Category Archives: Events

HFI 2021 Annual Open House set for May 15 on Zoom

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.

To register for HFI’s Open House, Saturday May 15, 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.

a man assisting a young child with 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.

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 Board Chairman Dr. Gilbert W. Kliman, MD, Honorary Dean Dr. Kirkland C. Vaughans, PhD, Executive Director Michael Connolly, MPA, LP, Training Director Dr. David Abrams, PhD, Clinical Directors Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Fanny Brewster, PhD, MFA, LP, and Ernest P. Smith, LCSW-R, and child & adult psychoanalyst Ann Marie Sacramone, MSEd, LP.

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.

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

To register for HFI’s Open House, Saturday May 15, please click on this Zoom link.

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:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYqfu2sqjgqGNc0dym5zDcTLdPIlKXXxjvD

More information about the Institute and its psychoanalytic training programs is available in its 40-page Catalogue.

Continuing Education: An Afternoon with Dr. Fanny Brewster – “The Racial Complex: Race, Racism and Cultural Complexes” – Saturday, Feb. 13, 2021

Fanny Brewster, PhD (Psych.), MFA, LP

The Racial Complex: Race, Racism and Cultural Complexes

Saturday, Feb. 13, 2021, from 1:00-2:30 pm

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The Harlem Family Institute presents an afternoon with
Fanny Brewster, PhD, MFA, LP

Just as the colored man lives in your cities and even within your houses, so also he lives under your skin, subconsciously. Naturally it works both ways. Just as every Jew has a Christ complex, so every Negro has a white complex and every American (white) a Negro complex.

– C.G. Jung Collected Works, Vol. 10, para 963.

As we encounter the issue of race and therefore racism, witnessing the constellation of cultural complexes in actions of racial violence, marching protests and global engagement, it appears important to visit the Jungian concept of psychological complexes. Jung’s early work on the “color” complex, what I have named the racial complex, has with few exceptions, not been reviewed and investigated for almost one hundred years. Jung’s early attempt to define ethnicity and culture within the context of a racial complex, had the hallmark of 19th Century colonial-influenced thinking. As we work within a 21st century consciousness, we are required to deconstruct psychological theories that are relevant specifically to Jungian psychology and in general to the field of Psychoanalysis. This deconstruction allows us to question, inquire of and re-define both the interior unconscious space of complexes, and the exterior relationship with a differing cultural/ethnic “Other,” in deepening our understanding of racial relationships within the clinical setting.

The program offers 1.5 continuing education credits for Licensed Psychoanalysts.

Dr. Brewster is a Jungian analyst and Professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute of New York and is a New York State Licensed Psychoanalyst and Certified School Psychologist. She is a senior faculty member at the Harlem Family (Psychoanalytic) Institute, where she is establishing the Institute’s new Public Programs. She is also the author of several recent books, including:

The Racial Complex: A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race, 2019, nominated for the 2020 Gradiva Award;

Archetypal Grief: Slavery’s Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss, 2018; and

African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows, 2017.

Objectives:

1. Learn C.G. Jung’s general theory of psychological complexes and its applicability to clinical practice in terms of the Transference relationship.

2. Learn two characteristics of C.G. Jung’s “color”/ racial complex, its theoretical history and contemporary influence on the development of cultural group process.

3. Define C.G. Jung’s perspective on the American collective societal issue of racism as described in his Collected Works writings from the 1930s.

Registration: $60
To register: Pay $60 here via the Donate button, and then register here.

To receive CE credits, participants must be visible at all times during the presentation.

Cancellations: Professionals who are unable to attend a course for which they have registered may obtain a 60% refund if they notify the Registrar (emily.forche@hfi.nyc) in writing, no later than 24 hours before the class. Less than one day, no tuition will be refunded.

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.

BOOK LAUNCH: “White Privilege: Psychoanalytic Perspectives” by Dr. Neil Altman – Saturday, Dec. 12

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

Click here to donate

Registration link

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.

He is author of “The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture through a Psychoanalytic Lens” (Routledge, 2010) and “Psychoanalysis in Times of Accelerating Cultural Change: Spiritual Globalization” (Routledge, 2015). He has written numerous articles on clinical work with underserved and marginalized people, as well as his new “White Privilege: Psychoanalytic Perspectives” (Routledge, 2020).

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.

He is the author of many articles, including Silenced: the Black Student Experience, Towards a Rainbow-Coloured Therapeutic Community, Updating Psychotherapy training: equality and diversity issues in psychotherapy training and Why strong black people do go counselling (Voice newspaper).

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.

She is the author of several recent books, including “The Racial Complex: A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race,” 2019; “Archetypal Grief: Slavery’s Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss,” 2018; and “African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows,” 2017.