Online Information Series: Understanding the Austen Riggs Treatment Approach
What does it mean to truly pay attention—to patients, to suffering, and to yourself?
For Kyle Shepard, DO, the Austen Riggs Center Fellowship was not simply advanced psychiatric training. It was a four-year process of learning how to listen more deeply, tolerate complexity, and rethink what growth means—both for patients and for himself.
The Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center Adult Psychoanalytic Training Program and Fellowship, based in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, offers immersive post-residency and postdoctoral training for psychologists and psychiatrists grounded in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic principles within a therapeutic community. It is fully accredited by the Accreditation Council for Psychoanalytic Education (ACPEinc) and is an approved institute of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). For clinicians seeking depth over speed, reflection over protocol, and collaboration over hierarchy, it represents something increasingly rare in modern mental health care.
For Kyle, the journey began years before he ever arrived in the Berkshires.
Discovering the Austen Riggs Fellowship During Residency
Kyle first heard about Austen Riggs early in his psychiatry residency at the Institute of Living / Hartford Hospital. A program director with longstanding connections to Riggs encouraged him to “keep an eye on the place.” At the time, he had broad interests—psychotherapy, inpatient psychiatry, academic possibilities—but no single, fixed path.
By his fourth year of residency, he had explored nearly every fellowship option available.
Then he completed a rotation at Riggs through its Elective in Psychodynamic Psychiatry.
What struck him was not just the clinical model, but the atmosphere.
“There was a sense that everything here was a learning experience. The curiosity. The self-reflection. The immersion. I had this feeling that no matter what I did afterward—even if I left medicine entirely—I would grow from this.”
For Kyle, that sense of immersion distinguished the Austen Riggs Fellowship from other psychiatry fellowships. The work was not compartmentalized. Clinical care, supervision, seminars, team meetings, and community life all intersected. Learning was continuous.
Other career opportunities, he reasoned, would likely remain available later. This kind of deeply reflective training experience might not.
He applied. He was accepted.
And then the world shut down.
Beginning a Fellowship in the Midst of a Pandemic
Kyle began his Fellowship at an extraordinarily uncertain time. COVID-19 was still surging. Vaccines had only recently become available to frontline healthcare workers. Meetings were virtual. The Berkshires were quiet and socially distanced.
Before coming to Riggs, he had worked in inpatient settings during the height of the pandemic, caring for COVID-positive patients and witnessing profound loss.
There was, he recalls, an undercurrent of existential fear.
Entering an intensive psychodynamic training program under those conditions was disorienting. Joining a therapeutic community while much of the world felt suspended required patience and resilience.
And yet, even in that context, something essential about Riggs held steady.
“What’s remarkable about Riggs is holding on to the idea that surviving is necessary—but not sufficient. We’re not just patching people up and sending them on their way. We’re asking: what does it mean for someone to find their own reasons and ways to be on this planet?”
That commitment—to depth rather than symptom management alone—gradually reshaped how he thought about treatment.
Learning to Work with Intense Feeling
The Austen Riggs Fellowship trains psychiatrists and psychologists in psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalytic thinking within a therapeutic community model. Fellows carry individual psychotherapy cases, receive intensive supervision, participate in interdisciplinary teams, and engage in sustained self-reflection.
For Kyle, the most transformative lesson came down to one deceptively simple skill: attention.
“I think the biggest thing I learned was how to pay attention—to all parts of myself, and to all parts of the people I work with.”
Medical training often demands narrowing focus—identifying symptoms, making diagnoses, intervening efficiently. Riggs asks clinicians to widen the lens.
Fellows learn to “zoom in and zoom out”—to attend not only to what patients say, but to what remains unspoken, dissociated, or difficult to articulate. The training emphasizes psychological depth: understanding unconscious dynamics, relational patterns, and the meanings behind behavior.
Much of what brings patients to Austen Riggs involves suffering that cannot be reduced to checklists. To work effectively in that space, clinicians must tolerate ambiguity and intense emotion without retreating into premature solutions.
Before coming to Riggs, Kyle knew he wanted to better understand how to sit with pain “without looking away and without getting lost in it.” What surprised him was how personally challenging that would be.
“If you’re with someone in enormous suffering, there are days when you leave thinking, ‘What did I accomplish?’ I had to examine my attachment to certain ideas about productivity—and what it means to feel good about the work I’ve done.”
In a healthcare system often driven by metrics and more immediately measurable outcomes, this was a radical recalibration. The Fellowship pushed him to question how he defined effectiveness, impact, and professional identity.
A Fellowship That Finds Your Edges
Prospective applicants often ask what the Austen Riggs Fellowship is really like.
Kyle’s answer is honest.
“The experience has a way of finding where to catch you—in your areas of struggle.”
Riggs does not offer passive learning. It requires engagement—not just intellectually, but personally. Fellows are asked to examine their assumptions, defensive patterns, blind spots, and relational styles.
That can be difficult.
But it is also, he emphasizes, invaluable.
“You can organize your life in ways that avoid your areas of greatest struggle. Or you can step into something like this. I can’t put a price tag on what I got out of it. There’s a long-term reward that unfolds over time.”
The growth he describes mirrors what Riggs hopes to offer patients: not quick fixes, but deeper understanding and sustainable change.
Training That Extends Beyond One Career Path
While the Austen Riggs Fellowship is grounded in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, its applicability extends far beyond a single professional niche.
During his training, Kyle continued working in inpatient settings and began building a private practice. The Fellowship informed both.
He believes the skills developed at Riggs—careful listening, collaborative thinking, psychological mindedness, leadership capacity—translate across settings:
- Inpatient psychiatry
- Outpatient psychotherapy
- Academic medicine
- Program leadership and administration
- Clinical supervision and teaching
“I think no matter what you choose to do, it’s quite useful. The kind of training you receive here carries into any kind of clinical work—and into leadership and education as well.”
For clinicians seeking advanced psychiatric training that deepens both technical expertise and self-understanding, the Fellowship provides a uniquely broad foundation.
From Fellow to Staff Psychiatrist at Austen Riggs
Today, Kyle serves on the staff at the Austen Riggs Center.
Transitioning from Fellow to staff psychiatrist brought greater autonomy, but preserved what initially drew him to Riggs: collaboration.
“I don’t feel alone here. There’s something deeply supportive about this community. I love working closely with colleagues—thinking together about patients and about what we’re doing.”
The therapeutic community model fosters shared responsibility and interdisciplinary dialogue. Treatment is not siloed; it is thoughtfully examined and continually refined.
But perhaps the most meaningful aspect is something harder to quantify.
Permission.
“It’s a place that allows you to know yourself in all of your eccentricity. We’re not trying to churn people out into the world in some cookie-cutter way. The goal—for patients and for us—is to find a way of being that feels authentic.”
That ethos—authenticity over conformity—shapes both treatment and training at Riggs.
Why the Austen Riggs Fellowship?
For psychiatrists and psychologists seeking advanced training in psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalytic thinking, the Austen Riggs Fellowship offers:
- Intensive training in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy
- Immersion in a therapeutic community model
- Close individual supervision and interdisciplinary collaboration
- Opportunities for teaching, leadership, and scholarly development
- A culture that values reflection, curiosity, and psychological depth
- Competitive salary and financial support for up to two years (300 hours) of personal analysis
Located in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, the Fellowship attracts clinicians from across the country who are ready to deepen not only their clinical expertise, but their capacity for self-examination.
As Kyle’s experience illustrates, the Fellowship is a formative experience—one that reshapes how clinicians listen, think, collaborate, and grow.
For those willing to step into the challenge, the rewards extend far beyond four years.
Related Resources
News
Fellows on the Fellowship
October 5, 2022
We asked some of our current and a recently graduated Fellows what they had to say about our Adult Psychoanalytic Training Program and Fellowship in Hospital-Based Psychotherapy for post-residency psychiatrists and postdoctoral psychologists.
Resource
Overview of the Fellowship Program
June 10, 2022
Megan Kolano, PsyD, gives an overview of the Fellowship Program at the Austen Riggs Center.
Resource