Candidate Training

Candidates typically facilitate a reflective group (usually 75-90 minutes long) for frontline workers in a community agency. To date, the project groups have involved therapists, social workers, investigators, and peer counselors. The candidate facilitators follow the group process and attempt to foster a supportive, well-functioning group environment. While this comprises the bulk of the time at the community agency, the candidate facilitators also meet with each other weekly to debrief their experience (30 min), and also meet weekly with an experienced supervisor or administrator from the community agency (60 min). Process material from all three components provide the presentation material for the core seminar supervision.

The Core Seminar serves as the primary supervisory and teaching component of the CPT. During 90-minute weekly meetings, candidates present process material from the community project to the Core Seminar group. This forum operates as a “think tank,” utilizing psychoanalytic thinking at both the group and individual levels to support candidates’ work at the community agency and to help them learn about the practice of community psychoanalysis, including how to understand the transferential forces stemming from the multiple systems in which they are embedded.

The Core Seminar group consists of:

• Candidate participants
• PINC-credentialed Community Personal Supervising Analysts (CPSAs)
• Community Consultants (from the Community Psychoanalysis Consortium)

Community Consultants think and work psychoanalytically in community settings and have not been institutionally trained as psychoanalysts. This creates an fruitful dialectic tension in the Core Seminar group between institutional and community forms of psychoanalytic practice, a tension that is critical to surfacing and analyzing organizational and disciplinary transferences.

The regular training curriculum at PINC seeks to incorporate the broader societal context into all psychoanalytic coursework. Specific courses include:

• Introduction to Community Psychoanalysis Course: All first-year candidates at PINC are required to take this course, which covers various topics and key concepts in community psychoanalysis. The aim is to help prepare candidates who choose to participate in the CPT. It also gives those candidates who do not choose to participate in the track an exposure to the theory and practice of community psychoanalysis.

• Psyche and Society Series: This series of courses at PINC is mandatory for all candidates. The series explores the intersection of psychoanalysis with sociocultural theory and political contexts.

• Immersive Group Processes and Learning Theories of Groups: Throughout their training, candidates at PINC participate in immersive group processes and study theories related to group dynamics.

• Coursework: In addition to the required coursework detailed above, CPT candidates are required to complete two CPT-approved electives before graduation. Examples of elective topics meeting CPT criteria would be courses on racialized differences including whiteness, gender and sexuality, large group trauma, group theory, coloniality, the social unconscious, immigrant and refugee work, the carceral system, community staff wellness, and the like.
• Individual Supervision: Alongside Core Seminar group supervision, candidates meet with their CPSA individual supervisors quarterly and as needed. Candidate dyads working together at agencies may also opt for conjoint meetings with supervisors to enhance their co-facilitating capabilities and to address any emerging issues.
• Community Project Write-Up: As with conventional dyadic cases, CPT candidates are required to complete a writeup to help them digest and reflect on the psychoanalytic processes observed throughout the project. Candidates work with their assigned CPSA to refine clinical writing skills and showcase their understanding of unconscious processes within groups and institutions.

Open to all members of the CPT&C, the Theory Lab comprises psychoanalysts, candidates, and community workers who convene occasionally for intellectual discourse and dialogue. The primary focus is on exploring the question: what constitutes community psychoanalysis and how is it practiced? Recent theory labs have elaborated core concepts of community psychoanalysis as practiced in the CPT&C model, and explored the use of auto-theory for writing and thinking.

In addition to studying and developing the theory of community psychoanalysis, the goal of the Theory Lab is to promote writing by members of the CPT&C and the dissemination of theory to other institutes and agencies, aiming to advance understanding and practice in the field.