The new Social Justice Division of Harlem Family Services announces a seminar series led by forensic expert Dr. Gil Kliman, focusing on “Trauma through a Forensic Psychoanalytic Lens.”
These monthly virtual sessions will explore the theory and practice of forensic psychoanalysis as applied to cases of trauma. The first session will take place on Tuesday, January 23, 2024, at 11 AM EST via Zoom. Guest instructor Hasani Baharanyi, MD will be the featured speaker.
Participants may register via Zoom at this link (click here.) Registration is free for HFI/HFS candidates, faculty and staff. All others, please pay the $30 registration fee online via HFI’s website here.
Course Description
Psychological trauma will be defined in behavioral and psychoanalytic terms, together with a theoretical point of view consistent with modern evolutionary theory. In this seminar we will work together to identify the obstacles and opportunities presented by the legal system for psychoanalytic and psychodynamically-oriented expert witnesses. Countertransference problems will be discussed, ethical problems will be described, and most importantly the alleged and proven victims of psychological traumas will speak for themselves in various videotaped interviews which demonstrate the evidence of their psychological damage.
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of the seminar, participants will be able to:
Describe what plaintiff and defense attorneys expect an expert witness to contribute to the education of a jury or to the settlement of a contested claim. Explain why a psychoanalytic point of view about the long-term effects of childhood trauma has special value in a court room and goes far beyond a behavioral cross section. Illustrate how to formulate a clinical life care plan in a way that is associated with cost estimates over a lifetime. Describe the power of adverse childhood events research in forecasting psychosomatic problems and physical health care costs over a victim’s lifetime. Demonstrate how to prepare a Meyerian Chart in a fashion that can be presented to a jury, instead of an ordinary legal timeline. Explain how to testify concerning “Loss of Parental Services.” Describe special features of scientific knowledge about the aftermaths of childhood sexual molestation. Describe special features of traumas involving “betrayal” by family, institutions, schools, and agencies.
NOTE: Each Forensic Seminar will be recorded in order to ensure that interested colleagues may study them. In addition, numerous videos of evaluations concerning which we have permission will be shown and made available by HIPAA-compliant means. Upon receipt of separate confidentiality agreements, those videos may also be studied in-depth at leisure.
We at the Harlem FamiIy Institute and Harlem Family Services, New York, NY, urge compassion for all souls affected by the continuing conflict between Israel and Hamas and wish to press for humanitarian responses. While we condemn the recent and continuing violence and acknowledge the long-standing suffering of both the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, we believe that identification with the aggressor solves nothing and that only nonviolence engenders the transformations that can allow all to come together.
Following the example of African Americans who met the terrorism of white supremacy with nonviolence, as modeled by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we implore both sides to break this cycle of violence. Lay down your armaments and open your hearts to each other’s anguish. See the basic humanity in those you call foe. Turn hatred into empathy, isolation into kinship, brutality into mercy.
Through compassion that lifts up the downtrodden, we can transform suffering into a higher purpose. Our shared burdens can blossom into enlightenment if we raise each other from pits of vengeance to peaks of unity. When we connect as fellow human beings through shared struggles, labels of race, nationality, or creed fade into the background.
The path of nonviolence and compassion is challenging. We harbor pain and anger that tempts us to answer violence with violence. But we must resist the cycle of retribution, which only leads to more innocent bloodshed. With empathy for the suffering on both sides, we appeal to the humanity that lies in all people beneath the labels that divide us. We believe peace is possible if we open our hearts, though the road may be long.
Reconciliation demands humility and sacrifice. We must be willing to understand those we call enemies. We must be willing to forgive, even amidst grievous injustice. We must be willing to seek nonviolent solutions, though they require work and compromise. The rewards are healing, hope, and dignity for all people. We urge perseverance of spirit despite setbacks. With shared courage and compassion, we can mend what is broken. For in the profound words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Please join us for the Institute’s annual Open House on Saturday May 15 from 1-3 pm to learn about our clinical training programs in the community to become a psychoanalyst. Applicants need to hold at graduate degree in any discipline – allowing individuals from across the humanities, sciences and social sciences to enter the field. Training to become a Licensed or Certified Psychoanalyst usually takes 4-5 years part-time, though swifter advancement is possible.
Since 1991 we have worked to train tomorrow’s diversity-sensitive psychoanalysts by taking training and treatment out to the community in small clinical sites that we operate in Harlem and Northern Manhattan, where our candidates provide free and ultra-low-fee clinical services to children, families, adolescents and adults through both psychotherapy and play therapy.
Through play therapy, we offer youngsters a safe space to express their feelings, to learn to use their strengths to manage the challenges they face every day, and to discover new ways to relate to the world.
We have served hundreds of parents and children through our school- and community-based playroom treatment centers, where we offer consistent, long-term therapy and play therapy. Clients meet with their therapist in a safe, pleasant space where they work together to address difficult issues through play or talk.
The candidates studying in our programs – many of African American or Latino heritage, including clergy, from Harlem and the city’s most diverse communities – are able to develop careers as advanced mental-health professionals. The Institute’s more than 90 faculty members come from many of the city’s and nation’s psychoanalytic institutes, drawn by its unique mission. The institute can admit suitable candidates, whether licensed or not, who hold a graduate degree in any discipline. Graduates of our Licensure-Qualifying Program may immediately sit the state exam to become Licensed Psychoanalysts.
In addition to taking psychoanalytic training and treatment out to the community, the Institute aims to deepen an understanding of diversity and inclusiveness among tomorrow’s psychoanalysts. Created in 1991 to help children and families at a small independent elementary school in Harlem, HFI seeks to draw individuals of all cultures and backgrounds as it helps them develop psychoanalytic skills in working with children, parents, adolescents and other adults. It operates small neighborhood therapy sites in schools, community centers and houses of worship in Harlem and Upper Manhattan. It offers evening classes and supervision in faculty members’ offices. It also offers supervised clinical-experience programs for students in graduate programs in psychology, LMSWs and others. The Institute is currently working to develop a bigger Harlem clinical and child-development operation, where it hopes to offer not only individual psychoanalytic work and psychotherapy for adults, adolescents and children, but also group work for pregnant women, mothers & babies, parents & toddlers, Reflective-Network Therapy Nurseries for Preschoolers, and adolescent groups.
David Abrams, PhD Training Director
Fanny Brewster, PhD Clinical Director
Ernest P. Smith, LCSW-R Clinical Director
If you hold a graduate degree in any discipline and would like to become a psychoanalyst equipped to work with children, families, adolescents and adults in Harlem and nearby communities of New York’s great’s diversity, this event will help you get started by learning about the Institute and our training programs.
Ann Marie Sacramone, MSEd, LP Senior Faculty Member
HFI, which aims to take psychoanalytic training and treatment out into the community, grew out of a 1980s psychotherapy program created by psychoanalyst Stephen Kurtz, LCSW to help children at the Children’s Storefront School on East 129th St. In addition to Mr. Kurtz and Dr. Lawrence, founding Board members included Robert Coles, MD, the Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who devoted much of his career to researching and writing about the moral and spiritual life of children, including the book “Children of Crisis,” George Getzel, CSW, Tamar Turin Opler, LCSW-R, poet Ned O’Gorman, who founded the Children’s Storefront School, and attorney Elisabeth Radow, the Institute’s first chair, who did a mountain of pro bono legal work to set up the Institute and win its needed New York State approvals.
HFI Founder Stephen Kurtz, LCSW, with Founding Trustees
Margaret Morgan Lawrence, MD, and Robert Coles, MD
HFI’s current Board Chairman Dr. Gilbert Kliman, MD, was the 2020 recipient of the American Psychoanalytic Association President’s humanitarian award for “his lifetime psychoanalytic leadership in treating and advocating for underserved and traumatized children worldwide,” and the 2020 Rieger Award of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry for his Reflective Network Therapy in the Preschool classroom, which shows significant and regular IQ gains in the children who have participated in the treatment. Dr. Kliman has also created a series of guided-activity workbooks for children, including most recently, “My Pandemic Story” (see below), which has been translated into 13 languages. Dr. Kliman also provides expert-witness testimony to help victims of abuse and trauma pursue actions against their abusers. Intended recipients of such work in future include victims of police and vigilante violence and their families.
Leading psychoanalyst and HFI Honorary Dean, Dr. Kirkland Vaughans, has drawn wide attention for co-editing with Warren Spielberg, PhD, the seminal, 2014, two-volume book “The Psychology of Black Boys & Adolescents.”
To register for HFI’s Open House, Saturday May 15, please click on this Zoom link:
The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted all of our lives. Children and teenagers are especially vulnerable to the mental and emotional stressors of the crisis: their world has been turned upside down just as they were beginning to discover their own place in it.
The new guided-activity workbook “MY PANDEMIC STORY,” by our own HFI Chairman, leading child psychiatrist Dr. Gilbert Kliman, was created to support young people and their families and educators during these troubled times. Based on Dr. Kliman’s own Reflective Network Therapy and backed up by the authors’ decades of experience and evidence-based findings in disaster response, this workbook is for everyone grades K-12 and their families, educators and caregivers. It encourages learning and healthy emotional expression, introduces young people to appropriate coping and recovery skills, and encourages scientific thinking.
The Harlem Family Institute is honored to offer this workbook, in cooperation with the Children’s Psychological Health Center, in electronic format for purchase on our website. Pricing starts at $3.99 for an individual copy, with major discounts available on bulk licenses for organizations and educational institutions. For more info and to purchase: https://harlemfamilyinstititue.dpdcart.com/product/205016
Dr. Altman will discuss his new book over Zoom on Saturday, Dec. 12, 2020, at 11:30 AM EST, in conversation with integrative arts psychotherapist Eugene Ellis, MA, and child & adult psychoanalyst Ann Marie Sacramone, MSEd, LP. The book launch will inaugurate the Institute’s new Public Programming, under the leadership of HFI senior Faculty member, Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Fanny Brewster, PhD, MFA, LP.
In “White Privilege: Psychoanalytic Perspectives,” Dr. Altman examines the significant role race and the concept of unearned “white privilege” plays in society and in clinical practice, suggesting that there are hidden assumptions in the idea that perpetuate the very same prejudicial notions that are purportedly being dismantled.
This book examines in depth the polarized, black-and-white, socially constructed racial categories that rest on fallacious ideas of physical or psychological differences among peoples. Neil Altman also critically examines related concepts including privilege, guilt, and power. He suggests that the polarization of our political positions also contribute to stereotyping between people with different political leanings, foreclosing mutual respect, dialogue and understanding. Finally, Dr. Altman’s book explores in detail the implications for the theory and practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
Drawing on Neil Altman’s rich clinical experience and many years of engaging with racial and societal problems, the book offers a new agenda for understanding and offering analytic practice in contemporary society.
Admission cost: a donation of any amount to the nonprofit Harlem Family Institute
Dr. Neil Altman, PhD, is a member of the faculty at the William Alanson White institute in New York. He is Joint Editor Emeritus of “Psychoanalytic Dialogues: the International Journal of Relational Perspectives,” and a member of the editorial board at “Ricerca Psicoanalitica,” “The Journal of Child Psychotherapy,” “The Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy” and “The International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies.” He is a member of the Harlem Family (Psychoanalytic) Institute’s Advisory Council.
Eugene Ellis, MA, Dip. PSA accredited, is an integrative arts psychotherapist practicing in the U.K. He has worked for many years with severely traumatized children and their families in the field of adoption and fostering, as well as in private practice. He has a special interest in body-orientated therapies and is also the founder of the Black, African and Asian Therapy Network.
His coming book “The Race Conversation: An essential guide to creating life-changing dialogue,” explores not just the cognitive and historical development of the race construct but also focuses specifically on the nonverbal communication of race, both as a means of social control and as an essential part of navigating oppressive patterns.
Ann Marie Sacramone, MSEd, LP, is Chair of the Schools committee at the American Psychoanalytic Association, and Co-Chair of the Child, Adolescent and Parent Committee at the International Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. She is also a senior faculty member at the Harlem Family (Psychoanalytic) Institute
The basis of Ms. Sacramone’s approach to fostering change with clients is based on the developmental processes that we understand through neuroscience, video microanalysis and attachment research. We influence and respond to each other when we interact with each other. Over time, those interactions can change how we think, feel, work, play and have relationships.
In her practice, Ms. Sacramone views that influence, response and change as a therapeutic process. She practices that process in ways that lead to the vital growth of the client. Part of that vital growth is the development of rich and fulfilling relationships in love and work. Ms. Sacramone treats adults and children. In addition to her private practice, she has designed innovative models for school and community interventions that help both children and adults.
She has published and presented widely on psychoanalytic perspectives and applications in large social groups.A selected list can be found here.
Dr. Fanny Brewster, PhD, MFA, LP, is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Philadelphia. She holds a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, is a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute of New York and is a New York State Licensed Psychoanalyst and Certified SchoolPsychologist. She is a senior faculty member at the Harlem Family (Psychoanalytic) Institute, where she is establishing the Institute’s new Public Programs.
At The Harlem Family Institute, we hold in our hearts and minds that all of us in the world must unite against systemic racism. We are in solidarity with victims of abuse as we recognize the social responsibility of all people of all races for the behavior of their police officers. We help psychoanalysts rise above being bystanders. We recognize that all persons are the aggressors, bystanders and ultimately the police of a complexly interactive world. As psychoanalysts of many colors at this unique place called The Harlem Family Institute, we have a special mission: It is to deepen and extend conscious responsibility to as many citizens of the planet as possible.
As Chairperson of The Harlem Family Institute, a New York psychoanalytic training institute, I know that at this Institute we have great knowledge about the great social damage done by lynching, beating and killing of black persons. These seemingly old abuses still occur, conspicuously by wrongful police action. But here at The Harlem Family Institute we know these abuses are also widely present in other societal forms. They greatly affect children directly and indirectly for generations to come. The ways of affecting children are often unconscious. We want to raise consciousness of the complex processes, to combat the abuse of human beings by human beings.
Our unique psychoanalytic institute is established to train people of all ethnicities, people of all colors and diversity more generally to become psychoanalysts. We train as well as treat oppressed people. We offer forensic expert training in our acquired knowledge about the effects and actions of racism in this continuing crisis. In our forensic and other community-oriented psychoanalytic trainings, we use our specially acquired knowledge. We often benefit from our clients’ gifts of their voices. Thus, we use recorded evidence of wrongdoings against children of color and those in poverty, not just adults. We teach about the way the evil playbooks of racism travel through time, across generations.
We support those who take leadership in expressing the ultimate consciousness of responsibility borne by all citizens of France and, by extension, the world.
