About SFCP’s Child & Adolescent Analytic Program
SFCP’s training program in child and adolescent psychoanalysis is the only such program in Northern California. It is also unique in that it offers a clinically based, experiential model for coming to understand the theories and techniques that are the foundation of contemporary child and adolescent psychoanalysis. The curriculum consists of didactic presentations and reading and discussion of the literature with local instructors, as well as candidates’ clinical presentations to a series of noted outside instructors who represent an array of theoretical and technical perspectives.
In this way, candidates learn the precepts of contemporary child and adolescent work from contemporary theoretical and clinical lenses such as Contemporary Freudian, Neo-Kleinian, Middle School, Winnicottian, Bionian, and Field Theory. Candidates are given the opportunity to compare and contrast the different perspectives, and to integrate them as they develop their own analytic approach.
In our program, we reconsider diagnostic categories, with attention to different clinical ways of considering and approaching patients who have been historically diagnosed as neurotic, borderline, or psychotic. We investigate processes of trauma, adaptation, addiction, autistic and narcissistic functioning in children and adolescents, always relating conceptual material to actual cases with which we are working. We consider alternate approaches as we seek the best treatment for any given family and child.