Upcoming Courses & Events
September 2019
This year-long study course will take up various conceptualizations of the body in psychoanalysis. Therapists from a range of theoretical backgrounds will use contemporary texts, contemporary artists, and writings to explore the psychological development of body-mind. The body that is born, the body that registers pain and trauma, the body that heals, and the body that dies, and the territories in between.
This is a pivotal time for psychoanalysis to re-tool itself and offer both comprehension and best care to children and youth who experience and express themselves outside our normative gender structures. Dr. Ehrensaft will present the interdisciplinary gender affirmative model of care developed collectively by experts at four major U.S. pediatric gender clinics, including UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, where she is Director of Mental Health of the Child and Adolescent Gender Center.
This course is an introduction to Melanie Klein’s theoretical and clinical concepts, and to contemporary Kleinian clinical work.
Building on the foundation laid by Freud, Melanie Klein’s focus on early mental life lead her to an awareness of a powerful primitive phantasy life that underpinned all mental activity, shaping one’s sense of self, relationships to others, and one’s sense of the world. Klein’s groundbreaking work on the centrality of unconscious phantasy, the role of internal object relations, and the significance of the instincts lead her to be understood as both an innovator and a radical.
October 2019
The frenetic pace of agency work in community mental health makes it difficult to find time and space to think deeply about our work. With the pressures of documentation requirements, community trauma, and limited resources, these demands overshadow clinical thinking. In response to the needs of our community, NCSPP is providing an additional forum to reflect on our clinical work.
This consultation group will process clinical work by licensed or unlicensed employees of county-funded or non-profit CMH agencies, and will be led by seasoned clinicians who have experience in community settings. The groups will meet approximately every other week and be held at the consultants offices or virtually.
This course will examine the development of the radical intersubjectivity contained within Bion’s “Theory of Thinking,” his groundbreaking 1962 paper formally introducing two-person psychology, which reoriented psychoanalytic theory toward today’s intersubjective perspective. Drawing from Freud’s (1911) “Formulations on Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” Bion postulated two possibilities open to humans from infancy onward — thinking or projective identification — placing early parenting in the pivotal role of shaping the individual’s capacity to think or project.