Course  Objectives

PCC’s year-long intensive child psychotherapy course provides a perspective on the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the nature of human development. The course introduces psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic theory and technique for working with infants, children and adolescents from an Object Relations Model.

PCC’s unique approach:

• Gives attention to major developmental phases from prenatal life through adolescence
• Elaborates specific states of mind that accompany each developmental phase
• Builds on the work of Klein, Bion, Winnicott, Tustin, Meltzer and others
• Includes readings from the London Tavistock Clinical Series
• Is a window into central theoretical and clinical components of PCC’s training programs
• Correlates theory with clinical application in all seminars.

Course Structure

This introductory course on child development and clinical treatment integrates theoretical conceptualization and clinical application in each two-hour seminar. The course focuses on essential and unfolding elements of the psychotherapeutic encounter with parents and their children from pregnancy, infancy, and childhood through adolescence.

The course is structured as follows:

• Two-hour seminars conducted over three trimesters
• Begins in October and ends in June
• Students present case material from their clinical work for discussion
• Each student is assigned a PCC Faculty Mentor

Course Materials

A succinct and comprehensive overview of human emotional development unfolds over PCC’s intensive year-long child psychotherapy program.

Highlights of course material include:

• Possible meanings of pre-birth experience
• The nature and significance of the mother/father/infant relationship
• States of mind characteristic of young child, latency and adolescent mentalit
• Course Schedule
• Seminar Classes meet for two hours on Wednesday evenings on Zoom, ten weeks per trimester

Fall courses

• Discovering Infantile Mental Life
• Pre-birth Experiences
• Nature and Significance of the Mother/Infant Relationship
• Considerations about Early Development
• Early Affect Regulation
• Developmental Disorders
• Launching the Treatment
• Assessment
• Fundamental Needs
• The Growth of Mental Structures
• Unconscious Phantasy
• Early Oedipus Complex and Super-ego Formation

Winter courses

• Diagnostic Evaluation of the Child
• Neuroses in children
• Psychotic illness in early childhood
• The Psychotherapeutic Setting
• The playroom
• Issues of play technique
• Communication and Interpretation in work with young children
• Gathering the Transference
• Working with children who cannot talk or play
• Technique of working with latency age children
• Issues of emotionality and learning disorders

Spring courses

• Issues of Puberty and Adolescence
• Problems of unresolved mother/infant relationship
• Problems of unresolved Oedipal issues
• The Assessment of Adolescence
• adolescent states of mind
• Eating disorders and other psychopathologies
• The adolescent at risk
• Gang mentality and delinquency
• Issues of ending therapy
• Impact of these states of mind on psychosexual development from puberty to adulthood

Certificate

Students are awarded Certificates of Completion at the year-end Graduation Ceremony held in June.

Tuition

•    $50 non-refundable application fee
•    $425 per trimester
•    $50 one time Administration fee
•    Total cost for one year is $1375 (application fee included), paid as follows:
•    $525 due before commencement of classes
•    $425 due at beginning of second and third trimesters
•    $0.00 Student Tuition Recovery Fund (STRF) – Non-refundable*

Admission requirements

Applications are accepted from all mental health professionals with a valid California license (L.C.S.W., M.D., M.F.T., Ph.D., Psy.D., R.N.), and have authorization to work under a person holding a valid California license or are working within or under the auspices of a state approved mental health facility.