Open Analytic Theory Classes 2025 -2026

Each year, the Institute opens several classes in the Analytic Training program to non-candidates. Graduates of
an advanced psychotherapy program (such as the Advanced Psychodynamic Psychotherapy program affiliated
with the Institute or comparable programs), individuals in psychiatric training programs, academics with a
research interest in the area, along with Advanced Analytic Candidates and Faculty of the Institute may apply
to take these Open Analytic Theory Classes.

Acceptance into Open Analytic Theory Classes is by application process only. Apply online at least 4 weeks in
advance of the start date at: https://www.stlpi.org/open-classes/

For the 2025-2026 Academic Year, the Open Analytic Theory Classes include:

CORE

Core Concepts (8 sessions)
Instructor: Matt Shatzman, LPC
Dates: 9/5/2025-10/24/2025 Fridays 1:15-2:30 PM, Institute Classroom B
Course Fee: [Non-candidate (Early) $544, (Regular) $560]

Psychoanalysis is both an ever-expanding set of theories about how minds work and a multi-approach to clinical practice. It can also be, for better and for worse, hard to pin down. Psychoanalytic concepts and their comprehension is as much a subjective experience/process as anything else. In this class we will engage with what I have found to be some of the most foundational concepts  – the unconscious, free association, neutrality, the frame, holding and containing, love and hate/life and death instincts – within psychoanalysis. Over time, however, these concepts (and others) will optimally and necessarily be translated and transformed by you, into you, and become your version of formulating psychoanalytic thought and technique.

While the concepts and readings for this course decidedly lean clinical, we will contextualize them within diverse theoretical perspectives. If something catches your attention, follow it. Footnotes, references, associations you might have while reading – write them down, reflect on them, compile a reading list to follow up on. Bring your ideas, your reactions, and your desire to class. Your training, and for our purposes the time we share together, will be enriched to the extent you engage yourself with this awesome thing called psychoanalysis.

 

Freud (8 sessions)
Instructor: J. Todd Dean, MD
Dates: 9/5/2025-10/24/2025 Fridays 10:30-11:45 AM, Institute Classroom B
Course Fee: [Non-candidate (Early) $544, (Regular) $560]
The value of studying Freud for clinicians and scholars has been well described by Adam Phillips:  “Freud was discovering what, if anything, the new languages of science had to contribute to this project of finding adequate – that is, therapeutic – forms of narrative coherence; a way of telling and contributing to a patient’s telling of that person’s life story that would disclose a repressed repertoire of possibilities” (Becoming Freud, p. 133). The purpose of studying his work is not to make students into Freudians, but to help them work through the problematics of mental health and therapeutics, not only in the clinic, but in the larger world.

 

Trauma (10 sessions)
Instructor: Joseph Wise, MD
Dates: 10/31/2025-01/23/2026 Fridays 1:15-2:30 PM, Institute Classroom B
Course Fee: [Non-candidate (Early) $680 (Regular) $700]
This course will focus on theoretical and clinical aspects of trauma, beginning with a definition of trauma relative to other psychic pathology. We will discuss implicit and explicit memory as they relate to traumatic experience, and the problems of subjectivity and changeability of memory as they affect the practice of reconstruction of traumatic events.  We will also explore the effects of various traumas, including incest, neglect, and wartime experience, on development and symptom formation in children and adults. Clinical examples will be of adults who have experienced traumas in childhood and adulthood.  Important aspects of work with victims will be reviewed, including common transference and counter-transference phenomena encountered in therapeutic work.

 

Neurosis (10 sessions)
Instructor: Mary Nielsen, MD
Dates: 2/6/2026-4/17/2026 Fridays 1:15-2:30 PM, Institute Classroom B
Course Fee: [Non-candidate (Early) $680 (Regular) $700]
This 8-week seminar is designed to familiarize candidates with neurotic level psychopathology and psychopathological entities classically referred to as neuroses.  From the birth of psychoanalysis, Freud understood neurotics (hysterics, obsessionals, phobics) as those who risk experiencing unending symptomatic yearning for what was lost and suffering from psychical conflicts whose origins lie in the subject’s childhood
history. Neurotic psychopathology and manifest neuroses is traditionally referred to as being non-psychotic and “higher level” in terms of defensive architecture. We will study economic, structural, dynamic, constitutional, and adaptive aspects of neurotic states and aim to distinguish these states from other psychopathology that appear superficially similar.

 

Dreams (4 sessions)
Instructor: S. Brahnam, PhD
Dates: 4/24/2026-5/15/2026 Fridays 1:15-2:30 PM, Institute Classroom B
Course Fee: [Non-candidate (Early) $272 (Regular) $280]
In this four-week course, we will discuss dreams from a purely psychoanalytic perspective, keeping an ear open to the unconscious. We will review several theoretical viewpoints on dream analysis (Freudian, Kleinian, Lacanian, and possibly others of interest to the class) and explore techniques guided by these theories. Our focus will be on dream analysis within the therapeutic setting. The assumption is made that the dreams of those in psychoanalysis or therapy often differ from those not in treatment. Through examples, some provided by the class, we will discuss dreams not only in terms of the events, characters, and conflicts in a patient's current and past life but also in terms of transference and events that are taking place in the treatment. We will also consider how dream narratives within a given session relate to other material in that session and across those that proceed and follow it.

 

Developmental Viewpoint (32 sessions)
Instructor(s): M. Nielsen, MD, D. Benrey, MA, et al.
Dates: 9/5/2025-5/15/2026 Fridays 2:45-4:00 PM, Institute Classroom B
Course Fee: [Non-candidate (Early) $2176, (Regular) $2240]
Developmental Viewpoint is a two-semester study of psychodynamic development, beginning with pregnancy and infancy on into childhood developmental stages and ending with adulthood and senescence.  The course engages the student’s thinking in terms of the social, emotional, affect development, defenses, inter alia. The interplay and the connections among the unconscious and conscious mental and emotional processes that influence our daily life – in our interactions with others (relationships) – would be examined more fully.  This course is part of the core curriculum, offered as an Open Class only with the full year commitment. The writings of Freud, Klein, Bion, Winnicott, Stern and others will be presented.

FOURTH YEAR

Neuropsychoanalysis (8 sessions)
Instructor: Stuart Ozar, MD
Dates: 9/5/2025-10/24/2025, Fridays 10:30-11:45 AM, Institute Classroom A
Course Fee: [Non-candidate (Early) $544, (Regular) $560]
Freud was originally, and maybe essentially, a neuroscientist. He abandoned neuroscience, realizing that the technology of the time, clinic-anatomic studies, did not allow for investigation of dynamic relationships in the brain. We now have those tools, ones that Freud anticipated and certainly would have used. A new, interdisciplinary field of study has emerged, named by Mark Solms and colleagues, neuropsychoanalysis. This course will introduce students to some of the advances in neuroscience that allow for dynamic models of brain functioning that correlate in striking ways with psychodynamic theories of the mind.

 

Lacan (8 sessions)
Instructor: Todd Dean, MD
Dates: Sessions 1-4 will meet on Fridays 8/8, 8/15, 8/22/8/29/2025 from 10:30-11:45 AM
and 12/4, 12/11, 12/18/2025 and 1/8/2026 from 7:00-8:15 PM
Session 5-8 will meet on Fridays 1/16, 1/23, 2/6, 2/13/2026 from 10:30-11:45 AM
Institute Classroom A
Course Fee: [Non-candidate $544 (Early) $560, (Regular)]
Lacan’s work is provocative, helping us to think about psychoanalysis from different perspectives.  Starting with his early work on psychosis and “the mirror stage”, we will address the major developments in his theoretical work, including the development of discourse theory and his work on the relation of language to “the thing”.  In the process, we will look at the application of such concepts as castration, superego, jouissance and fantasy in both clinical and social contexts.  We will conclude with a discussion of his late paper “Science and Truth”, which addresses the relationship of science and psychology.

 

Loewald (4 sessions)
Instructor: Sundeep Jayaprabhu, MD
Dates: 9/5/2025-9/26/2025 Fridays 1:15-2:30 PM, Institute Classroom A
Course Fee: [Non-candidate (Early) $272, (Regular) $280]
Leowald initially studied philosophy but after his deep disappointment of his mentor, Martin Heidegger, Leowald became disillusioned with the field. He then turned to psychoanalysis and much of his writing has been viewed as an attempt to both integrate and move beyond integration of his Heideggerian influence. Who was Loewald and what is his theory? Why has he been referred to as the first relational psychoanalyst? How did he conceptualize ego psychology in a way that reoriented psychoanalytic theory? Join the conversation!

 

Winnicott/Bollas (8 sessions)
Instructor: Michael Deal, LPC
Dates: 10/3/2025-11/21/2025 Fridays 1:15-2:30 PM, Institute Classroom A
Course Fee: [Non-candidate (Early) $408, (Regular) $420]
This eight-week course is designed to explore the central concepts of Donald Winnicott and Christopher Bollas, both considered key theorists in the Independent Tradition. In studying Winnicott’s central ideas, students will be able to appreciate how Bollas was able to further elaborate these ideas into new concepts that retain the magic of Winnicott’s thinking while remaining fresh, intuitive and playful in Bollas’s own unique clinical voice. Both individuals vividly conceptualize the interplay between the internal and external world, how physical objects help a person grow and establish critical structure, and each one greatly privileges creativity and play in life and the clinical process. Each week we will focus on at least one key paper from each author around a related theme such as the connection between the Transitional and the Transformative Object; The Holding Environment and The Unthought Known; and Hate in the Countertransference and Loving Hate.

 

Psychoanalysis in Motion: Thomas Ogden (4 sessions)
Instructor: Matt Shatzman, LPC
Dates: 12/5/2025-1/9/2026 Fridays 1:15-2:30 PM, Institute Classroom A
Course Fee: [Non-candidate (Early) $272, (Regular) $280]
Buckle up. To read Thomas Ogden is to invite oneself on something of a magic carpet ride. Coincidentally, there are no safety belts on a magic flying carpet. At least not that I know of. And so we start. Fully imaginative and profoundly humane, Ogden situates his psychoanalysis in the swooping realms of being and becoming, of dreaming and reincarnation, and of the necessary interplay within dialectic tensions that permit such travel. His ideas extend, and in some cases reimagine, those found in Freud, Klein, Fairbairn, and most notably Winnicott and Bion. Beyond explaining concepts, the writing and reading (and dreaming) of these papers aim to show more than tell. While the course slants theoretical, it will undoubtedly pull us into the clinical. Deeper into our own interior. It is unlikely you’ll leave the same as when you arrive.

 

Sado-Masochism (3 sessions)
Instructor: Paul Morris, LCSW
Dates: 1/16/2026-2/6/2026 Fridays 1:15-2:30 PM, Institute Classroom A
Course Fee: [Non-candidate (Early) $204, (Regular) $210]
This four-session course introduces psychotherapists to a psychodynamic understanding of masochistic personality problems. We will examine the developmental roots and unconscious meanings of masochistic behaviors and internal object relations, with attention to both classical and contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives. Emphasis will be placed on how masochistic dynamics manifest in the clinical setting, particularly within the transference and countertransference. Through readings, case discussions, and group dialogue, participants will deepen their capacity to recognize and work effectively with these complex and often challenging presentations in therapeutic practice.

 

Guntrip (3 sessions)
Instructor: Mike Brog, MD
Dates: 2/13/2026-2/27/2026 Fridays 1:15-2:30 PM, Institute Classroom A
Course Fee: [Non-candidate (Early) $204, (Regular) $210]
Perhaps nowhere in psychoanalytic lore has the relationship of a writer’s life history, personal analysis, and scholarly contributions been so fascinatingly delineated as in the work on schizoid phenomena by Harry Guntrip. The remarkable story of Guntrip’s life history and personal analytic work with both Fairbairn and Winnicott helps us to more deeply appreciate his essential contributions to understanding schizoid components of personality. This four-session class will review Guntrip’s personal saga and survey his key papers, which remain a vital resource for recognizing, framing, and working with manifestations of schizoid conflicts commonly encountered in clinical practice.

 

The Body in Psychoanalysis (10 sessions)
Instructor: Ann Simmons, PhD
Dates: 3/6/2026-5/15/2026 Fridays 1:15-2:30 PM, Institute Classroom A
Course Fee: [Non-candidate (Early) $680, (Regular) $700]
“The indissociable unity of psyche and soma” is M. Aisenstein’s (2006) reformulation of Freud’s characterization of the uneasy relationship between the hysterical body and its psychic representations. Psychic life begins with the infant’s physical and psychic response to the caregiving functions of Other, awash in corporeal, sensorial, verbal, and, of course, unconscious communications. As exchanges between infant and Other become increasingly complex and “enigmatic” with the introduction of the drive – the sexual drive, derivative of the “vital” biological needs of the infant — an uneasy convergence among drive, need, felt experience and relationship to the Other develops in the somatic-psychical subject. In this course, we will investigate how soma and psyche, these two seemingly divergent aspects of human life, are theorized and experienced clinically in psychoanalysis. Even though much of our reading and discussion will center on the French school and other influential French thinkers, the course will include readings by clinicians and theorists with different perspectives as well. We will turn briefly to the body in culture and art to investigate body modification, pregnancy, gender, and racial issues in the psychoanalytic conceptualization of the body and in the treatment of patients.

*DATES ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE.

 

Distance Learning is available for all courses.

REFUND SCHEDULE

 

 

Questions?  Email us at recruitment@stlpi.org