by Luba Palter, MFT

“Life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base” (John Bowlby, 1988). 

I’ve been re-watching one of my favorite shows, The Golden Girls. For those who may not know, it is a show about three middle-aged women and one older woman, living together in Miami, Florida. They embark on a journey of becoming roommates after loss and divorce. The four of them work, raise money, and volunteer their time for various political causes. They dissect aging and menopause while eating an enormous amount of cheesecake. While they sit around their kitchen table, they support each other through various life challenges. These older women in a community of four lead full lives filled with sex, hobbies, and meaningful work. When their toilet breaks, they decide they can remodel the bathroom themselves. And with trial and error, they do. Boyfriends and husbands come and go. Relatives visit and bring drama with them. But what remains true and steadfast is the characters' commitment to each other and their chosen family. The kitchen table is their symbolic secure basis, a touchstone that they go back to over and over that allows them to dip into grief, confusion, despair, and anxiety as they gather their strength to venture back into the stimulating and at times harsh world.

This brings me to this point – most humans need communities to thrive individually, a place to connect to others, to feel seen and heard. Where do you get your sense of community? Ideally, such a place would hold each member's full humanity and complexity. And this magical home would have room for conflict and differences. Is such a place in fact magical, aspirational, fantastical, or does it indeed exist for some of you?

Where does your sense of analytic community come from? As a Community member at SFCP and PINC, I have been asking myself, where is my professional home if I am not in analytic training? Could it be NCSPP? If so, how? I wonder if you have struggled with this dilemma too. What do you need to feel that an organization can be a professional home? What has worked for you?

Write to me at lpalter@ncspp.org. I would love to hear!