Training

Eating and The Body:

A Cultural, Relational Psychoanalytic Framework

The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute is known for its pioneering work on women's relationship to food, feeding, and their bodies. Since the publication of Susie Orbach's Fat Is A Feminist Issue (1978), the faculty of The WTCI has further developed a theory and practice explicated in Eating Problems: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Treatment Model (1994), a widely used text for psychotherapists.

The WTCI's intensive One Year Training Program understands eating and body image problems as the way women/people speak about what is dissociated and unspeakable. We see these symptoms as an expression of the confluence of self, interpersonal, and cultural experience. The prejudices of our culture regarding race, class, gender, and sexual identities are contained in the contemporary idealized Body: racialized Euro-American, ultra-thin, hard, toned, young, heterosexual, hypersexual, and affluent. We analyze why and how women become psychically malleable to internalize this Ideal.

We have developed a theory and practice integrating psychoanalytic, trauma, feminist, and social theory which are fully elaborated in our self-attuned model illustrated in Eating Problems (Basic Books,1994) written by The WTCI faculty. This integrative model offers a treatment method that includes working directly with the symptom, thereby helping people become embodied selves, (re)claim, literally and metaphorically, their own hunger, appetites, needs, desires, and limits. The program enriches and deepens therapists' knowledge base, skills, and use of self in working with people suffering not only with eating and body image difficulties, but with obsessions and symptoms of all kinds. Graduates find their clinical work becoming enlivened whether in agency-based or private psychotherapy practice.

Open House Sunday, April 25, 2010 12:00-1:30 Call for location: (212)721-7005

Provisionally Chartered by the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York

Program Information

Classes meet on Thursday evenings,

6:00 PM - 8:30 PM and include lectures, discussion, an experiential group, and group supervision. Thirty weeks of individual supervision are required. Supervision may be focused in one of two ways:

The Clinical Track requires students to have their own individual case or group (from agency or private practice). This track is designed to assist those who wish to enhance their clinical skill in treating eating and body image problems. Process recordings will be required.

The Applied Track requires the student to identify a research topic, a community-based project or intervention, or other topic of interest culminating in a final paper. This track is for those who do not have a current clinical case and wish to deepen their learning experience by focusing on a theoretical or clinical issue, problem or question. Topics may be developed in the context of supervision and should be identified by December 1st. Students pursuing the clinical track should have their case or group identified by December 1st, or earlier.

Fees

The fee for the course work is $1950.00 per year. Individual supervision is $60.00 per session. Application fee of $50 is non-refundable. Scholarship funding is available.

Eligibility

This program is open to those with degrees in the mental health professions and related fields. Applications are due by June 15th.

The Women’s Therapy Centre Association

Upon graduation candidates become members of a vibrant, activist organization and are supported to begin/continue any project of their interest or join any existing one: the Domestic Violence Project, the Diversity Committee, lectures, and workshops.

For application information and an application form, click here

WEEKS 1-5 Oct. 7, 14, 21, 28, Nov. 4:

* Social causes: gender arrangements, racism, consumer capitalism, class, thinness as an ideal, and dieting as both a commercial empire and an internal object relation.

* Relational psychoanalytic theory: Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and contemporary theorists with reference to the cultural ideal and normative practices.

* Stance: candidates' conscious and unconscious body size biases.

WEEKS 6-10 Nov. 11, 18, Dec. 2, 9, 16:

* An experiential psychoeducational group: participants learn The WTCI's unique model of

feeding oneself and living in one's body.

Participants work on their own eating and body issues, observe an experienced clinician in practice, and discuss her interventions as they apply the model to themselves. This in-depth work creates a cohesive group learning environment.

WEEKS 11-15 Jan. 6, 13, 20, 27, Feb. 3:

* Implementing the model: clinical work on the psychodynamic meanings and self states of the body--including hunger, food choice, satiety, and fat and thin states. Learn to help people become embodied subjects rather than objectified bodies.

WEEKS 16-20 Feb. 10, 17, March 3, 10, 17:

* The psychodynamics and treatment of those suffering with and speaking through bulimia, anorexia, and compulsive eating as well as the experience of living in a larger body.

WEEKS 21-24 March 24, 31, Apr. 7, 14, 21:

* The convergence of eating problems, trauma, and dissociation.

WEEKS 25-26 Apr. 21, 28:

* Working with adolescents and families.

WEEKS 27-30 May 5, 12, 19, 26:

* Countertransference (explored throughout the program); non-verbal communication and the psyche-soma connection.

Graduation: June 2

WTCI Faculty and Supervisors

Linda Arbus, LCSW

Linda Arkin, LCSW

Catherine Baker-Pitts, Ph.D.

Carol Bloom, LCSW

Barbara Buloff, LCSW

Luise Eichenbaum, LCSW

Bonnie Gitlin, LCSW

Andrea Gitter, MA, ADTR, LCAT

Susan Gutwill, MS, LCSW

Laura Kogel, LCSW, ACSW

Anne Leiner, LCSW

Deborah Liner, Ph.D.

Deborah Luepnitz, Ph.D.

Wendy Miller, Ph.D.

Susie Orbach, Ph.D.

Lisa Thaler, LCSW

Anne Wennerstrand, LCSW, DTR

Lela Zaphiropoulos, LCSW, ACSW