Psychotherapy Training Program

Long Term Care Clinic

Each resident is paired with a supervisor in the PGY II year. In the middle of the PGY II year, you will start treating a patient thought suitable for intensive, long-term, psychodynamically oriented psychotherapy. You will meet weekly with your supervisor to discuss the progress of the therapy. You will continue to meet with the patient and the supervisor until the end of residency. This supervisor-resident relationship often becomes a very important mentoring relationship.

Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapy

In your PGY III year, you will be assigned patients and a supervisor in order to learn CBT. You will meet with your supervisor to learn to structure the therapy session, develop a therapeutic alliance and shared understanding of the work you and the patient will be doing, and review the progress of the therapy with an eye toward creating and implementing CBT oriented interventions. You may also elect to learn Cognitive Processing Therapy, a new therapy for patients who have experienced trauma.

Other Psychotherapeutic Treatments

You will learn about other forms of psychotherapy during your PGY 2 and 3 curricula. These include individual psychotherapies like existential psychotherapy and brief psychodynamic psychotherapy as well as psychotherapeutic modalities like dialectical behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, group therapy, couples therapy, and family therapy. Depending on your level of interest in these treatments, you can elect to have clinical experiences in your PGY 3 and 4 years, supervised by expert clinical faculty who employ these modalities of treatment in their own clinical practice.

The Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis

The Department of Psychiatry maintains a close affiliation with the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis (WNEIP), which is located in New Haven. Many members of the WNEIP are also faculty members in the Department and intimately involved in all levels of resident teaching and supervision of residents. They also act as consultants and mentors for residents interested in psychoanalytic training and/or personal psychoanalysis. The WNEIP offers a low-fee psychoanalytic clinic which is available to residents. The Department and the WNEIP jointly sponsor Grand Rounds presentations and the WNEIP sponsors psychoanalytically-oriented Continuing Medical Education activities through courses, seminars and special symposia. In addition, the WNEIP has an extensive psychoanalytic library available to residents. For more information please go to their website at: https://westernnewengland.org/