Contemporary Freudian Curriculum and Faculty
Welcome to Postdoc!
All of us affiliated with the Contemporary Freudian Track (CFT)—faculty, graduates, and candidates—welcome you to the NYU Postdoctoral Program and wish you an exciting, enriching, and transformative journey through your psychoanalytic training.
There are many ways for you to be involved in the life of the Program and the life of our track, and we encourage you to find the way that suits you to join our ever-evolving, lively community. In addition to your coursework, clinical work, and supervision, we encourage you to attend the variety of stimulating theoretical, clinical, and social events sponsored by the tracks, throughout the year. These collegial get-togethers include, for example: parties, a Meet-the-Faculty brunch, “Lounge” presentations and discussions, colloquia, and candidates-only events.
We also invite you to become an active participant in our organizational activities. Candidates become full members of our Executive Committee, our Faculty-Curriculum Committee, and our Education Committee, and thus play an active role in shaping our community and its ongoing growth.
Please feel free to contact the Head of our track, Margery Kalb (margerykalb@gmail.com), for further information, and welcome!
What is Contemporary Freudian Psychoanalysis?
The CFT strives to honor our past while simultaneously cultivating our present and future by integrating continually evolving changes in theory and technique. Freud's original theory and practice - conceptualized well over a century ago - has evolved and continues to do so. We study our roots in Freud, as well as a century of pivotal developments offered by a diverse array of psychoanalytic thinkers who have extended Freud’s thinking. In so doing, we continue to generate creative and vital growth. Our courses and supervisors thus encompass the diversity of viewpoints that characterize the wide range of contemporary Freudian psychoanalysis today -- building upon rich traditions while conceptualizing and integrating contemporary developments in theory, practice, and research.
Our commitment to integrating continuity with change has led us to curriculum and supervisory approaches that reflect firm rootedness in a developmental perspective, encompassing the centrality of early object relationships; the origin and vulnerability of the self; the significance of sexuality; the role of all varieties of trauma (dyadic, familial, and sociocultural) and their interaction; the play of unconscious fantasy; the power of conflict, anxiety, and loss in human suffering; and the diverse sociocultural milieu. Foundational ideas reflect the contributions of our forebears, including but not limited to Freud, Winnicott, Klein, Kohut, and Loewald, and extend their conceptualizations to include contemporary contributions of the international psychoanalytic community (the Barrangers, Bollas, Green, Laplanche and others) as well as an emerging American middle group (Bach, Chodorow, Poland, Lear, Ogden, and others). These contributions provide intellectual context for moving far beyond the either/or thinking that dichotomizes one-person and two-person psychologies, reconstruction and co-construction -- bringing us to an exciting integration that allows for the breadth and depth of “both/and” thinking.
Clinically, these ideas come alive and take their pivotal place in the analytic relationship. Our approach to the transference-countertransference interactional matrix includes working in the verbal as well as the nonverbal registers, using a mixture of containment, interpretation, and witnessing in order to facilitate making meaning of repressed, dissociated, and unrepresented states. This process involves the complex emergence and melding of past and present in intrapsychic, interpersonal, interpsychic, intersubjective and diverse sociocultural modes of communication, as enacted in the therapeutic interaction. The analytic relationship thus holds the mutative potential to serve as a newly discovered object relationship.
We hope this stimulates your interest, and we encourage you to reach out and contact us to discuss any aspect of our warm and enriching professional home! Just email: margerykalb@gmail.com.