Mission Statement

All psychoanalytic orientations or traditions share a certain basic sensibility. This sensibility includes: (1) a respect for the complexity of both the human mind and of interpersonal relatedness; (2) an interest in a person’s history, which is an essential dimension of the complexity of mind and relatedness; (3) a belief in the importance of unconscious experience in order to understand human lives as well as the centrality of the discovery and creation of that experience in analytic therapy; and (4) a sense that a genuine psychoanalytic experience requires a deeply significant and affectively rich relationship between patient and analyst. As people gained experience with psychoanalysis over the past century, new concepts and approaches were developed. While this distinctly psychoanalytic sensibility was preserved, the premises underlying many of these new concepts and approaches were not always compatible with each other nor were they compatible with the original Freudian notions. Greenberg and Mitchell’s 1983 book, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, provided a particular reading and a framework for understanding and organizing what had became a sprawling body of obscurely related analytic literature. In particular, they gathered a subset of these newer concepts and approaches which shared a basic premise—that human relationships are the central organizing principle for understanding personality structure, psychopathology, and the psychoanalytic approach to therapy. Specifically, interpersonal psychoanalysis, object relations theory, and self psychology, despite differences in language and emphases, share this basic relational premise

Relational psychoanalysis was not merely the knitting together of a set of compatible psychoanalytic theories and ideas, however. Rather, Greenberg and Mitchell’s book provided a platform from which relational theory has sprung, taking shape as it mixed with the broader social and intellectual currents of the late 20th century. Thus, movements like constructivism and feminism, as well as fields like narratology and queer studies informed and breathed life into the creation of a distinctively relational point of view.

This relational point of view has opened a new--and for many of us--compellingly interesting, conceptual “space” in which old psychoanalytic ideas are seen from a fresh vantage point and new approaches are taking shape. For example, the concept of dissociation has been extended; on the relational reading, dissociation is not merely a defense, but a basic form of personality organization. Or, more broadly, the vision of the self as decentered and multiple, which has profound implications for psychoanalytic listening, has been described in different ways by several different relational theorists. Moving from the more-or-less intrapsychic to the more-or-less interpersonal, nuances and paradoxes of interpersonal relatedness have been carefully explicated by a number of relational authors with the use of concepts such as “intersubjectivity” and the “analytic third”. Our curriculum reflects both of these features of relational psychoanalysis, i.e., some of our courses will be devoted to ideas that are central to (and may have originated with) relational psychoanalysis specifically, while other courses will be taught with a relational sensibility. For example, when we teach Freud we will highlight the dialogue, sometimes explicit but more often implicit, that he had with other important psychoanalytic theorists, such as Adler, Jung, Rank, and Ferenczi.

The primary objective of our institute is to provide a setting, unique in this city, devoted to the in-depth study of relational psychoanalysis in the context of traditional academic values. We have designed our program to encourage critical thought in regard to psychoanalytic theories of mind, as well as to the social and cultural contexts and meanings of our work. This “academic spirit” is reflected in our curriculum, as well as in our requirements for the candidates’ personal psychoanalysis. As for the personal psychoanalysis, while we will insist upon the candidate’s analyst meeting the standards of the Accreditation Council for Psychoanalytic Education (ACPE), candidates are free to work with any analyst they choose. Therefore, we do not subscribe to the training analyst tradition.

Roughly half our courses and the majority of the supervision will be taught by prominent figures in relational psychoanalysis. These individuals are associated with the Stephen A. Mitchell Center in New York City. The board of the Mitchell Center is comprised of Tony Bass, Jody Messler Davies, Jessica Benjamin, Margaret Black, Neil Altman, and Spyros Orfanos. Philadelphia and New York are close enough to make it feasible for faculty and candidates to travel to their respective cities for lengthy weekend classes, which will be held several times a semester with weekly classes held via conference call between these weekends. On the other hand, the cities are too far apart to accommodate weekly in-person supervision hours for most of the candidates. Therefore, most of the supervision will occur predominantly by phone. While this is an arrangement that has been done many times previously, we know that it is not ideal. Indeed, one of the goals of our institute will be to develop local faculty who will be able to teach and supervise in future years.

Our institute began its first class in January 2007. In some sense, however, the structure of our school and a committed cohort of candidates have been in the making since 1993. In that year, the Philadelphia Center for Psychoanalytic Education was established. The idea was to generate interest in the Philadelphia area in “comparative psychoanalysis… in a broad intellectual context” as the charter papers filed with the state note. In each of the past twelve years, three or more reading seminars have been offered, culminating in a day-long class offered by such noted authors as Beatrice Beebe, Philip Bromberg, Nina Coltart, Anna Ornstein, Joyce McDougall, Jay Greenberg, Adam Phillips, Christopher Bollas, Jessica Benjamin, Edgar Levenson, and Lew Aron. These seminars have succeeded in creating a cohort of individuals who share an excitement and interest in contemporary psychoanalytic thought. It is largely from within this group that there has been a call for a specifically relational psychoanalytic institute in Philadelphia.

To summarize: The Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia offers a core training program devoted to the in-depth study of relational psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, our school evolved out of the comparative psychoanalytic approach of PCPE and we intend to retain the intellectual openness and challenge that such a comparative approach implies. In order to achieve this: (1) We do not use the training analyst system. (2) We will not restrict our faculty to our own graduates. This will be an ongoing commitment of our institute. In particular, we will look to people trained outside the relational tradition to teach certain courses. (3) We are experimenting with incorporating a PCPE seminar within one of our classes each year. Since these seminars are open to the larger community of clinicians interested in psychoanalysis, this provides a check on the kind of insularity that often develops in psychoanalytic training programs.