by Willow Banks, Psy.D.

As I write this, I am preparing to attend this year’s Division 39 conference in New York. I have not attended a conference since sometime before 2020. It feels like an excellent way to reconnect with the larger psychoanalytic community, reinvigorate my interest in learning, and get exposure to diverse ideas. The conference may also be an opportunity to meet with colleagues from other places who do not benefit from as thriving a psychoanalytic community as we have in the Bay Area and want to know what we offer. It could be a way to find teachers from around the country or the world who want to teach or present for NCSPP. One benefit of continuing to hold NCSPP’s courses and events remotely is that it allows us to work with and learn from those who live in other places and who can bring a fresh perspective to our local learning environment. Our board has been talking about how to implement this idea. The possibilities for collaboration and sharing are exciting. This got me thinking about what drives our desire for connection through psychoanalytic ideas and what keeps us interested in the evolving knowledge that informs our work and daily lives.

While conferences and courses can command the spotlight, it’s possible to overlook how much reading can do for us. The benefits of being a member of NCSPP include a subscription to our journal fort da, with the spring issue release right around the corner in May. Our education committee’s reading group, Psychoanalytic Dialogues on the Climate Crisis, is underway and is well-attended. Reading felt difficult during the early days of the pandemic - I found my brain was so full of safety concerns and the challenges of Zoom sessions that I had little to no ability to concentrate on an article or a book chapter. Returning to reading, I recognized how lonely I had felt without it. I don’t think I realized how much I depended on the regular input, and it was satisfying to feel hungry for engagement with reading again.

I imagine how we each address that hunger is very personal and individual, and I’m glad that multiple options exist to satiate it. How do you seek out emergent psychoanalytic ideas, and how has that potentially changed over the course of your career and or training? The pandemic and quarantine limited our options, so perhaps many of us are returning to this question. At NCSPP, we’d love to know what kind of learning opportunities hit the spot and who you feel drawn to learn from as we continue to plan our programming.