Impulse is a community newsletter produced by the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP) and distributed electronically at no cost to subscribers. We envision Impulse as an integrative source for local news, events, and thinking of interest to the psychoanalytically inclined. Our goal is to be your guide as you explore the Bay Area's rich array of analytic resources.
We invite you to become a member of NCSPP, if you are not already. And, we welcome you as a subscriber to Impulse. Join us as we highlight the exceptional diversity of psychoanalytic thought and practice in Northern California.
by June Lin-Arlow, AMFT
Over the last several months I’ve been thinking about norms and practices of silence around pregnancy and birth - pregnancy announcements, secret miscarriages, gender reveals, even the pressure to only tell people about certain positive aspects of motherhood and birth. After I found out that I was pregnant, I immediately started asking my mom friends about their experiences, and their responses were similar: “the first trimester can be hard, but you’ll love being pregnant.”
Early in pregnancy, when my body still looked the same but felt completely different, I was convinced that something was very wrong. Something was dead inside of me but growing like a cancer. “This cancer is invading me, taking my energy,” I would say, using the exact language my patient, who is plagued by paranoid thoughts, uses in session to tell me about what famous actors are doing to her. I had violent fantasies of cutting open my abdomen to extract the grape-sized fetus, just as she wanted to dig into her body for the microchip she was convinced had been implanted inside of her uterus. There was a thin veil between delusion and consensus reality, where I could find myself stumbled into her world.
by Mariya Mykhaylova, LCSW
REFLECTIONS OF A UKRAINIAN IMMIGRANT
My therapist says I should write. She is probably right. A week into the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin, I try to make sense of how to carry on with my life in the United States while my family members back in Odesa brace for terror and parts of my motherland become increasingly unrecognizable.
I immigrated as a child, old enough to have many memories and feel deeply affected, and young enough to lose my accent and pass for a non-immigrant, White American much of the time. I have lost count of the number of times that someone asks me where I am from, I tell them my story, and they respond by telling me that I am American. Privilege and erasure — two sides of the same coin.
Kyeyoung Park, a sociocultural anthropologist at UCLA, coined the term 1.5 generation to describe Korean Americans who immigrated as children and were not quite first- or second-generation. This concept captures something vital about the in-betweenness of straddling multiple cultures while fully belonging in neither.
OFFICE FOR RENT. Attractive, airy, light, quiet, and well-proportioned second floor North Oakland psychotherapy office. Parking available, office near Piedmont Ave. Contact cdithrich@gmail.com or (510) 655-6650.
WEEKLY CONSULTATION GROUP. Launching in May for early-career clinicians (pre or post-licensure) and focusing on the intersection of the personal, the conceptual, and the clinical in order to deepen our work with patients as well as to further personal and intellectual growth. My orientation is contemporary psychoanalytic and relational, and we will work on making central psychoanalytic concepts useful and grounded in real clinical and personal experience. Some clinically relevant papers will be discussed in response to themes and concepts that emerge organically from our case discussions. Space will be made for group process as needed, with attention to parallel process (clinical material unconsciously taking shape in the group), in order to maintain a safe and generative field for all participants. For more information please contact me at contact@jonathanmossmft.com or (415) 508-8626.
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Child, Parents, and Psychoanalyst: A Binocular Vision
Sat, Apr 9 / 10:00 am - 12:00 pm / Zoom
SFCP / (415) 632-2438 / E. Molinari, M.D. et al. / free
Student Seminars: Loss and Grief
Wed, Apr 6 (begins) / 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm / Zoom
SFCP / (415) 632-2438 / C. Scott, MA / free
The Something of “Nothings”, Memoir and Poetry
Fri, Apr 8 / 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm / Zoom
PINC / (415) 288-4050 / A. Jones, M.D., P. Varsano, Ph.D. / free - $40
Self-Destructive Impulses Through the Lens of Object Relations
Mon, Apr 11 / 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm / Zoom
SFCP / (415) 632-2438 / K. Lewis, Ph.D., S. Purcell, M.D. / free
Symposium: Adieu Lacan
Fri, Apr 15 / 9:30 am - 11:00 am / Online / San Francisco
EJP / (631) 375-2841 / B. Milan Ph.D., F. Castrillón, Psy.D. / $10
Race and Racism in Psychoanalytic Thought
Sat, Apr 30 / 10:00 am - 12:00 pm / Zoom
SFCP / (415) 632-2438 / B. Stoute, M.D., C. Fisher, M.D. / free
Student Seminars: What is Psychological Work?
Wed, May 4 (begins) / 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm / Zoom
SFCP / (415) 632-2438 / S. Tan Psy.D. / free
A Liberatory Psychoanalysis: Towards a Freedom of Mind and Body
Fri, May 6 (begins) / 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm / Zoom
PINC / (415) 288-4050 / P. Contreras, Psy.D., D. Kallivayalil, Ph.D. / $35 - $85