Extraordinary Riches
TOPS training series taps into thirst for human connection
By Lucas McGranahan
Illustration by Austin Hughes
In an era of manualized treatments, outcome metrics, and AI chatbots, many clinicians feel a need for a return to the basic human capacities that make psychotherapy possible in the first place. Treasure of Ordinary Psychotherapy (TOPS), a five-part online training program that drew hundreds of clinicians from across disciplines, addressed that need in its inaugural series hosted by Jeffrey Katzman at Silver Hill Hospital in 2025. (Registration is now open for TOPS Part II, a new series of five online courses running from February 4 to April 1, 2026.) Rather than teaching new techniques, the program focuses on what its organizers see as the real work of therapy—holding, playfulness, trust, and what Jewish mystic Martin Buber called the “I-Thou” relationship.
In this interview with TAP’s Lucas McGranahan, the five clinicians behind TOPS, listed below, reflect on the limitations of manualized treatment models, improvisation in art and life, and the enduring importance of ordinary relational capacities in clinical work.
Jeffrey Katzman, MD — Director, Silver Hill Academy for Research and Education
Jon Allen, PhD — Clinical Professor, Voluntary Faculty in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Baylor College of Medicine
Michael Groat, PhD — President and CEO, Lindner Center of HOPE
Ross Ellenhorn, PhD — Founder and CEO, Ellenhorn
Robin Kissell, MD — Training Analyst, New Center for Psychoanalysis; Director, The Mentalizing Initiative
The following is an edited composite of two conversations held over Zoom in spring 2025.
Tell me about this training series you ran, Treasure of Ordinary Psychotherapy.
Jon Allen: The spirit of what we’re doing is really the central thing for me, the hunger for ways of freeing people up. The antithesis is manualized therapies. It’s a polar opposite—not to mention AI.
Ross Ellenhorn: I think manualized treatment is a remarkably effective treatment for the anxiety of clinicians. It’s a way to treat clinical anxiety.
Jon Allen: People are thrilled to relearn, or learn for the first time, that there’s this other way that’s actually been here longer.
Jeffrey Katzman: I’ve studied many psychotherapies, but I’ve always been struck by how I’m helped when somebody gets me and can hold me in their mind. There’s a sense of connection between us. That’s always seemed to be most important. I knew a few people in my life who shared that value. When we convened this group, we started calling ourselves the Hippy Dippy Group, as we knew that the world had moved into highly specialized manualized psychotherapies. We agreed that actually understanding another person in a genuine manner was quite extraordinary, but then thought our whole point was to try to underscore the importance of being ordinary.
By manualized therapy, you mean CBT?
Jon Allen: Yeah. All the T’s: DBT, CBT, MBT [mentalization-based therapy], which I was very fond of. I worked very closely for 25 years with Peter Fonagy and wrote with him and his group. Now it’s been converted into a loosely manualized therapy. I got off that train with the transition from interest in mentalizing as a common relational factor to mentalization-based therapy.
Mentalization has come up a couple times. What does it mean?
Michael Groat: I think of mentalization as a way of bringing attention to the development of certain human capacities to be reflective and curious about our internal experiences. People do that for other people. We humans move in and out of this mode all the time. It’s quite easy, especially when we’re stressed out, to flip out of that mode. It’s its own intervention trying to restore that capacity for people or even help them begin to develop it.
Robin Kissell: I run a nonprofit called the Mentalizing Initiative which trains clinicians in the practice of mentalization-based therapy. For me, mentalizing recognizes a vulnerability and an aspect of the mind that other approaches miss. It is about developing a capacity to understand yourself and understand other people. It’s about recognizing that I don’t understand another person’s mind unless I am curious about it and it’s difference from mine. And as I am curious, it opens my mind to a different understanding that allows me to be that much more empathic with someone. I’m hoping that in the process of being curious and understanding more accurately someone’s experience I am helping to develop a sense of self in them and build their capacity to mentalize.
Each you of led a session in the series. What were the five sessions on?
Jon Allen: Mine was the therapist’s life. I argued in my previous book that we should pay more attention to the development of therapists in contrast with the development of hundreds of therapies.
Michael Groat: I did one on trust.
Robin Kissell: Ross did his on holding, and I did mine on containment. And Jeff did one on playfulness. It was mostly us riffing. People seemed to enjoy it. And it was really fun.
You’ve had a very positive response.
Jeffrey Katzman: There were about 500 people participating from all over the country. That’s not typical for a virtual program of five weeks. It was kind of wild. They were from different disciplines: psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, mental health counselors of various kinds.
Robin Kissell: We had people who were early-career clinicians, and we had people who were psychoanalytically trained and had been doing therapy for a long while.
What is your dynamic like? I wonder about the role of improvisation, given that Jon is a pianist and Jeffrey does improv theater.
Jon Allen: I think of us as a quintet. Improvisation, but not without structure, not without concepts, not without traditions. So that’s the balance. Miles Davis.
Ross Ellenhorn: Yeah, absolutely that orientation towards standards and then making something new out of them. TOPS was formulated by Jeff meeting with all of us in a completely open, uncertain way. It was really improv. In free jazz you develop these motifs that emerge not from one person, but from all the listening going on.
Jon Allen: If I could connect this with psychoanalysis, I’m fascinated in my latest book with the idea of the analytic third, or the interpersonal field. What’s happening between people who create? The creation creates the creators. I read about the analytic third, and it just sounded esoteric and kind of nutty. But it was like jazz. It was playing in a trio. And you would have the analogous experience in theater.
Jeffrey Katzman: I was having a simultaneous experience, for what it’s worth. When we gathered our group, I had been meeting with a rabbi, who was also interested in improv. He is gifted in paying attention to what I say and creating a sense of flow between us. He’s not a psychoanalyst or anything. But he’s a human being, and the experience was quite meaningful as we addressed deep human questions from spiritual dimensions.
Ross Ellenhorn: Just to just to bring a little more Judaism into this—Lucas, I don’t know if you know anything about Martin Buber.
Yeah, when I was in high school, I was close with my art teacher, and he gave me a copy of Buber’s book I and Thou as a graduation present.
Ross Ellenhorn: In real dialogue, there’s a Thou. And you’re generating that Thou in the way that Jon was talking about, through dialogue. All real living is meeting. At the point of meeting, you’re creating a Thou.
Jon Allen: And this is very critical: The manuals push us toward the It. Here this idea of “common factors” in therapy is very misleading. It’s as if the common factors are the foundation for the therapy, and if you get trust and empathy and so forth, then you can do the real work. No, that is the work of the therapy: creating that way of relating and fostering it, so the patient can generalize it beyond the therapy.
Jeffrey Katzman: To see another person as Thou, that’s no easy trick. It is part of what I would consider extraordinary, though it may seem quite ordinary.
Ross Ellenhorn: It might be the most extraordinary thing we do as human beings—to mentalize and hold each other.
Published January 2026