Graduate Education in Psychology

Psychoanalytic / psychodynamic education in clinical psychology graduate programs ranges from an eclectic faculty and practicum sites that include opportunities to learn about psychoanalytic perspectives, to graduate programs that do not offer any psychoanalytic perspectives, to programs that are openly hostile to psychoanalytic or depth psychological perspectives.

However, as student clinicians develop and start to work with clients, many soon discover that people are complex, and they find that the treatments they engage in need to be more subtle, multilayered and multidimensional than they thought.  The lack of psychoanalytic insights lead them searching for a theory of the mind that will help them understand their complex clients and will help them unlock, uncover and bring to awareness the aspects that clients sense in themselves but don’t know how to articulate.

APsA aims to support students and faculty in all graduate departments who are curious about the psychoanalytic perspective and how it can help them better understand the multifaceted aspects of their clients and research questions they face.  Faculty can be supported through APsA’s Teachers’ Academy.  Both students and faculty can participate in our distance learning opportunities that are live, but also recorded and available as podcasts and/or streaming video below. Look for more informational links to be coming in the near future!

Faculty member: Seth Aronson, Psy.D.

Faculty Member Michelle A. Stephens, Ph.D.