History:

This project was organically and slowly generated over years starting in 2019. At the outset, there was no official goal other than to listen to what local psychoanalytically oriented or curious clinicians needed and try to provide that to the degree possible.

While Western North Carolina has at least four graduate programs for mental health counselors and social workers in the vicinity, those programs are general training programs. This means that psychoanalysis can be experienced as a bit of a footnote in those training programs. Unfortunately, for students interested in psychoanalysis, there were few local resources and those resources that did exist seemed hard for new clinicians to find. Clinicians were reporting that they felt misunderstood, isolated and confused about how to blend their values about the work with what they were hearing that those in the mainstream therapist community were doing.

As a result, new therapists who were interested in practicing in a psychoanalytically oriented way found themselves without local guidance, local networking or local training to further their interest. Students started reaching out for guidance in their final semesters. Small reading groups turned into small consult groups. Small consult groups evolved into twice a year training opportunities locally. In turn this has evolved into quarterly training and some small series courses that provide CE’s.

This is a project grown from community need and one that aims to continue to be responsive to the local need.

My primary goal is to help clinicians sit in their chair with ease and sustainability for a long and meaningful career in helping others. To be a soft place to land in a world of confusing and complicated messages about how one helps the other.

Although I resist the request to identify with any one theory of psychoanalysis, I stand firm that any intervention that is not based in context of the relationship is unnecessarily vulnerable to becoming abusive in the treatment relationship. I take the relational stance that interpretation when not couched in a goal to have the patient feel understood is a violation of a patient’s autonomy and sense of self. In this way, all training will dance around the core belief that the therapeutic alliance is the most important factor in designing any interventions.

Mission:

Harry Guntrip wrote: “Theory…is a useful servant, but a bad master.” and “In the last resort, good therapists are born, not trained, and they make the best use of training.”

The mission of this venture is to provide local community around psychoanalytically informed conversations.

To provide psychoanalytic continuing education and discussions that demolish structural dogma that leaves historically marginalized people out of the discussion.

To provide psychoanalytic continuing education and discussion that is accessible to working mothers and fathers and supports their careers instead of demanding more of them than their families can or should sacrifice.

To create opportunities to meet like minded therapists, fostering ethical referral making in our community.

To provide meaningful opportunities for continuing education locally to those who are interested in different ways of thinking about therapeutic work.

To provide an emotionally contained space outside of the typical accredited psychoanalytic training institutes where innovative thought can be ungoverned by ideas of what psychoanalysis “must” be.

To create a place for innovative psychoanalytic thinkers to continue the brave and revolutionary work of challenging old ideas.

To aid clinicians in being good clinicians… not good theoreticians.

To provide what is good about post graduate learning (community, access to reading, helpful discussion, structure around deepening learning) while making it cost effective and sustainable in our modern world.

In a sea of manualized treatment, this training aims to explore schools of thought that are embodied in the vast array of psychoanalytic theorists from Freud and beyond.

Founding Trainer

Lara Doerrer has over two decades of clinical experience in a variety of professional settings. Lara opened her own private practice a decade ago. Through her private practice she sees patients and provides supervision for less experienced clinicians. Lara has decades of training experience as a certified MAPP trainer and a provider of staff training throughout her thirteen years in mental health agencies. Lara has thirteen years of experience in high intensity trauma settings and brings her trauma experience to all training. Lara has six years of continued education, supervision and training analysis through the Philadelphia School of Psychoanalysis. Lara has selected not to continue her education through an institute or to graduate. The blog posts on this website along with this article “Abolish The Psychoanalytic Institute” by Carter may shed light on the ethics and decision making around that choice. Lara identifies most with relational psychoanalytic thought, in other words: using the treatment relationship to treat trauma.

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