Eating and The Body:
A Cultural, Relational Psychoanalytic Framework
The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute is known for its pioneering work on women's relationship to food, feeding, and their bodies. Since the publication of Susie Orbach's Fat Is A Feminist Issue (1978), the faculty of The WTCI has further developed a theory and practice explicated in Eating Problems: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Treatment Model (1994), a widely used text for psychotherapists.
The WTCI's intensive One Year Training Program understands eating and body image problems as the way women/people speak about what is dissociated and unspeakable. We see these symptoms as an expression of the confluence of self, interpersonal, and cultural experience. The prejudices of our culture regarding race, class, gender, and sexual identities are contained in the contemporary idealized Body: racialized Euro-American, ultra-thin, hard, toned, young, heterosexual, hypersexual, and affluent. We analyze why and how women become psychically malleable to internalize this Ideal.
We have developed a theory and practice integrating psychoanalytic, trauma, feminist, and social theory which are fully elaborated in our self-attuned model illustrated in Eating Problems (Basic Books,1994) written by The WTCI faculty. This integrative model offers a treatment method that includes working directly with the symptom, thereby helping people become embodied selves, (re)claim, literally and metaphorically, their own hunger, appetites, needs, desires, and limits. The program enriches and deepens therapists' knowledge base, skills, and use of self in working with people suffering not only with eating and body image difficulties, but with obsessions and symptoms of all kinds. Graduates find their clinical work becoming enlivened whether in agency-based or private psychotherapy practice.
Provisionally Chartered by the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York
Program Information
Classes meet
on Thursday evenings, 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM and include
lectures, discussion, an experiential group, and group
supervision. Thirty weeks of individual supervision are
required. Supervision may be focused in one of two ways:
The
Clinical Track requires
students to have their own individual case or group (from
agency or private practice). This track is designed to
assist those who wish to enhance their clinical skill in
treating eating and body image problems. Process
recordings will be required.
The
Applied Track requires the
student to identify a research topic, a community-based
project or intervention, or other topic of interest
culminating in a final paper. This track is for
those who do not have a current clinical case and wish to
deepen their learning experience by focusing on a
theoretical or clinical issue, problem or question.
Topics may be developed in the context of supervision and
should be identified by December 1st. Students
pursuing the clinical track should have their case or
group identified by December 1st, or earlier.
Fees
The fee for
the course work is $1950.00 per year. Individual
supervision is $60.00 per session. Application fee
of $50 is non-refundable. Scholarship funding is
available.
Eligibility
This program
is open to those with degrees in the mental health
professions and related fields. Applications are due by
July 15th.
The Women’s Therapy Centre Association
Upon
graduation candidates become members of a vibrant,
activist organization and are supported to begin/continue
any project of their interest or join any existing one:
the Domestic Violence Project, the Diversity Committee,
lectures, and workshops.
Download Application
Here
Curriculum
WEEKS
1-5:
*
Social causes: gender arrangements, racism, consumer
capitalism, class, thinness as an ideal, and dieting as
both a commercial empire and an internal object relation.
* Relational psychoanalytic theory: Klein, Fairbairn,
Winnicott, and contemporary theorists with reference to
the cultural ideal and normative practices.
* Stance: candidates' conscious and unconscious body size
biases.
WEEKS
6-10:
* An
experiential psychoeducational group: participants learn
The WTCI's unique model of feeding oneself and living in
one's body. Participants work on their own eating and
body issues, observe an experienced clinician in
practice, and discuss her interventions as they apply the
model to themselves. This in-depth
work creates a cohesive group learning
environment.
WEEKS
11-15:
*
Implementing the model: clinical work on the
psychodynamic meanings and self states of the
body--including hunger, food choice, satiety, and fat and
thin states. Learn to help people become embodied
subjects rather than objectified bodies.
WEEKS
16-20:
*
The psychodynamics and treatment of those suffering with
and speaking through bulimia, anorexia, and compulsive
eating as well as the experience of living in a larger
body.
WEEKS
21-24:
*
The convergence of eating problems, trauma, and
dissociation.
WEEKS
25-26:
*
Working with adolescents and families.
WEEKS
27-30:
*
Countertransference (explored throughout the
program); non-verbal communication and the psyche-soma
connection.
WTCI
Faculty and Supervisors
Linda Arbus, LCSW
Linda Arkin, LCSW
Catherine Baker-Pitts, Ph.D.
Carol
Bloom, LCSW
Bonnie Gitlin, LCSW
Andrea Gitter, MA, ADTR, LCAT
Susan Gutwill, MS, LCSW
Laura Kogel, LCSW, ACSW
Deborah Liner, Ph.D.
Wendy Miller, Ph.D.
Lisa Thaler, LCSW
Anne Wennerstrand, LCSW, DTR
Lela Zaphiropoulos, LCSW, ACSW
Janet Zinn, LCSW
Additional Programs
The WTCI
offers continuing education courses; six week eating and
body image psycho-educational groups for both the public
and practitioners; an annual lecture, workshops, and our
annual event,
INDWELLING: Living in a Female Body