Impulse is a community newsletter produced by the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP) and distributed electronically to subscribers at no cost. We envision Impulse as an integrative source for local news, events, and thinking of interest to the psychoanalytically inclined. Our goal is to be your guide as you explore the Bay Area's rich array of analytic resources.
We invite you to become a member of NCSPP, if you are not already. And, we welcome you as a subscriber to Impulse. Join us as we highlight the exceptional diversity of psychoanalytic thought and practice in Northern California.
by Rebecca Shapiro, Psy.D.
How does psychoanalytic case writing further its aims?
On writing, Hélène Cixous (1991) says: “I am the awkward sorceress of the invisible: my sorcery is powerless to evoke, without the help of your sorcery. Everything I evoke depends on you, depends on your trust, on your faith.” Your trust, your faith. You, Reader. That what I write finds its hook, pierces, somehow, but not so piercingly that you turn away, at least not completely.
Like psychoanalysis, the best writing seduces. That is, it leads one away. Reading Cixous, I’m enthralled, breathless—wanting for a path, a resolution.
But captivated as we are, writing that demands that we follow deprives us of certainty, revealing the surplus of possibility opened out at certainty’s limit. This is something like the paradox of falling forever while held, in Solmaz Sharif’s words, like “a newlywed securing her updo / with grenade pins” (2016). As with writing, psychoanalysis disorients in order to open, patient and analyst alike.
A patient said recently, “I didn’t come here to feel good.” To touch the other-than-good, we describe the space he gets stuck in in between words, a space fitting nothing but the stuff of its selfsame derivative. I get sucked in and stuck in the space between words. He stumbles pausing, “I don’t know.” Pause. What’s there? I say. “No. I don’t. Know.” Ok. He says, “no, more.” No? More? No! More? No more? “Don’t no.” Stop. We have a foundation in stopping—I think a fermata in music, a pause stabilizing a state over time—terra firma. Don’t no = yes? Hermenaut that I am, has my insistence on explication tightened our knot?
But I’m falling for the desire to map the map of descriptive inconsequence.
Pause.
by San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis
SAVE THE DATE! AND CALL FOR PAPERS
Western Regional Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Conference
Yearly meetings of the six psychoanalytic institutes of the Western region of the United States that have child training programs.
When: October 2nd - 4th, 2026
Where: San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis
444 Natoma Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
The San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis invites you to attend these clinically focused meetings. This year, we aim to explore children’s ability to play and disruptions to that developing capacity. Please consider submitting a paper for clinical discussion.
For questions or more information, please contact Catherine Phillips at catherinehphillips@gmail.com or Phyllis Cath at pjcath@gmail.com.
For more information and to register, visit https://www.sfcp.org/western-regional-child-and-adolescent-psychoanalytic-conference/.
by San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis
EAST BAY YEARLONG PROGRAM
THE THERAPIST AS INSTRUMENT: LISTENING FROM WITHIN PSYCHOANALYTIC WORK
Psychoanalytic work unfolds in the space between spoken and felt experience. Therapists listen to patients’ words and to emotional and bodily experiences that arise within. These experiences—often elusive and at times deeply disturbing or disorganizing—can become essential guides in understanding another person’s inner life.
This East Bay Yearlong SFCP course centers the therapist’s experience as a primary instrument of psychoanalytic thinking. We will explore how personal history, unconscious motivation, countertransference, relational patterns, and broader social and cultural contexts shape how we listen, think, and respond in the consulting room.
Through shared readings, reflective discussion, and a case conference component in which participants present their own clinical work, the course offers a space to slow down, deepen attention, and think together.
We invite clinicians to enroll via this link in a year of thoughtful inquiry and shared reflection.
by Lila Zimmerman, MFT
A DINNER PARTY WITH MY PSYCHOANALYTIC FRIENDS: PARTLY REAL, PARTLY IMAGINED
V has her baby sitting in a floating highchair at the end of the table. The baby is our centerpiece. She’s gripped in, we are gripped to her. She has giant blue eyes and a mouth that grasps at new sounds.
A gathering of potluck-style efforts has filled the table with make-your-own lettuce wraps plus some off-theme dolmas and a bowl of olives stuffed with garlic. A bottle of wine, cans of Diet Coke, a carafe of tap water. R has made a pistachio milk pudding in a massive terracotta serving dish. I am impressed and cannot take my eyes off it. I was excited to bring a pavlova but hadn’t anticipated an off-season heat wave and my meringue is refusing to stay crisp, humiliating me with its fallen and gummy demeanor.
“Don’t look at that,” I tell the group.
V is worried about mothering (her child and her patients) alongside robots and the future. We have been texting in groups and one-on-one. What will happen to our profession? We are mixed on the matter.
M says she’s not worried. I agree.
“People need people.”
“This is just a phase.”
The skeptics raise brows and shrug. “I don’t know…”
by Natasha Oxenburgh, Psy.D.
DISPLACEMENT, NOSTALGIA AND THE UNCANNY: A COURSE TAUGHT BY ALEXANDER ZINCHENKO, PH.D.
Mondays, June 15th - July 6th, 2026 | 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
St. Clement’s Episcopal Church
2387 Claremont Blvd., Berkeley, CA 94705
The experience of displacement renders linearity and rationality obsolete. By its very nature, this experience not only disrupts the continuity of space, time, and being oneself, but also severs the in-between cultural landscape of home, while the host country’s tastes, smells, climate, and customs remain alien and are often experienced as an assault on the senses. In this seminar, Dr. Alexander Zinchenko, Ph.D., will use art, film and other disciplines in the humanities, as well as clinical vignettes and psychoanalytic theory, as a springboard to explore these phenomena as presented by immigrant patients. We will also address ways of being with immigrant patients both as immigrant and native-born clinicians. Special attention will be paid to witnessing, enactment, and self-disclosure in the clinical encounter.
by Sullivan Oakley, Psy.D.
ANNOUNCING 2026-2027 NCSPP INTENSIVE STUDY GROUP INTRODUCTORY EVENT
MAKING CONTACT: SKIN, CONTAINMENT, AND THE SOMATIC IN PSYCHIC LIFE
Saturday, July 25th, 2026 | 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Location TBD, In-Person in Berkeley
This introductory event to NCSPP’s year-long Intensive Study Group (ISG) features the course’s five instructors—Kristian Kemtrup, David Gatta, Maiga Berzins, Mary Margaret McClure, and Alice Jones—in conversation on this year’s theme, Making Contact: Skin, Containment, and the Somatic in Psychic Life. Instructors will provide an introduction to the concept of “psychoanalytic skin,” highlight foundational underlying theory and thought-provoking perspectives on the topic, and invite discussion and associations from participants.
Stay tuned for more details and registration!
PACIFIC HEIGHTS THERAPY OFFICE AVAILABLE FOR SUBLET. 2nd floor office available Fridays, weekends, and ½ day Thursdays in a suite of 4 offices with psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Includes shared waiting room, bathroom, and small kitchenette.
Monthly rent for Fridays only is $500. Saturdays or Sundays are available for $300 each monthly. ½ day Thursdays available for $250 per month. I prefer someone who is willing to commit to at least 6 months. Please call 415-522-7393 if interested.
UNION SQUARE THERAPY OFFICES AVAILABLE. Full-time (unfurnished, $900) & part-time psychotherapy offices available in Union Square, San Francisco. Please contact Pirouz for more information.
PINC Symposium: Dissociation and State Transitions
Sun, Jun 14 / 9:30 am - 11:30 am / 530 Bush St. / San Francisco
PINC / (415) 288-4050 / P. Goldberg, Ph.D. / $10 - $35
Displacement, Nostalgia and the Uncanny
Mon, Jun 15 (begins) / 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm / 2837 Claremont Blvd. / Berkeley
NCSPP / (707) 646-1678 / A. Zinchenko, Ph.D. / $90 - $270