The Columbia Academy for Psychoanalytic Educators: A Pilot Program for Developing Analysts and Supervisors of Analytic Candidates.

The Columbia Academy for Psychoanalytic Educators supports graduate analysts' professional development at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. In 2018, a pilot program was launched for faculty interested in analyzing and supervising candidates, whose aim is to support and educate those interested in taking on these essential training functions. The focus is on educating the educators, which is a significant departure from the historical focus on evaluation, vetting, and faculty hierarchies. In the process of developing and piloting the program, complex and long debated issues in psychoanalytic education and development were considered that are relevant to many institutes, including training of supervisors and analysts of candidates, addressing problematic faculty hierarchies, creating safety for those presenting clinical work to colleagues, building professional peer relationships, and engagement of faculty in time consuming and nonremunerative activities. The authors report on their experience developing and evaluating this pilot program.

Writing about clinical theory and psychoanalytic process.

In the Senior Candidate Case Writing Seminar, the final component of the Writing as Pedagogy Program at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, candidates write about one of their longer training cases, with attention to the ways they use clinical theory, particularly transference and countertransference, to deepen their understanding of psychoanalytic process and therapeutic action. Building on the previous four years of the writing program, this seminar teaches advanced candidates to recognize and integrate the lived experience of conducting an analysis, the micro- and macroprocesses, and the theories most relevant to an understanding of the analytic work. The seminar emphasizes the challenge of dealing with the power of the transference, unrecognized or unacknowledged countertransference, and the nature of therapeutic action. Pedagogical emphasis is placed on peer group discussions and group learning, and common problems in integrating theory and practice are described and illustrated.