BACKGROUND
For many years, psychoanalytic training has been undervalued within the field of psychology. When psychoanalysis first came to the United States, Freud wrote his now famous paper “On the Question of Lay Analysis” to help support his disciple, Theodor Reik, to establish the field of psychoanalysis in the USA as separate from the medical/psychiatric profession which, at that time, had attempted to absorb and monopolize it as part of its scope of psychiatric practice in the United States. After the field of psychiatry backed down, psychoanalytic training institutes began to form and attract people from outside the medical field. They included, as a central component of training, the personal training analysis of students along with extensive coursework, carefully supervised clinical practice and ‘control analyses’. Since academic institutions were not permitted to include personal analysis among their requirements, psychoanalytic training was limited to free standing psychoanalytic training institutes. Although these free-standing institutes provide clinically focused training that often requires more time to complete than more academically focused PhD programs in psychology require, most unfortunately can’t offer any formal academic degree, as a culmination of their training. Those very few that do, offer more academically-focused doctoral degrees that tend to focus mostly on research and not clinical work.
The Parkmore Institute was created to address this disparity. It offers high quality post graduate training for graduates of any independent psychoanalytic training institute, which leads to a clinically-focused doctoral degree in Psychoanalytic Studies, (Dpsa). Parkmore recognizes the depth of psychoanalytic institute training and has opened the way for graduates of institutes with more innovative, less traditionally focused theoretical approaches, to also achieve a doctoral degree. Their program focuses on addressing the gap between intensively focused clinical training and formal academic achievement by providing candidates an opportunity to prepare a final paper that is of sufficient quality to be published in an internationally acceptable, PEP-web recognized journal.
The Institute for Expressive Analysis is unique among more traditional psychoanalytic training institutes as it integrates elements of implicit, sensory motor and creative non-verbal forms of communication within the fabric of depth oriented psychoanalytic theory and practice. This focus is on the cutting edge of what we are now discovering in our latest neuropsychological research. As research identifies the connection between implicit memory and the unconscious, more emphasis will be placed on non-verbal, pre-verbal and sensory motor communication as vehicles to promote the expression and resolution of unconscious conflict within psychoanalytic treatment. Since its inception in the mid 1970s, these now, newly emphasized concepts, have been at the original core of IEA’s mission and basic theoretical foundation. We at IEA have always been dedicated to the promotion of this unique mission and have sought to strengthen our theoretical position and potential application within the contemporary analytic community. However, as creative people, we have often been better at being creative within our own clinical practice than within the area of psychoanalytic literature and publication.
IEA Affiliation with the Parkmore Institute
It is therefore with great pleasure, that I announce today that we at IEA have established a formal Affiliation Program with the Parkmore Institute in South Africa, www.parkmoreinstitute.org. Through this affiliation process, we are addressing this challenge by offering our students and members a pathway to develop their writing skills, to find and expand their unique voice within our analytic community and attain a high level of professional recognition by ultimately achieving a clinically based doctoral degree. This program will offer to our students an option to apply for affiliation with the Parkmore Institute during their final stage of training at IEA. If their application is approved by the IEA/Parkmore Application Assessment Committee, they can seamlessly transition to become students at PI, after graduating IEA, and will automatically have their Application Fee waived and become eligible, after an evaluation by the Director of the Parkmore Institute, for consideration to enter PI on an advanced level of training. If admitted on an advanced level, candidates could also benefit from the elimination of certain other tuition requirements at PI. We at IEA and our counterparts at PI have worked hard to enable this option for qualified students. We also are now able to offer our graduates and members the option of applying directly to PI, have their application fee waived, and be eligible for the same evaluation interview, by the Director of PI, for advanced standing in their training program. We hope that our effort in developing this affiliation will help IEA students, members and graduates find a new way to have a voice within our field and bring a new level of professional recognition to IEA, as well as to the field of psychoanalysis. More details of this Affiliation may be found on our website: www.ieanyc.org
Dr. Robert Irwin Wolf, President
The Institute for Expressive Analysis