President's Report

It is an honor to offer these few thoughts to the membership as NCSPP's seventeenth President. I began my term by sitting with the Board and taking stock of the phenomenal changes the organization has undergone since its inception in 1987. It was interesting, if not rather startling, to note the changes in the organization just in the last few years. When I joined the Education Committee in 1996, NCSPP's committees numbered just three: the Editorial, Education, and Program committees, with the South Bay offerings and the Intensive Study Group contained within the Education Committee. It gradually dawned on various members of that committee that giving every other weekend to professional volunteerism, while altruistic in the extreme, was also slightly insane, and eventually the South Bay effort and the Intensive Study Group hatched their own committees. In 1996, the notable journal you hold in your hands was an eight-page society newsletter. Neither the Associate Member representative to the Board nor the Membership Chair had a committee to help them in their labors. The nascent analytic community in Sacramento lacked formal affiliation with NCSPP. The Interdisciplinary Education Committee, with its fascinating forays into philosophy, film, and technology, was barely a flicker in the fertile imagination of its progenitor, Jeanne Wolff Bernstein. In the space of a few years, NCSPP has grown to become the largest local chapter of Division 39 in the country, thanks to the ongoing interest and support of our membership and the dedicated work of the Board and committees. As members, you can take pride in participating in this exciting and fruitful era of growth in our corner of the world.

Having said that, the question remains: whither goest psychoanalytic education in the Bay Area as a whole? In the midst of the encouraging signs of NCSPP's growth and vitality, our professional community also shows signs of continued recession. Following the trend of recent years with the