Associate Member Committee

The Associate Member Committee refocused its commitment to creating programs and opportunities for pre-licensed clinicians with an emphasis on community building and professional development. Specifically, we are working to bridge the often daunting gap between the worlds of student and practitioner. As we have learned from the Associate members of NCSPP, issues around professional development are often not adequately addressed at schools or internship sites, leaving new clinicians with many questions about how to set out on careers in psychoanalytic psychology. In the time of transition from student to intern to licensed professional, clinicians can often feel unmoored and isolated, without firm roots in a professional community.

In our desire to build community within the Associate membership, we have developed a section on the newly redesigned NCSPP website for pre-licensed clinicians and created a listserv exclusively for Associate members to address the concerns that arise for them as students, clinicians, and professionals. We hope both these venues provide virtual spaces where Associate members can connect to and build a professional network. In the hopes of bringing members into contact with one another, our committee has begun hosting a monthly Happy Hour the first Thursday of the month in various locations in the East Bay and San Francisco. Go to for more information about these Happy Hours.

In the spring of 2007, we held our first professional development seminar for the students of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), which was met with a strong attendance and even stronger enthusiasm from the student body. This fall, we will be sponsoring four more free seminars at the Wright Institute, Argosy University, Alliant University/California School of Professional Psychology, and CIIS. If students are interested in helping to bring similar seminars to their schools, please contact me at (510) 273-9229.

To expand the conversations beg