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NYU & Academics

Lewis Aron, Ph.D. has been the director of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis since January, 1998.  A freestanding interdisciplinary program within the Graduate School of Arts and Science, the NYU Postdoctoral Program is designed to provide advanced education for postdoctoral psychologists in the theory and practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. 

Established in 1961, at a time when psychologists found it difficult to obtain formal training in psychoanalysis, the Postdoctoral Program was started as part of the Department of Psychology.  It was the first psychoanalytic training program housed in a psychology department in a university school of arts and science and was established to provide psychoanalytic training specifically for psychologists. 

Currently, with over 600 graduates, the Postdoctoral Program is the largest and among the most highly regarded psychoanalytic training program in the country. The Postdoctoral Program is fully accredited by The Accreditation Council for Psychoanalytic Education, Inc. (ACPEinc), and it was the first psychoanalytic training program to be so accredited. For further information about the ACPE standards and accreditation, see: http://www.acpeinc.org/about.html  

The Program offers a diverse curriculum, comprising modern Freudian, interpersonal, relational, and independent orientations, and it is unique in offering comprehensive training in these various schools.  Each orientation has an internationally known teaching faculty and outstanding clinical supervisors.  Contemporary psychoanalysis has become increasingly pluralistic, and the Postdoctoral Program's community of scholars and practitioners has made a significant contribution to the field.  A certificate of specialization in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis is awarded by the faculty upon satisfactory completion of courses, supervised clinical work, and a personal analysis. 

Lewis Aron with Prof. Martin Bergmann
The honored faculty speaker at the NYU Postdoc graduation, June, 2010.

Lewis Aron, Ph.D. is Co-Founder and Co-Chair with Adrienne Harris, Ph.D. and Jeremy Safran, Ph.D. for The Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School for Social Research

The Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School for Social Research was established in Spring 2008. 
The goals of the Ferenczi Center include
1) fund-raising to help support the Ferenczi House Project and the International Sandor Ferenczi Foundation
2) promoting new translations and publications of Ferenczi's writings
3) sponsoring conferences and promoting research, scholarship and publications regarding Ferenczi here in the USA.

Setting the Sandor Ferenczi Center in the New School has historical significance. Ferenczi spent 4 months in New York in 1926 centered on a series of lectures given at the New School, after being invited to the United States by Alvin Johnson, the President of the New School. From his correspondence with Freud in this period, we know that he lectured, saw patients and was involved in key issues in the developmental of psychoanalysis and training in the United States. Linking the Ferenczi project to the New School reconnects American psychoanalysts to important features of our own history.

It is also of some significance that we established the Ferenczi Center precisely 100 years after Ferenczi's first meeting with Freud in 1908. It is also of historic significance that the Ferenczi Center is housed in a major university since Sandor Ferenczi himself was the first to have been appointed as a Professor of Psychoanalysis at the University of Budapest in 1918.