Robert Winer, M.D.

About Me

I had my first experience in this field as a college student. Taking a course called Field Work in Mental Health at Harvard, I was assigned to meet with a young schizophrenic woman at a state hospital once each week, and to try to get to know her. I learned a shocking lesson about ambivalence when I returned to the ward after a long Christmas break and she hurled at my head a wallet she’d lovingly made for me in occupational therapy. Later that year, along with five classmates and our teacher, we opened a halfway house for patients from that hospital – we lived there, while attending classes, and operated the facility. Wellmet House was one of the first halfway houses in the nation, and it is still successfully in business in Cambridge, Mass.

After medical school and my psychiatry residency, both at Yale, I came to the National Institutes of Health and worked for two years on a ward that treated adolescents and their families. I learned a good deal about family process there, and went on to organize and chair a postgraduate training program in family and couple therapy through the Washington School of Psychiatry which trained over 100 clinicians over the course of 26 years.

In the 1970’s I took training in adult psychoanalysis at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. My private practice over the last three decades has included individual therapy and psychoanalysis with adolescents and adults, couple therapy, and family therapy. I’ve written a well-received book about my work, “Close Encounters: A Relational View of the Therapeutic Process.” Reading it would give you a good sense of how I work and think. I’ve also started and chaired a number of training programs for postgraduate professionals, most notably a national program in psychological writing, New Directions, which is based in Washington.

Education

- Bachelor of Arts, Magna Cum Laude
Harvard College, Cambridge, MA

- Doctor of Medicine
Yale Medical School, New Haven, CT

- Fellowship in Psychiatry
Yale Medical School

- U.S. Public Health Service, Clinical Associate
Adult Psychiatry Branch, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD

- Psychoanalytic Training
Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, Washington, DC

Current Positions

- Full time private practice of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and couple
and family therapy, in practice since 1973

- Teaching Analyst, Washington Psychoanalytic Institute

- Chair, Modern Perspectives on Psychotherapy, a program of the
Washington Psychoanalytic Center, since 1984

- Co-Chair, New Directions, a program of the Washington Psychoanalytic
Center, since 1996

- Advisor, Psychoanalytic Theory for Scholars, a program of the Washington Psychoanalytic Center, since 2003

- Faculty Committee, Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, since 2004

- Guest Teaching at Georgetown Medical School, Children’s Hospital,
Catholic University, Gallaudet University, Walter Reed Hospital,
Children’s Hospital

- Editorial Advisory Board of Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological
Processes, since 1991

Book

Close Encounters: A Relational View of the Therapeutic Process, NJ: Aronson, 1994.

Book Chapters

“Witnessing and Bearing Witness: The Ontogeny of Encounter in the Films of Peter Weir” in Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema, Psychiatry and the Humanities Series, Vol. 10, edited by Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

“The Role of Transitional Experience in Development in Healthy and Incestuous Families” in Foundations of Psychodynamic Family Therapy, edited by Jill Savege Scharff, NY: Aronson, 1989.

“The Re-Creation of the Family in the Mind of the Individual Therapist & The Re-Creation of the Individual in the Mind of the Family Therapist” in Foundations of Psychodynamic Family Therapy, edited by Jill Savege Scharff, NY: Aronson, 1989.

“The Whole Story” in The World of Samuel Beckett, edited by Joseph H. Smith, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

“Echoes of the Wolf-Men” in Telling Facts: History and Narration in Psychoanalysis, edited by Joseph H. Smith and Humphrey Morris, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Book Reviews

Book Review: The Sexual Relationship: An Object Relations View of Sex and the Family by David E. Scharff, in Psychiatry 46: 402-404, 1983.

Book Review: Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis by Stephen A. Mitchell, in Psychiatry 53: 92-99, 1990.

Book Review: Meadowlands by Louise Glück in Voices: The art and science of psychotherapy 34: 91-93, 1998.

Articles

“Choose Me” in Projections, the Newsletter of the Forum for Psychoanalytic Study of Film, 1989.

“Dekalog One” in Projections, the Newsletter of the Forum for Psychoanalytic Study of Film, 11: 15-17, 1997.

“Another Woman” in Projections, the Newsletter of the Forum for Psychoanalytic Study of Film, 11: 14-16, 1997.

“Body Heat” in Projections, the Newsletter of the Forum for Psychoanalytic Study of Film, 12; 10-12, 1998.

“Evil in the Mind of the Therapist,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 37: 613-622, 2001.

Presentations on Film and Theater

“Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean”
American Film Institute retrospective on Robert Altman 1987

“The Stunt Man”
Forum for Psychiatry and the Humanities, Washington School of Psychiatry
1988

“Zelig”
Smithsonian Resident Associate Program 1988

Presentation on Samuel Beckett
Smithsonian Resident Associate Program 1989

“The Pawnbroker”
Jewish Community Center of D.C. 1989

“Choose Me”
Smithsonian Resident Associate Program 1989

“The Year of Living Dangerously”
Smithsonian Resident Associate Program 1990

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” and “Long Day’s Journey into Night”
American Psychoanalytic Association annual meeting 1990

“The Manchurian Candidate”
Forum for Psychiatry and the Humanities, Washington School of Psychiatry
1991

Host of film series on political extremism
Smithsonian Resident Associate Program 1991

“The Pawnbroker”
American Psychoanalytic Association annual meeting and at The Lincoln
Center, N.Y. 1991

“The Silence of the Lambs”
American Psychoanalytic Association annual meeting 1993

“Taxi Driver”
Smithsonian Resident Associate Program 1994

“The Odyssey” (Derek Wolcott)
Arena Stage 1994

“The Conversation”
Forum for Psychiatry and the Humanities, Washington School of Psychiatry
1995

“Mourning Becomes Electra”
The Shakespeare Theatre 1997

“Seven Guitars”
The Studio Theatre 1998

“The Trojan Women”
The Shakespeare Theatre 1999

“All My Sons”
Arena Stage 2000

“The Great White Hope”
Arena Stage 2000

Host of film series on disturbances of time
American Psychoanalytic Association winter meeting 2000

“Hero”
Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute” 2001

Host of film series on film noir
American Psychoanalytic Association winter meeting 2001

“House of Games”
Washington Psychoanalytic Foundation 2002

“Apocalypse Now (Redux)”
Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute 2002

“True West”
Arena Stage 2002

“The End of the Affair”
Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute 2003

“The Kiss of the Spider Woman”
Washington Psychoanalytic Foundation 2003

“Another Woman”
American University

“Body Heat”
Corcoran Museum

“Vertigo”
Washington Psychoanalytic Foundation 2003

“Stand By Me”
Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute 2004

“Long Day’s Journey into Night”
Washington Psychoanalytic Society 2004

“The End of the Affair”
Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute 2005

“Closer”
Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute 2006