking forward to reading the papers with which I am unfamiliar. I suspect others will enjoy the same pleasure.
We are planning to have the compilation of reading lists and course descriptions accessible through the APsaA Web site later this year. Our goal is for this to serve as a source of new ideas for established child analytic training programs as well as examples for institutes developing child analytic programs. In addition, institutes may wish to review the Web site offerings for useful information in updating child development seminars in their core curricula.
We hope those institutes that have not yet responded to our inquiries will contact us soon so that their information can be added to the compilation for the Web site. Please send additional syllabi to me at tks.king@gte.net. Once the project results are on the Web site, we also look forward to your feedback.
Kenneth R. King, M.D., is a member of COCAA and COCAP (Committee on Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis) and a BOPS fellow. He is a training analyst and supervising child and adolescent analyst at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Washington and is in private practice in Bellevue, Washington.