Our Mission:

To offer mental health providers a unique psychodynamically-oriented, neurobiologically-informed, and trauma-focused doctoral degree education that equips students with the necessary theory, skills, and techniques to better serve and make a significant difference in the mental health needs of children, adolescents, and their families with cultural humility and equity. 

Our Vision:

The Reiss-Davis Graduate School aspires to be a leading institution offering clinicians a transformative education and doctorate degree within a psychodynamic, neurobiological, and trauma-focused context that fosters a passion for improving the lives of children and adolescents: understanding, intervening, and making a difference.

Our Purpose:

Reiss-Davis Graduate School’s purpose is to prepare students, who are mental health professionals, to become sensitive child-adolescent psychotherapists who respect each child’s unique neurobiological, psychodynamic, and social-relational history.  The RDGS’s purpose is effectuated through a developmentally-based, psychodynamically-oriented, neurobiologically-informed, and trauma-focused doctoral program in psychodynamic child psychology and psychotherapy, whose curriculum includes mentoring that integrates theory and technique, applied research, and professional practice.
The outcome of carrying out RDGS’s mission, purpose, vision, values and guiding principles is the preparation of culturally sensitive, professionally competent and engaged clinicians who contribute to significant and lasting change in the emotional lives of children and adolescents.  In these ways, the RDGS is proud to take a leadership role in serving the complex mental health needs of today’s children. Our intent is to educate mental health professionals to understand the complex dynamics of childhood and intervene when appropriate to improve the emotional lives of children. We strive to develop the knowledge and skillset of the clinician based on the needs of the child, through a psychodynamic approach. 

Our Core Values:

• Compassion: A commitment to act toward all in a spirit of empathy, caring, justice, and respect.
• Excellence:  A commitment to high expectations with accountability and creativity; to develop life-long learners who contribute to our professional mental-health community.
• Inclusion: A commitment to respect the distinct abilities, talents, perspectives, and skills of all through awareness of self and others.
• Integrity: A commitment to act authentically with truth, honesty, professionalism, and transparency. 

Our Guiding Principles:

Regarding Children and Adolescents:

• We believe that every child should be valued, respected, and understood even before we start treating them. 
• We care and value about how a child perceives and communicates about his/her world and experiences.
• We believe that a child’s inner life is as important as his/her external life.
• We value a child’s unconscious mind as much as his/her conscious experience. 
• We appreciate and respect the importance of each child’s unique neurobiology. 

Regarding Working Therapeutically with Children and Adolescents:

• We believe that a child’s therapeutic experiences should be tailored to his/her unique self and not forced into an externally prescribed model.
• We believe that the change element in child psychotherapy is the relationship, we honor that therapeutic relationship, and we value it as the curative factor. 
• We believe that teaching a child a way of listening is different from his/her merely hearing.
• We believe that problems arise in human development and resolve through human relationships. 

Regarding Working with Parents in Parent Work:

• We believe that any comprehensive change in a child’s inner world necessitates parent work. 
• We believe that parent work focuses on those inner and external struggles and intergenerational difficulties that significantly impact on the child’s inner and outer life.