Reflections

After completing N.Y.U.’s Graduate School of Social Work, I knew I wasn’t yet ready to become a clinician and still needed to learn much more. Consequently, I explored various institutes and discovered NYSPP was best designed to fill my educational holes. Through its mind-enriching curriculum and highly seasoned as well as supportive instructors, I learned not only how to listen diagnostically to patients' conscious and unconscious material, but also how to channel those insights into attuned psychoanalytic interventions that enable patients to feel thoroughly understood and profoundly helped.

Since I deeply value the education I received, years later I joined NYSPP’s faculty and for many years taught a class entitled: “Introduction to Ego Psychology,”—a course that expands thinking and equips clinicians to become far more proficient in the art of therapy. What an honor and pleasure to pass on a theoretical and applicable orientation that has benefitted my patients for over 40 years.

I hope this doesn’t sound cheesy or like a cliché but it feels a little hard to try and capture in words just how much my training at NYSPP has influenced me and informed me and has made me the highly skilled clinician that I now feel I am.

My decision to study and train at NYSPP was singlehandedly the best decision that I ever could have made for my growth and ability as a clinician. I began my training when I was working in an outpatient hospital setting, a setting in which I carried a caseload of adult patients with a wide range of disorders and symptoms. The training that I received at NYSPP enabled me to do the work of psychotherapy on a significantly deeper level, a level at which I actually felt like I was having an impact on the patient. For the first time, I started to feel that the work was promoting meaningful change in the patients’ lives. I also didn’t realize just how little I understood about what was going on for the patient, as well as in the treatment, until I started my training. It is a bit like being in the dark, yet not knowing that you are in the dark, until suddenly someone turns the lights on. Only once I had started my training at NYSPP did I realize just how much I had been in the dark beforehand.

After I finished my MSW, I began working as a clinical social worker in a Multiple Sclerosis (MS) treatment center as part of a multidisciplinary medical team. I was lucky enough to work with many patients in individual therapy at my job. My patients talked to me, telling me rich, interesting, emotionally-laden information about their lives. I realized I felt paralyzed about what to do with this information, how to help them. It felt as though real therapeutic work with my patients lay just beyond my grasp. I describe this struggle to my supervisor and my therapist, coincidentally both NYSPP graduates, and they suggested I consider psychoanalytic institute training. Postgraduate training was something I always imagined I would do far later in my career, when I wanted to go into private practice, but I decided to explore the idea. Upon my first encounter with NYSPP, I found it to be warm, welcoming, accessible and interesting. As I went through the program, I was delighted to find it ever-more-deeply enriching, challenging, supportive, collegial and sparking of a life-long desire to learn more. I have NYSPP to thank for how much I love the clinical work I do today.

The NYSPP program has helped me personally and professionally to be a more confident, and competent clinician. The staff is supportive, dedicated, passionate and knowledgeable about psychoanalysis and private practice. I love the small class sizes, schedule, and affordability of the program. I am currently working as a school social worker in the Department of Education. My training has given me skills to engage parents and better understand the developmental aspects and needs of my students. It has allowed me to actively listen for underlying problems that may be barriers to student's learning.

Studying at NYSPP gave me a vital foundation of knowledge for my clinical work in psychotherapy. The training has been essential for expanding my knowledge and my ability to listen.

I graduated many years ago but have been deeply appreciative of the training I got at NYSPP ( formerly ISP). I gained an in-depth training in early childhood development and pathology and how to address the adult in front of us who experienced early trauma. When I went onto to analytic training I appreciated my earlier training even more since much of the study of pre-oedipal pathology seemed to be omitted back then.

Training at NYSPP expanded my thinking, introducing me to new adventures in exploring the workings of the mind-- mine and that of others. It also enriched my life by providing opportunities for extraordinary teaching and mentorship as well as meeting new colleagues and friends. It was a life-altering experience for which I am ever grateful.