In June 2024, PCC added an Integrated Training Program (ITP) to our core program offerings. The ITP combines the curriculum from the Core Adult training program and the Infant, Child, and Adolescent (ICAPP) psychoanalytic training program. This integrated approach enables candidates to study British-American object relations theories and clinical practices across the life cycle, from fetus to adult.

At the completion of training, graduates of the Integrated Training Program receive both a Graduate Psychoanalyst Certificate (Core/Adult) and a Graduate Child and Adolescent Psychoanalyst Certificate (ICAPP) through PCC’s status as a component society of the IPA.

PCC’s training model emphasizes the psyche-soma, or body-mind, basis of all experience from the beginning of life, with the sense of self and the relationship to others emerging from primitive, fundamental object relations. Candidates become familiar with the development of primitive conditions, often caused by distress and traumas, and their manifestations at different ages.

In the clinical aspects of the ITP, candidates learn to attune to experiences from the transference and counter-transference, and to include their own unique personal reactions. The one-year infant observation that is foundational to the Adult Core program is expanded to a second year so that candidates can observe an infant-mother-or-father pair from the infant’s birth to the age of two years. This prepares the candidate for attunement to origins of these complex states and relationships.

The PCC Integrated Training Program also emphasizes the dreaming functions of the personality, functions that begin in utero. The trained analyst becomes able to closely attune in the clinical setting to self-and-other meanings from the unconscious and to co-dreaming possibilities.

PCC’s Integrated Training Program develops clinicians who are able to treat the more primitive illnesses – autistic spectrum; severe narcissism; psychosomatic, obsessive-compulsive, and borderline disorders; and even aspects of psychosis. With early-in-life treatment, the transferences can be seen closer to their beginnings and with all the individual patient’s immediate passions – before life’s experiences bring layers of protection. Everyone can see in more depth that there are no shortcuts to treatment.

PCC has a cooperative relationship with the Vista Autism Program in Los Angeles, where faculty and candidates have opportunities to learn about and work with children and adolescents on the autistic spectrum or with other neural-diverse challenges.

A four year course of didactic study is enhanced by supervised clinical cases of both adults and children. Didactic classes are held on Wednesdays, 8 am to 2:10 pm Pacific time.

PCC’s Integrated Training Program is a relatively new and unique opportunity to acquire psychoanalytic training in-depth and in-breadth,  gaining greater intuition, sensitivity, and empathy in treatment for these primitive states of body-mind.  Please come join us in this endeavor by requesting an application or further information from the PCC Office.