Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I want to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for your support of NYIPT.  This past year has been wonderfully successful, and we expect that 2007 will be even better!

I would like to tell you about the new and exciting projects on our agenda, which we are proud to be offering:

During this past year we partnered with The Opportunity Charter School in Harlem, and have already started training its social workers who provide mental health services to troubled children. These professionals play a critical role in helping the students address their mental health problems and encouraging them to stay in school and continue learning.  Many of these children are in foster care and some are even homeless. As a result of our training, the social workers at the Opportunity Charter School will improve their skills, and thanks to your contributions we will be able to continue our mission.

In addition, this year we started a project to provide training to mental health workers and interns at the Administration for Children’s Services.  These are people who work with New York City’s most seriously abused and abandoned children and with runaway teens (See articles on our collaboration with ACS).  In this newsletter we have excerpts from talks presented by Gloria Malter and Tracy Simon to help ACS workers better relate to the traumatized children that they see on a daily basis.

In the five years since receiving our charter, NYIPT’s faculty has supervised candidates who have provided over 18,000 hours of psychotherapy services for needy children and their parents.  NYIPT’s graduates have continued to work as administrators in programs that are helping children.  Most of our graduates have gone on to train and supervise other mental health professionals, thus helping more and more children each year.  NYIPT is proud that our program has created a chain effect of training mental health workers to be the best professionals they can be!  We are happy to be continuing our original mission: to provide training for therapists who work in New York City Public Schools and Community Mental Health Agencies, people who are providing mental health services to hundreds of children each year. 

In this newsletter, you will read about our work with needy children.  First, our Clinical Coordinator Carole Grand describes her work with a troubled boy and her interventions with his parents, which seemed to change the trajectory of his life in a profound way.  Next, Hannah Hahn describes the importance of the therapeutic relationship as illustrated by her treatment of a five-year-old boy.  We can all learn from the experience of our esteemed and well-seasoned matriarch, Jeanette Levitt, as she takes a historical look at the field of child therapy from the 1930s to the present. She suggests that we have come full circle in terms of what we need to do to respond to the needs of children in therapy today.  We have another opportunity to rethink history as Teri Schwartz presents us with a noted scholar’s talk on the first child therapy case treated by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. 

Many of us at NYIPT have been influenced by another major thinker, Dr. Michael Eigen. He has made a major impact in the world of psychoanalysis.  We are happy to publish excerpts from an interview that Regina Monti conducted with him.  Other articles include: Jane Buckwalter looking into the lyrics of hip-hop artist Eminem as she gives us some ideas about the meaning of his music; Martha Herman giving us her insight on Asperger’s Syndrone with suggestions for therapists, teachers and parents on ways to connect with these children; a look at the development of a professional from our graduate Susan Caputo; and some comments from our graduates.

We are all proud to be part of the NYIPT program and of the contributors to this Newsletter.  I hope you will enjoy reading it. My best wishes for a healthy new year,

       Phyllis

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