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.
Mark your calendars! The Harlem Family Institute’s “Saturday Talks” series and community outreach conversations are set to continue this fall. Stay tuned for further information and registration for each event.
Saturday, September 30, 11:00 AM – 1:30 PM Eastern Time (virtual): “Saturday Talks: Harlem’s Psychoanalytic Renaissance” presents: Don Moss, “On Having Whiteness Revisited & A Composite of Outraged Whiteness.”
Friday-Sunday, October 27-29, in-person in Phoenix, AZ: an immersion weekend workshop in REFLECTIVE NETWORK THERAPY with Dr. Gilbert Kliman.
Saturday, November 25, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM Eastern Time (virtual): “Saturday Talks: Harlem’s Psychoanalytic Renaissance” presents: Jennifer Davids, “The Grenfell Tower Fire and The Social Psychoanalytic Work | Refugee Life, Race, Gender, and Privilege as Power | Faces of Othering 6 Years Later”
We’re seeking applicants with advanced degrees in any discipline and the self-awareness, intuition, curiosity and passion to become Licensed or Certified Psychoanalysts through our psychoanalytic training programs.
Please join us for the Institute’s annual
Open House
on Saturday May 6 from 11 am to 1 pm (Eastern Time)
to learn about our clinical training programs in the community to become a psychoanalyst.
Applicants need to hold at least a master’s 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.
To register for HFI’s Open House, Saturday May 6, please click on this Zoom link:
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 of multiple faiths, from Harlem and the city’s most diverse communities – are able to develop careers as advanced mental-health professionals. The Institute’s more than 70 available 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.
Our founding Trustees included Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence, MD, the nation’s first African American woman pediatrician and first African American psychoanalyst, who died in December 2019 aged 105. Our leadership includes Principal Consultant Dr. Paula Kliger, PhD, Honorary Dean Dr. Kirkland C. Vaughans, PhD, Executive Director Michael Connolly, MPA, LP, Training Director Dr. David Abrams, PhD, Academic Dean Robin Rayford, MA, MLLP, Clinical Director Ernest P. Smith, LCSW-R, and child & adult psychoanalyst Ann Marie Sacramone, MSEd, LP.
Paula Kliger, PhD HFI Principal ConsultantKirkland Vaughans, PhD Honorary DeanDavid Abrams, PhD Training DirectorRobin Rayford, MA, MLLP Academic DeanErnest P. Smith, LCSW-R Clinical DirectorAnn Marie Sacramone, MSEd, LP Senior Faculty Member
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.
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.
To register for HFI’s Open House, Saturday May 6, please click on this Zoom link:
“My Book About the War and Terror in Ukraine” offers psychological first aid to displaced and traumatized children and families during the war in Ukraine
The continuing war and terror in Ukraine have caused havoc and suffering for millions of Ukrainians by killing, maiming, terrorizing and displacing them from their homes. Here at the Harlem Family (Psychoanalytic) Institute in New York we are also all too familiar with atrocities. We know about lynchings, the genocide of Native Americans, rape, mutilations and transgenerational horrors in our own neighborhoods. We have an Acute Trauma Response Service (named after the first African American woman psychoanalyst) and have been regularly presenting extraordinary workshops, including powerful videos of how psychoanalysts can listen, give voice to, understand and sometimes deeply strengthen the lives of child and family victims.
“My Book About the War and Terror in Ukraine,” a new Guided-Activity Workbook aimed at helping young war victims deal with the trauma of recent events
To help guide caregivers and therapists, child & adolescent psychoanalyst Gilbert Kliman, MD, with several co-authors and translators, has prepared a new guided-activity workbook: My Book About the War and Terror in Ukraine. (It is based on previous editions, which have helped recovery from natural and human-caused disasters.) Published digitally in numerous languages by the Harlem Family (Psychoanalytic) Institute in New York, it is offered on the Institute’s website. It is part of the Institute’s focus on responding to trauma and loss, whether in New York or elsewhere in our so-often cruel and troubled world.
The workbook provides a structure to help as many children, teens and families in many nations as quickly as possible, whether affected directly or indirectly.
We are now beginning a series of Saturday trauma-focused workshops for clinicians, educators and others. The workshops will facilitate the use of our psychoanalytic and other caregiver selves and our ways of helping traumatized people. They will focus on real experience of countertransference and technique in catastrophic traumas in many contexts. We welcome and hope to include Ukrainian and other European colleagues and their evolving work.
The Harlem Family (Psychoanalytic) Institute in New York invites you to join us via Zoom for:
Trauma-Focused Workshops for Clinicians & Educators
including how to help Ukrainian and other children & families to use
My Book About the War and Terror in Ukraine
The digital publication is an evidence-based, 98-page, guided-activity workbook designed to support children’s, teens’ and adults’ mental and emotional health amid the war and terror in Ukraine. It is available from the website of the Harlem Family Institute for single-copy download for a donation to the Institute of whatever amount each individual acquirer wishes. It is in English, Ukrainian, Polish, German, French, Italian and Spanish, and soon in Russian.
Each 90-minute trauma-response workshop will be offered for US$60 on Saturdays. It will be offered free to Ukrainian colleagues who contact us. We begin May 21 at these times:
5 to 6:30 pm:Ukraine, Israel
4 to 5:30 pm: Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Warsaw
3 to 4:30 pm: London
10 to 11:30 am: New York
9 to 10:30 am: Dallas, Chicago
7 to 8:30 am: San Francisco, Tucson
10 to 11:30 pm:Beijing
The workshops will be offered by child & adolescent psychoanalysts Gilbert Kliman, MD, the lead author on the workbook, and Paula Kliger, PhD, an expert in trauma, disaster and crisis response.
The program offers 2.5 New York State continuing-education contact-hour credits
for New York State Licensed Psychoanalysts and Social Workers. It also offers Certificates of Attendance. Details below.
Kathryn McCormick, MA, LMFT
About This Presentation
This presentation will highlight how an evidence-based, psychoanalytically-informed treatment method called Reflective Network Therapy (RNT) helps children and their natural networks (parents/caregivers, teachers and classmates) heal the experiences of intergenerational trauma, grief and loss, and the role that forming a coherent narrative plays in treatment. Perspectives in working with Indigenous and First Nations peoples will be considered.
Learning Objectives:
As a result of attending this presentation, participants will be able to:
Describe an understanding of the role of colonization in the transmission of intergenerational trauma.
Clarify and articulate the benefits that an evidenced-based psychoanalytic treatment method called Reflective Network Therapy (RNT) can bring children who have experienced intergenerational grief, loss and trauma and/or developmental disturbances.
Explore how Indigenous and First Nations preschoolers, their caregivers and tribal communities can experience healing from the impact of intergenerational grief, loss, and trauma through the process of building epistemic trust and the formation of a coherent narrative.
About Kathryn McCormick
Kathryn McCormick, MA, LMFT, CMHS, EMMHS, is a bilingual (Spanish) child analyst and an advanced candidate in adult training at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She has worked for over two decades in a northwest tribal community as a clinician, including for over 10 years as the Administrative Clinical Supervisor of a tribal Child, Youth and Family (CYF) Mental Wellness Program. For the past six years, she has served as the Administrative Clinical Supervisor of the tribes’ Birth to Five Center, and as the head and lead clinician in the psychoanalytically informed, evidence-based Reflective Network Therapy (RNT) program for children (aged 2½-5) challenged with trauma, developmental delays and/or social, emotional and/or behavioral difficulties.
Internationally, Kathryn has held numerous administrative and executive positions with IPSO (the candidate organization of the IPA) including as the former IPSO VP Elect of North America – 2013-2015, IPSO VP of North America – 2015-2017, IPSO President Elect 2017-2019, and most recently IPSO President, 2019-2021.
Additionally, she has held several positions in the IPA both on the IPA IPSO Relations Committee (IIRC) from 2013-2020, IPA Health in the Community Committee.
Kathryn currently serves on the IPA Education in the Community Committee.
Spotlight on HFI’s New Community Outreach
This presentation is part of our multifaceted new Community Outreach programs, including:
This Saturday Talks series, Harlem’s Psychoanalytic Renaissance, on many Saturdays at 11:30 am ET, featuring leaders on issues of diversity, discrimination, social justice, human rights and other global, community and individual needs.
A weekly clinical discussion group, Bridging the Harlem Family Institute and the Community,for neighborhood clinicians, clergy and teachers, led by Paula Kliger, PhD, and Neil Altman, PhD.
The Margaret Morgan Lawrence Acute Trauma-Response Service providing especially veteran psychoanalysts to help those suffering after traumatic events, led by Gilbert Kliman, MD, and Paula Kliger, PhD.
The Institute is also working to launch a service for young children, Reflective Network Therapy in Preschool Classrooms, created by Gilbert Kliman, MD. We seek preschools, daycare centers and child clinical centers interested in collaborating with us.
Further announcements about these efforts will follow.
Registration
To support the Harlem Family Institute’s work, we are charging attendees $60 for this event. Registration takes place via Eventbrite and you will receive the Zoom link by email prior to the event.
Discounts are available for unlicensed candidates at psychoanalytic training institutes and unlicensed students who can demonstrate this status and for whom this fee would be a hardship.
CE Contact-Hour Credits & Certificates of Attendance
New York State Continuing Education Contact-Hour Credits will be available for New York StateLicensed Psychoanalysts and Social Workers who attend the entirety of the presentation and remain on screen throughout. HFICertificates of Attendance will also be available on the same basis. Please note that we can offer CE credits only to Licensed Psychoanalysts and Social Workers currently licensed in the State of New York. Other licensed clinicians should check with their licensing agencies to see if the agency will accept an HFI Certificate of Attendance.
CE contact-hour credits will be granted only to participants with documented attendance of the entire program and completed online evaluation form who have registered for them. No partial credit will be offered. It is the responsibility of the participants seeking CE credits to comply with these requirements. Upon completion of this program and online evaluation form, participants will be granted 2.5 Contact-Hour CE credits. Certificates of Attendance will be granted to participants with documented attendance of the entire program who have registered for them.
The Harlem Family Institute is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for Licensed Psychoanalysts, #P-0048. The Institute is recognized by the same Board as an approved provider of continuing education for Social Workers, #SW-0648.
The Harlem Family Institute is deeply committed to diversity as it trains candidates from many different backgrounds to become psychoanalysts through clinical work in underserved communities. It is authorized to train anyone with a master’s degree in any field recognized by the NY State Education Department. Graduates may sit the state licensing exam in psychoanalysis upon graduation. The Institute is especially interested in issues of diversity and discrimination in race, ethnicity and gender and works especially with children and families as well as with adults in Harlem and other underserved communities.
Cancellations:Professionals who are unable to attend a course for which they have registered may obtain a 60% refund through Eventbrite up to 24 hours before the class. Less than one day, no tuition will be refunded. If you are in need of further assistance with a refund, please contact the Institute (hfi.admin@harlemfamilyinstitute.org) in writing. Disclosure Information:None of the planners and presenters of this program have any relevant financial relationships to disclose.
Recording:As the presentation will be recorded, participants’ registration and attendance represent their permission to be recorded and for their name and/or image to be included in subsequent presentations of the recording.
The Harlem Family Institute | Admin. Office: 2 Riverside Drive #5D, New York, NY 10023 Phone: 212-920-7965 | Email: hfi.admin@harlemfamilyinstitute.org
Detail, Vincent Smith’s “The Movers and the Shakers” mural at 125th St. 2-3 line subway stop, Harlem.
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On Saturday, February 26, our virtual Harlem’s Psychoanalytic Renaissance Saturday Talks series continues with the illustrious Dr. Harriet Wolfe, MD, President of the International Psychoanalytical Association, speaking on “Psychoanalysis at the Crossroads.”
In a time of growing awareness of social justice problems and structural racism, how can psychoanalysis take action as part of the solution?
The next few years will be especially important for psychoanalysis. As Fred Busch proposes in a book he is editing: It is a time to be thinking about Psychoanalysis at the Crossroads. The profession has an early and venerable history of commitment to social issues and social justice. In recent decades, it has engaged in a more limited focus on its functions and a preoccupation with internal controversies over training standards and theoretical differences.
The Harlem Psychoanalytic Renaissance offers a timely and deeply important opportunity to consider the possible role of psychoanalysis in moving members of the general public to recognize the impact of social inequity, economic need, cultural discrimination, prejudice, and environmental crisis on the development of individual and group minds. False beliefs are becoming so-called “facts.”
One role of psychoanalytic activism is the correction of false facts. False beliefs include the idea that therapists and people of color have equal access to mental health care, including psychoanalytic treatment and psychoanalytic training.
The Harlem Psychoanalytic Renaissance will be discussed as an example of the potential for a psychoanalytic commitment to social issues through treatment, community outreach, and training. Its growth will support psychoanalytic values important to society: truth, insight, freedom of thought, and justice for individuals and groups.
About Dr. Harriet Wolfe
Harriet Wolfe, M.D., is President of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Past President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.
Her scholarly interests include clinical applications of psychoanalytic research, organizational processes, female development, and therapeutic action. She has a longstanding commitment to psychoanalytic public health intervention. She has co-authored several guided-activity workbooks for children, parents and teachers to help children cope with natural and manmade disasters.
She teaches analysts-in-training, psychiatric residents, and junior faculty psychodynamic understandings of severely ill patients and the value of listening to listening in the clinical setting. She has a private practice of psychoanalysis, and individual and couple’s psychoanalytic psychotherapy in San Francisco.
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Registration
To support the Harlem Family Institute’s work, we are charging attendees $60 for this event. Registration takes place via Eventbriteand you will receive the Zoom link by email prior to the event.
Discounts are available for unlicensed candidates at psychoanalytic training institutes who can demonstrate this status and for whom this fee would be a hardship.
CE Contact-Hour Credits & Certificates of Attendance
New York State Continuing Education Contact-Hour Credits will be available for New York StateLicensed Psychoanalysts and Social Workers who attend the entirety of the presentation and remain on screen throughout. HFICertificates of Attendance will also be available on the same basis. Please note that we can offer CE credits only to Licensed Psychoanalysts and Social Workers currently licensed in the State of New York.
Learning Objectives
Participants will be able to describe and trace the early evolution of a socially conscious and responsible psychoanalysis, exploring the conception and implementation of “free clinics” as pragmatic solutions to making treatment more accessible to all people.
Participants will be able to identify and describe the structural changes in psychoanalysis, from its varied location within Europe and the U.S., as an institution and culture, as an evolving profession with multiple theoretical perspectives and practices.
Participants will be able to describe the current arguments around whether “community psychoanalysis” or “applied psychoanalysis” is “pure gold” psychoanalytic work.
Participants will be able to identify at least two psychoanalysts whose historical or current role in social activism influenced the psychoanalytic focus on “the complexities of societal suffering.”
Participants will be able to link the mission / activism / practices of early psychoanalysts, addressing transgenerational trauma, social injustice and inequity, discrimination, marginalization, and stress-based human suffering, to current efforts to do the same by psychoanalysts engaged in “bridging psychoanalysis and the community.”
CE contact-hour credits will be granted only to participants with documented attendance of the entire program and completed online evaluation form who have registered for them. No partial credit will be offered. It is the responsibility of the participants seeking CE credits to comply with these requirements. Upon completion of this program and online evaluation form, participants will be granted2 hour Contact-Hour CE credits.Certificates of Attendance will be granted to participants with documented attendance of the entire program who have registered for them.
The Harlem Family Institute is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for Licensed Psychoanalysts, #P-0048. The Institute is recognized by the same Board as an approved provider of continuing education for Social Workers, #SW-0648.
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.
