While many worry about the future of psychoanalysis, eight years experience teaching principles and techniques of psychoanalytic psychotherapy to a group of 40 mental health professionals in Turkey (TAP Vol. 37, No. 1, 2003) leads me to believe the worry need not be valid. Through work in locations beyond the U.S., I have found that a deep hunger for psychoanalytic knowledge, as it applies to psychoanalytic psychotherapy, exists across the globe. The problem, until recently, has been how to reach those who hunger for what we have.
Thomas Friedman, in his book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, tells us that, in fact, the world of information transfer is flat. The formerly isolating barriers of border, distance, mountain, and sea, he notes, are barriers no more. The wonder of communication via the Internet levels geographic barriers as it carries information to anyone, anywhere in the world. Eight years ago, when I began my work with the Turks, economics and limited technology required us to use speaker phones to conduct two-hour seminars every six weeks. Now, with improved classroom technology and under the auspices of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, we meet weekly for three-hour audio-video, real time, online classroom sessions. The teachers, drawn from the Chicago Institute community, are here in Chicago, the students in Istanbul, Ankara, and a few small academic towns in central Turkey. All sit at their personal computers and, through innovative software, create a classroom with no central location.
The Turks, now in their third quarter of a two-year psychoanalytic psychotherapy program, have developed a capacity to listen to their patients from a new perspective and now hear human stories that once passed them by. Their therapeutic work has been enriched and their experience as practitioners has become enriching. While many had seriously considered leaving the mental health field earlier as a result of boredom and therapeutic confusion, they now find themselves immersed in an educational experience previously possible only in their dreams.
How is this learning experience possible? Can psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy, a treatment of intense personal engagement, be taught in a situation other than the traditional face-to-face, brick and mortar classroom? The issue is currently a matter of debate. Many of those opposed speak from the safety of untested, preformed ideas. The Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, however, has taken an activist position in this conversation, exploring what actually might be possible by creating an experimental online Distance Learning Program in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. The Turkish group, now officially established and governmentally recognized as the Anatolia Association for the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies, Istanbul, has agreed to participate in this experiment as a pilot class. They have been wonderfully patient partners in this online project as together we have met and solved several technical and pedagogical problems.
The specific details of the distance learning program and curriculum can be found on the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis Web site located at . If you visit the site, you will find a Distance Learning button on the left hand side of the home page. Click it and you will come to the detailed explication of our what we are doing.
In our program teachers change quarterly and, in addition, we have a single moderator present in all classes for the entire year. The moderator's function is to raise questions, stimulate discussion, and make intermittent comments. We have found that the anonymity possible in a virtual environment diminished as the moderator became familiar with the cyber-students over the course of the year. We also find that the moderator's constant presence establishes continuity and fosters the friendliness that usually develops in face-to-face classrooms.
When the proposal for a distance learning program was first presented to the Chicago Institute, realistic concerns about staffing were raised. The institute's faculty, stretched by multiple commitments, felt the program might be a drain on its already heavily committed teaching resources. Many also felt that the scary, unfamiliar nature of new technology would dissuade faculty members from volunteering.
The solution to this problem lay in the deep talent pool among the institute's advanced candidates and recent graduates, most of whom are computer savvy and many of whom already taught in venues outside the institute. Previously these people usually waited five years after graduation before they were asked to teach at the institute. It seemed that they might be eager to teach if asked. The assumption proved correct and a significant pool of enthusiastic teachers, unafraid of new technology, now exists. In addition to their excitement over teaching in this new venue, these people are delighted to be able to enter institute life earlier than usual.
To date, inquires about our program have come from curious Web-surfers in Pakistan, France, Australia, South Africa, Turkey, Dubai, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, and Alaska. All inquiries are from geographically isolated people, unable
Allen M. Siegel, M.D., is faculty member and director, Distance Learning Program of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis; American director, Anatolia Association for the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies, Istanbul; and assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Rush University Medical Center, Chicago.
economically to reach psychoanalytic centers where they might find the knowledge about which they previously could only dream. Through the distance learning program, they need be isolated no longer. To paraphrase Thomas Friedman, this program has flattened the psychotherapeutic world.
It should be noted that this international interest has come about as a result of people simply surfing the Chicago Institute's Web site. Up to this point in the experiment we have done no active recruitment; however, e-mail announcements soliciting recruits for the next class will soon be sent to social workers, psychologists, and pastoral counselors in the U.S. We are approaching expansion slowly, with care to neither overwhelm ourselves nor promise anyone more than we can deliver. In this first stage of the project, translators were engaged for those Turks whose English is marginal. We've learned, however, that translation creates serious economic and technical problems. Therefore, future classes will be conducted only in English, with no translation available.
This experimental online experience is best summarized by one of our students:
As psychiatrists from different parts of the world connect through the Internet, an extraordinary experience of learning, sharing, and intellectual exchange is taking place. I, a Turkish born, U.S. trained neuropsychiatrist, recently moved back to Istanbul where I am an attending psychiatrist at Anadolu Medical Center, Johns Hopkins affiliated, Istanbul, Turkey.
In my unusual situation, this learning experience has played a special bridging role. I did my residency in New York and during that time also completed the psychoanalytic fellowship program at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. The group there was formed of residents from various training programs in New York City. We met weekly to discuss papers and cases in the comfort of a training analyst's home. Needless to say, we shared not only the same geography but similar educational backgrounds as well. Compared to that experience, the online learning experience is more challenging in terms of the preparation and motivation needed to make it happen. In terms of content quality and the learning experience itself, however, it is nothing less, and perhaps even more exciting.
There's nothing like a satisfied customer.