President's Report

On January 15, 2000, the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP) held its first retreat, which was attended by current and past Board members, and facilitated by Ralph Kaywin and Chuck Brandes. The purpose was to clarify NCSPP's vision and focus. Out of the diverse and creative discourse, a clearer vision of our purpose and role emerged. This can be summarized in five words: Affiliation, Education, Identity, Outreach, and the Unconscious, i.e., the five vowels. To briefly elaborate, one of the basic functions that NCSPP serves for the psychoanalytic community is to provide programs that allow our membership to gather together with the common purpose of connecting with each other and sharing our diverse knowledge in productive ways (Affiliation). Education is our primary purpose, goal, and focus. Every program we have is intended to support and strengthen our Identity as mental health providers who use psychoanalytic theory to guide our use of self in our work. Much of the discussion was devoted to how Outreach can be accomplished. There was a shared sentiment that in today's managed care market, there is an untapped potential for generations of the many effective applications of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Some of the areas of outreach identified were students in mental health training programs, mental health professionals working in other than private practice settings, and various underrepresented groups. Outreach implies that one of our roles is to promote making the study of psychoanalytic psychology more available to those groups. Lynn Alexander will be heading an ad hoc committee in the South Bay to investigate how we can facilitate the inclusion of psychoanalytic ideas in mental health training programs. The retreat confirmed that NCSPP values the discourse among a multiplicity of theoretical orientations within our psychoanalytic community. The final vowel, U, stands for NCSPP's role in facilitating the study of the Unconsci