School of Medicine and Health Sciences Partners with Washington Center for Psychoanalysis

The collaboration will offer research and educational opportunities for medical students and residents.

November 6, 2013

Washington Center

Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Chair James Griffith, current President of the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis David Cooper and former President of the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis David Joseph.

The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences has announced an educational and research partnership with the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis (WCP).

The affiliation will offer expanded educational opportunities for medical students and psychiatry residents.  The WCP will become an academic division within the Department of Psychiatry, which will encourage campus-wide teaching and scholarly collaborations with other academic departments at the university.

The WCP is a nonprofit association in D.C. that provides training for clinicians, scholars and others in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapies, as well as educational programs that use psychoanalytic theory to examine literature, art and music.

“This affiliation will provide our students and residents with experiences that are not as easily attainable at other medical schools,” said James Griffith, the director of Psychiatry Residence Training and the interim chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. “With an understanding and appreciation for psychoanalysis, our students will be better prepared to understand and treat their patients.”

Dr. Griffith noted that this affiliation between a psychoanalytic institute and a psychiatric department is the first of its kind in recent history, and he hopes it will reinforce SMHS’s place as a center for excellence for psychotherapy practice, training and research.

The use of psychoanalysis as treatment for mental illnesses has declined within current health care systems due to length of treatment and costs.  However, psychoanalytic inquiry as a method for studying human experience offers a valuable perspective for examining impasses in clinical treatment, enriching psychiatric education, designing mixed methods programs for psychiatric research and conducting scholarship within the interdisciplinary field of medical humanities, which applies the humanities and the arts to medical education and practice. The partnership will maximize the benefits of the perspective offered by psychoanalysis.

 “Many center members have been teaching and/or supervising in the Department of Psychiatry for many years, and formalizing this union makes great sense for both organizations,” President of the WCP David Cooper said. “We look forward to a mutually enriching collaboration, as there are exciting possibilities for psychoanalytic clinicians and scholars to engage in the university setting."