We hope that you enjoy this month's issue, and we hope you'll join NCSPP or contribute to our scholarship fund to assist us in fostering a vibrant psychoanalytic community in Northern California.

LET MY PEOPLE GO

Attending a family Passover seder, a few weeks ago, I was intrigued by the following passage from the Haggadah in use. “If our freedom had been given us by Pharaoh, we would have been indebted to him, still subservient, within ourselves dependent, slavish still at heart. We had to free ourselves!” (Bronstein, 1975). A non-religious Jew by upbringing, I have made brief forays into the deeper meaning and history of the Passover meal and ritual. Each year, I find one unleavened crumb of new learning. This year, I am engaging with the above passage.

While followers of psychoanalytic theory need to avoid treating their theory as religion, all religions worth following have psychology at their core. This Passover nugget, if seen as symbolic of the intrapsychic landscape, is a beautiful illustration, filled with an age-old struggle between a kind of regressive and, ultimately, oppressive dependency and the development of internal authority and conscious intention.

In his book, The Jewish Holidays, Michael Strassfeld (1985) writes that, without strenuous self-reflection about our values and the ways we enslave ourselves, Passover becomes just “another pleasant but meaningless ritual.” The critical importance of self-reflection, as a path to greater essential awareness and to meaningful living, dates back to our earliest philosophers and is found in most world religions — Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam, to name a few.

From this perspective the notion that psychoanalytic treatments would ever fall out of favor or be deemed "ineffective" is patently absurd. The core of psychoanalysis — intimate observation of the nature and vagaries of the heart and mind — is an essential human quest. In Socrates’ famous words of wisdom, “The unexamined life is not worth living” (Plato, 469-399 B.C.E.). Perhaps Socrates discussed this idea as a guest at a Passover seder 2,400 years ago. Good food for thought lives on and is certainly never ineffective.

Warm regards,
Melissa Holub, Ph.D.
NCSPP President

References:

Bronstein, H. (Ed.). 1975. A Passover Haggadah: The New Union Haggadah. New York: Central Committee of American Rabbis.
Plato. (469-399 B.C.E.). Apology of Socrates. Retrieved April 20, 2009 from http://www.bartleby.com/66/53/54553.html.
Strassfeld, M. 1985. The Jewish Holidays. New York: Harper Collins.


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COUCH
Elevation 7,214 ft

I'm writing from the mountains above Tahoe. It's Easter in April, and we're over 7,000 feet where the Sierra caps are bedded in snow. There was a fatal accident at a resort, and I was doing crisis counseling for hotel staff. Before leaving The City, snow had been predicted. The thought of driving in it filled me with sheer terror. For three nights before the trip, I had fantasies of icy, slippery, snowy mountain roads and plunging off a cliff in my Toyota. (Keep it to yourself, but if the CIA ever needs to torture me, the thought of sleety roads would do it.) I asked a friend to accompany me, using the lure of a luxury resort and mountain beauty. He agreed, insisting he drive his Honda. My anxiety offloaded, I felt excited about our alpine adventure. Then, the projection of my anxiety was forcefully returned to me. My friend, after investigating the intricacy of driving with chains and hearing the weather prediction of several inches of snow, reneged, declaring he did not want to drive in a snowstorm. My annihilation anxieties returned with gale force.

On the way, a few drops of rain fell outside Sacramento. Just before ascending the summit, I bought chains at a gas station. A man who lived up on the mountain told me he'd just come down. It was all clear up there, and he didn't think chains were needed. (Free association here. Lying on the couch, I once asked my analyst whether he had his seatbelt fastened. Caution: slippery roads ahead.) I crossed Emigrant Gap, then the Donner Pass. The enormous, ripped white crags of the Sierra rose up -- intimidating, majestic, unfathomable, terrifying. Just like psychoanalysis. The roads turning off to the resort were dry as a desert.

In the bowels of the resort, an external door was marked, "Keep this door closed to keep out raccoons and bears." Was the danger internal or external, a paranoid projection evacuated into the other? That night, after work, I went out on the vast deck of the lodge and faced the arresting white mountains. The hot tubs were blowing silver steam into the darkness. Hundreds of stars were bathing in the black sky. In the morning, the sun lit up the horizon's palette. There wasn't a single cloud out there.

Cleopatra Victoria, MFT
IMPULSE Editor


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Did you watch the 6 minute video "Vincent" by Tim Burton?

Click here to watch and then read the reviews.

Our top 2 choices for most intriguing review go to Brad Falconer, M.A. and Adam Beyda, Psy.D. We liked them both! We also got several other interesting analyses. Click here to read analyses by Will Collins, M.A. and Eric Essman, M.A. Thank you all for writing.

Brad Falconer

J'adore the work of Tim Burton, and I always have, so long as memory serves anyway. I start there because it seems important to hold some fondness for a subject before submitting it to analysis of any sort; otherwise, there’s a danger of getting caught up in an enterprise more sinister than therapeutic, as the main of human history is ever straining to remind us. So let there be no doubt in the reader's mind: when I was a kid, Burton’s film "Edward Scissorhands" did wonders for my worries about being excessively odd. To my young mind, there could be little question that Burton loved his gloomy outsiders — wartless parts and all. The director’s up-with-freaks sensibility, so tormented yet so tongue-in-cheek, greatly inspired me to go on trying to find a place for my true self in the real world, despite how imperfectly hospitable reality invariably showed itself to be. For that, I remain grateful to the artist for his labors, which were no doubt considerable.

That said, I imagine Burton caught on early to the transformative power of hard work done in the name of love. Case in point: a director and his crew must endure extraordinary strain to produce even a few short minutes of animated footage using the delightfully old-school and organic "stop-motion" technique, of which Burton's short film "Vincent" is a charming example. Imagine making painstakingly minute adjustments to a tiny, delicate doll, taking extraordinary care never to rush its movement or overtake its own innate subjectivity, then allowing yourself but a short moment when all is finally done to document the barely perceptible result. Then imagine repeating this process 24 times, each iteration performed with the same care, attunement, and patience, each repetition being paradoxically one-of-a-kind, never the same session twice. Through all these hours of creative labor, you can have no real idea how things will turn out, but you can be certain that even if all were to go ideally, your considerable devotion would still yield only enough frames to comprise a single second of real-time film. (To get a whole minute of footage, you have to prepare yourself for just north of 1400 sessions — no small task, to be sure.) This is the exacting technique that stop-motion animation requires. It's a wondrously bonzai-scaled and glacially-paced craft for which few living artisans have the time, space, or patience. Sound anything like analysis?

Adam Beyda

A black cat ushers us into the world of Vincent, a boy who is not as nice, nor perhaps as tormented, as he appears. Stuck at home, and in himself, Vincent seems subject to a trauma that is never known but only dramatized in his morbid obsessions — “the horrors he’s invented” — and in the film’s structure.

We hear of sister, aunt, mother, and a “wife” but no masculine, with the exception of the narrator, Vincent Price. This place of the paternal is not simply distant, for narrator Price tells us young Vincent in fact wants “to be just like Vincent Price.” That he wants to be the narrator is suggestive of the role of grandiosity and contrivance in Vincent’s psychology, of the self-dramatizing, knowing, and (falsely) whimsical character of his suffering, which may be related to a perversely constructed masculinity.

But whence all this display? When Vincent reads Poe and discovers “horrible news he could not survive, for his beautiful wife had been buried alive,” why does he identify so? Perhaps the horrifying image is an echo of the unsayable trauma, its character or sequelae; a deadness in his feeling connection to life and to the feminine inside himself. Vincent expresses himself in the only way he can, through action. Digging up his mother’s flower bed suggests the oedipal aspect of his dilemma.

When his mother, who had “banished” him to his room, enters in with an angry (annihilating?) “go out and play,” the rupture from the unconscious is reiterated. Vincent is rendered silent, unable to formulate what cannot be heard by the other. At the center of himself, and of the film, is this silence. What it might contain or signify is unknown. It is, for the time being, a blankness that acts as a medium for hysterical hallucinations.


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PINC Presents:
“THE POLITICAL SUBJECT OF ANALYSIS: THE CLINICAL IMPACT
OF ECONOMIC SHOCK”

The current economic crisis strikes at our deepest fears, rippling through our psychic life and impacting our clinical work. How do we address the intersection of social and economic shock with unconscious processes in our patients and in ourselves? How do we think about our patients’ reactions to the current economic crisis? How can we facilitate creative psychoanalytic responses in the analytic dyad to social and economic stressors?

Three renowned international presenters with broad experience working at the interface of analytic practice and socio-political forces will help us think together about these challenging questions:

Dr. Julian Braun, Argentine Society of Psychoanalysis
Dr. Lynn Layton, Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis
Dr. Andrew Samuels, Society of Analytical Psychology

Saturday, May 30, 9:30 AM - 3:30 PM
Berkeley Art Museum
2625 Durant Avenue, Berkeley CA

Fees: $40-125
Register at 415-922-4050 or www.pincsf.org or mail to: 2252 Fillmore St., San Francisco, CA 94115.

CE Credits: 5


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Appointment Book offers a sampling of the psychoanalytically oriented events taking place in Northern California over the coming month. Where available, simply click an event title to view details on the sponsoring organization's web site.

NCSPP: 22nd Annual Event and Lecture: A Day with Stefano Bolognini, M.D.
Sat, May 2 / 9 AM - 4:15 PM / Jewish Community Center - Fisher Family Hall / San Francisco
NCSPP / 415-738-8055 / S. Bolognini, M.D., C. Spezzano, Ph.D,; R. Peltz, Ph.D. / $45 - $180

SFCP Ext. Div. Pen. Seminar: Psychoa. Approaches to Eating Disorders
Sat, May 2 / 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM / Christ Episcopal Church, 1040 Border Road / Los Altos
SFCP / (415) 563-5815 / Ann Martini, L.C.S.W. and Jana Kahn, Ph.D. / $75

Supervision Study Program Open House
Mon, May 4 / 7 PM - 9 PM / 2232 Carleton St / Berkeley
The Psychotherapy Institute / (510) 548-4407 / Faculty of SSP / free

SFCP Public Lecture Series: The Effect of Global Social Trauma
Wed, May 6 / 7:30 PM - 9 PM / 2340 Jackson St., 4th Floor (entry Webster St.) / San Francisco
SFCP / (415) 563-5815 / Peter Goldberg, Ph.D. / free

SFCP Pen. Student Outreach: Therapeutic Action in the Clinical Moment
Wed, May 6 (begins) / 7:15 PM - 8:45 PM / Psychiatry Buiding, 401 Quarry Rd. Rm 2209 / Stanford
SFCP / (415) 563-5815 / Michael Smith, Ph.D. / free

SFCP Community Members East Bay Clinical Forum
Wed, May 6 / 7 PM - 9 PM / Herrick Hospital 2001 Dwight Way, Rm CC / Berkeley
SFCP / (415) 563-5815 / Diana Gleason, Psy.D. / free

PINC Graduation Paper: Negative Oedipus Redux
Sat, May 9 / 9:30 AM - 11 AM / UC Laurel Heights, 3333 California St. / San Francisco, CA
PINC / (415) 922-4050 / Francisco Gonzales, M.D., Stephen Hartman, Ph.D. / free

SFCP Graduation
Sat, May 9 / 4 PM - 6 PM / 2340 Jackson St., 4th Floor (entry Webster St.) / San Francisco
SFCP / (415) 563-5815 / Jim Dimon, M.D. / free

Marriage Prison and Playground- The Inevitable
Sat, May 9 / 9:30 AM - 1 PM / Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute 401 Parnassus / San Francisco
AAPCSW / (800) 952-5579 / Velia K. Frost , LCSW / $45

Lutecium Workshop: Lacan on Resistance
Sun, May 10 / 10 AM - 2 PM / 870 Market Street / San Francisco
Lutecium / Rebecca Bauknight, Ph.D. / $40 - $80

SFCP Special Scientific Meeting with Henry Smith
Mon, May 11 / 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM / 2340 Jackson St., 4th Floor / San Francisco
SFCP / (415) 563-5815 / Henry Smith, M.D. / free

SFCP Community Members South Bay Clinical Forum
Tue, May 12 / 7:15 PM - 9 PM / Psychiatry Buiding, 401 Quarry Rd. Rm 2209 / Stanford
SFCP / (415) 563-5815 / Jana Kahn, Ph.D., Ann Martini, L.C.S.W. an. d TBA / Free

Beyond the Consulting Room: A Conversation with Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D.
Thu, May 14 / 7 PM - 9 PM / Private Home (emailed to registrants) / San Francisco
NCSPP / (917) 405-3308 / Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D. / $10 - $20

SFCP Conversations on Adolescents:Adolescent Acting Out
Sat, May 16 / 10 AM - 12 PM / Flamingo Conf. Resort and Spa, 2777 4th St. / Santa Rosa
SFCP / (415) 563-5815 / Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D. / free

SFCP Psychoanalytic Students Seminar: Curtain Call: on Termination
Sat, May 16 (begins) / 2:30 PM - 4:15 PM / 2127 Ashby Avenue / Berkeley
SFCP / 415-563-5815 / Louis Roussel, Ph.D. / free

SFCP Community Members SF Clinical Forum
Tue, May 19 / 7:15 PM - 9 PM / 2340 Jackson St., 4th Floor (entry Webster St.) / San Francisco
SFCP / (415) 563-5815 / Cleopatra Victoria, M.F.T. and Jonathan Dunn, Ph.D. / free

Lutecium Workshop: Lacan, Language, Metaphor, and Metonymy
Sun, May 24 / 10 AM - 2 PM / 870 Market Street / San Francisco
Lutecium / Kristopher Lichtanski, Ph.D. / $40 - $80

SFCP Grand Rounds : Analyzing the Unanalyzable: Learning from Bion
Wed, May 27 / 6:15 PM - 7:30 PM / Psychiatry Buiding, 401 Quarry Rd. Rm 2209 / Stanford
SFCP / (415) 563-5815 / Lynn Alexander, Psy.D. / free

Imagination and Psychic Transformation in Analysis
Fri, May 29 (begins) / 9 AM - 5 AM / Kabuki Hotel / San Francisco
SAP / (206) 749-4111 / J. Beebe, J. Culbert-Koehn, W.Colman / $250 - $630

Treatment of BPD: Schema Therapy & Control Mastery Perspectives
Sat, May 30 / 9 AM - 4:30 PM / JCC, 3200 California St. / San Francisco
SFPRG / (415) 561-6771 / George Lockwood, Ph.D. & John Curtis, Ph.D. / $90

To submit an event, please see our submission guidelines.

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I AM INTERESTED in a psychoanalytic psychotherapy based study/case presentation group on Bion in the Sacramento area. I live in Nevada City. I'm lonely up here! Josie Gibb, Ph.D., LMFT, josiegibb@gmail.com, (530) 559-8420.

SF BAY AREA 9 - 12 month. FT-PT post-degree internship w/stipend 8/09-08/10. To apply: http://www.girlsinc-alameda.org/files/FT-PTInternship2009-2010.pdf

CONTEMPORARY INDEPENDENTS: Psychoanalytic Consultation Group: We will read/review Bollas, Eigen, Phillips Stein, with a focus on our clinical work and creative development. Fridays, noon - 1:30. Beginning June. Contact: Sue Saperstein Psy.D., MFT, (415) 641-4146

CURTAIN CALL: PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEWS ON TERMINATION: An examination of key concepts from the analytic literature on termination. Instructor: Louis Roussel, Ph.D., Dates and TIme: Saturdays, May 16, 23, 30, and June 6, 2009 2:30 p.m. - 4:15 p.m. at 2127 Ashby Ave. Berkeley, CA. To register, please call Max Lee, SFCP, at (415) 563-5815.

FOR SALE: San Francisco psychotherapy office space. Unique opportunity to purchase a 376 sq. ft. office space in medical condominium complex located across from Mt. Zion hospital. Remodeled in 2003 and built out specifically for a psychoanalytic practice. Has private waiting room, separate exit for patients and private office space separate from consultation room. Convenient parking lot on site for patients and therapists. Contact Bernard Katzmann for information. (415) 861-5222 X 120.

PSYCHOANALYTICALLY ORIENTED GROUP FOR MEN focusing on love, sexuality and relationship repair during recovery from substance abuse. Now forming in Los Gatos. Thursday eves. Contact Alan Javurek, Ph.D.,MFT 408-354-4068.


Old couches, new books, hot jobs, cool internships? Post classified ads on NCSPP's online bulletin board at no charge. We will also feature your listing in IMPULSE for a modest fee. Please see our submission guidelines for details.

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The Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP) is committed to the study of psychoanalytic psychology and the encouragement of its interest in the professional and general communities. We are a multi-disciplinary, non-profit membership organization open to mental health professionals and all others interested in the study of psychoanalytic psychology.

Our more than 650 members form a community that spans the greater Bay Area and Northern California. NCSPP is a local affiliate of Division 39 (psychoanalysis) of the American Psychological Association. Our vast array of lectures, intensive study groups, scientific meetings, courses, our journal fort da, and numerous special events and projects are all brought to you by scores of volunteers who work to support NCSPP's mission. Our educational programs include continuing education credit for psychologists, marriage and family therapists, and licensed clinical social workers. We welcome you into the psychoanalytic community in Northern California. Join us.

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Melissa Holub, Ph.D., NCSPP President
Cleopatra Victoria, M.A., MFT, Editor-in-Chief
Bruce Weitzman, MFT, Managing Editor
Meg Earls, M.A., Features Editor
Terra Morais, M.A., Appointment Book Editor
Michele McGuinness, Production Manager
Matthew Morrissey, Technical Editor
Cate Corcoran, Psy.D., Brad Falconer, M. A., Editors Emeritus

Each month, IMPULSE reaches over 1,830 psychoanalytically interested professionals and students in Northern California.

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IMPULSE is a monthly newsletter published by the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology for the purpose of connecting Northern California psychoanalytic practitioners, students, and scholars. IMPULSE aims to foster the development of psychoanalytic practice and thought in our region through collaboration and understanding.

For information on submitting event listings and other content to IMPULSE, please see our guidelines and policies page on the NCSPP web site.

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IMPULSE is published electronically once a month by the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology. Comments are welcome and should be sent via our online contact form.

You are receiving this monthly newsletter from the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP) because of your interest in psychoanalysis. Any mental health professional or student interested in psychoanalytic thought may subscribe free to IMPULSE, regardless of organizational affiliation. To ensure that IMPULSE isn't misidentified as junk mail, we recommend adding impulse@ncspp.org to your email program's address book. If you haven't done so already, click to confirm your interest in subscribing. To unsubscribe, click the SafeUnsubscribe link at the bottom of this message.

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