The PCC offers the “Child Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program” for treating children and adolescents. It is open to licensed mental health professionals who work with children and adolescents. The object-relations emphasis includes learning about early development, primitive mental states, unconscious processes, and dreaming that form the foundation of the personality from the beginning of life.

Special features of this program are as follows:

• An object relations synthesis of prenatal, infant, childhood, latency, and early and late adolescent development and psychopathologies
• Integration with recent studies in fetal, infant, and child research, with input
  from neuropsychoanalysis
• Introduction to child play therapy and technique as well as to clinical treatment
  and technique of working with adolescents
• Identifying a child’s or adolescent’s transferences while attuning to one’s own
  countertransference, to enable the clinician to work as close to the clinical
  material as possible
• Exploration of the current psychoanalytic assessment and treatment of infants,
  children and adolescents on the autism spectrum, in conjunction with their families
• Learning to work with parents as integral to maintaining the treatment
• Combined didactic and case-based seminars
• Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (ICAPP) training at PCC relies, among others, on the ideas of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Donald Meltzer, Frances Tustin, Esther Bick, and Ann Alvarez. The program teaches techniques to establish a therapeutic relationship with the child/adolescent and to explore his/her conscious and unconscious emotions and internal world.

This involves understanding the child’s conflicts and curiosities, their manifestations of anxieties and inhibitions, and their unconscious phantasies within the transference. While aspects of verbal expression and behavior are attended to, play is the child’s main mode of expressing feelings and thoughts. It provides the material of psychoanalysis in a way similar to verbal associations and dreams in the adult.

Completion of the year course earns a PCC-PPP Introductory Certificate in Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. The year course begins October of each year.