President's Report

For quite some time now, it has become commonplace in our communities to lament that we are no longer in the heyday of clinical psychoanalysis. Certainly there is abundant evidence on this point: the closure of analytically oriented training programs, the decline of enrollment in institutes, the mandate by an expanding corporate health care system for ever more constrained and limited forms of therapy that must be “evidence based” (that deceptive phrase!) in order to pass muster. We are all well aware of the difficulties attendant to our kind of praxis, and we have made our accommodations.

And, yet, at least among those of us in NCSPP, there seems to be a conviction that psychoanalytic thinking and practice are not just surviving, but thriving. We suffer in Northern California from a happy excess of psychoanalytic offerings. And while we might stumble over our cocktail party chatter to explain that, yes, we actually still do invite people to use the couch and that we see them multiple times a week, our greatest professional conflict on the weekends is often whether to attend yet another can't-miss conference when we have attended one each Saturday for the past month.

We are lucky to have a number of organizational voices in the Bay Area that contribute to this vibrant dialogue — not only the major mainstream psychoanalytic training institutes, PINC and SFPI&S, but also other sometimes smaller or less recognized — and yet I would argue indispensable — organizational bodies, such as the Lacanian School and the Lacanian Society, the Jungian Institute, the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Boyer House, and Access Institute, to name a few. All of these organizations provide opportunities for our continued enrichment. And, so, at this rich banquet of classes, case conferences, study groups and scientific presentations, what is NCSPP's current role in our community's development?

For the past several years, your Board has been engaged in a conversation that attempts t