San Francisco/East Bay Education Commute

This year the Education Committee decided to go for it — meaning, lead with our passions and offer all that we consider dynamic and new. The result: a year of curriculum that is diverse in several respects.

One respect is content: we are providing two classes that focus on the experience of the “psychoanalytic-psychotherapist.” This term describes many of us in the NCSPP community. We are clinicians who love and value psychoanalysis but who are not and may never be psychoanalysts. Although we may use the couch and think primarily about the unconscious dimensions of our patients and our encounters with them, we are doing something unique, special even, and something which deserves time for study and reflection in its own right. Hence, we've brought you a class with Beth Steinberg, past-president of NCSPP, in which she addresses this topic in a case conference format, and a course with Ruth Simon in which she takes up the developmental considerations in creating and maintaining a “psychoanalytic psychotherapy” practice.

To further shake things up concerning content, we have developed a class in which you will be led by your experience and the skill and expertise of Maureen Katz into thinking about and understanding “hate” between parents and teens — not an easy topic and no doubt a critical one. In the category of difficult and critical, we bring you another class from a master in the subject, Tamara McClintock-Greenberg, who will teach about the interface between psychological states and bodily illness. We are also offering a class completely about D.W. Winnicott's contributions, taught by our local Winnicott expert, Laurel Samuels; a course on the Oedipal dynamics in Gay and Lesbian families, taught by Gary Grossman and Amy Gentile; and another round of the very popular training in psychoanalytic couples therapy taught by the dynamic team of Rachel Cooke and Nancy Drooker. We also thought it was time to seriously take on culture and race in the consulting room. Who be