Dear Colleagues,

The summer is coming to a close and the SFPRG educational program will be starting up in September. There will be a great series of classes and conferences. Five clinical case conferences in Control Mastery Theory are offered in San Francisco and the East Bay as well as a research class. There are four fall conferences offered starting with the Paradox of Power on September 28 and followed by Law and Ethics, An Introduction to Control Mastery Theory, and The Sexual Intelligence of Men. Please see the SFPRG Website (SFPRG.org) for details, dates, and places. Please come to the conferences for excitement, professional enhancement, and continuing education credits, and, tell your friends.Read On

HEAD'S UP!!! The Membership Committee is launching the membership drive and sending out renewal letters to all members in September. We will also start planning the October Member Mambo and Town Hall meeting soon.

Kathie Dunn, our newsletter editor reports, that there are now 431 subscribers to the Newsletter. The Newsletter is helping SFPRG to expand its membership.

Peter Schumacher is making progress with the online searchable data base he is working on which will be used for a referral service for our members.

Karen Hubble, who is Chair of the Fundraising Committee, will be working with her committee to create a strategy for a major fund raising drive and will coordinate their efforts with the membership committee.

Hi Everyone,

This fall is going to be an exciting one for us at SFPRG with a series of amazing workshops that shouldn't be missed! First of all we have a workshop on a very thought-provoking topic featuring Dr. Heather Clague and Dr. Helene Goldberg entitled, "Looking at the Darkside: Aggression, Evoluation and Evil in Clinical Practice." The workshop will examine the adaptive nature of aggression in human life and how it can be reframed for clients in a way that is non-shaming and that facilitates empowerment and change. This workshop will be at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco on Saturday September 27 from 9 to 1:15; it is extremely inexpensive and provides 4 CEU's for licensed professionals. Read On

The SFPRG clinic has grown and flourished over the last 8 years. And as I take on my new position as Clinical Director I would like to acknowledge the individuals who have made it such a success. The clinic was the wish of both Joe Weiss and Hal Sampson. They each felt that training new clinicians in our theory was an important way to continue to have Control Mastery seen by a larger audience.

Jessica Broitman in her role of director of the clinic has done so much work to ensure that the clinic has blossomed and grown. Under her tutelage the clinic has grown from a small adjunct of the Wright's clinic to a thriving independent entity. Jessica will remain in her position as director of the clinic for the upcoming year but is actively looking for a replacement.

Barbara Sapienza, whose position I am replacing, has also done a remarkable job as clinical director for the last 5 years. She brought a warmth and thoughtfulness to the training that is very unique. Her presence will be sorely missed. Her shoes will be very hard to fill. We all wish Barbara all the best as she steps down.

The San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group Clinic and Training Center is the (grand) child of the Mount Zion Psychotherapy Research Group (MZPRG) which was established by Joe Weiss and Hal Sampson to conduct research on the Control-Mastery Theory. The MZPRG met weekly (on Fridays, hence the nickname the Friday Group) for many years to plan, discuss, and report on the on-going research that Hal and Joe organized and that was carried out by the various members of the group. The MZPRG achieved international recognition for the ground-breaking research that it conducted on the process and outcome of psychotherapy. Following the publication of The Psychoanalytic Process, and in some measure fueled by the demise of the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Zion Hospital, the MZPRG was reorganized as a free-standing non-profit organization and re-named the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group (SFPRG). The mission of the SFPRG was to continue conducting research on the theory and to disseminate the theory through courses, writing, and presentations. The establishment of a training clinic resulted in the current name iteration: San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group Clinic and Training Center. Read On

As many of you know, I believe that it is crucial for our group to develop rating scales that reflect some of our key concepts and that could easily be used by investigators or clinicians outside of our group. Toward this end, we* (see end of article) have been hard at work for the last year developing a new pathogenic belief scale (some of you have already used the scale on-line in rating one of our brief therapy cases, Leon). We are now ready to take a big leap and try the scale out as a self-rating measure, which entails people rating themselves on the pathogenic belief scale and completing a couple of other brief inventories.

There are two ways that readers of the Newsletter can contribute to this new research effort: 1) I hope that many of you will go to this web site (click on the link below) http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=xTqaNDAsvihuQrNrdjn02g%3d%3d and complete the scale and related inventories, which will take approximately 15 to 20 minutes of your time; and 2) that you will forward this link and ask your colleagues, students, friends, and relatives to do the same. Please note that all responses on this site are entirely anonymous and there is absolutely no way that any respondent can be identified (no names or email addresses are requested and the recording of IP addresses is disabled). Statistical validation of this new measure will require approximately 1000 participants and that is why we urgently need everyone's help. Since participation is entirely anonymous we will not know who has or has not filled out the questionnaire. So if you have any questions/comments/suggestions about the study or see other ways of using the pathogenic belief scale, please email me directly at George.Silberschatz@UCSF.EDU .

The "we" who have been working on developing and refining the pathogenic belief scale include John Belford, Marshall Bush, John Curtis, Kathy De Paola, Zohar Itzhar-Nabarro, George Silberschatz, Michelle Skeen, Molly Sullivan, Judith Wilson and Neil Young. Anyone who would like to get involved in scale development and testing should contact me.

The following is an important clarification from the write-up on the SFPRG Training Clinic data that appeared in last month's newsletter. The write up cited Lynn O'Connor in addition to Linda Tetzloff and Marshall Bush as being the key individuals involved in the development of the current treatment protocol at place in our clinic.

Actually the protocol was based largely on a protocol developed for her dissertation research by Dr. Jane Weisbin entitled "A Dose Response Study of Control Mastery Theory."

In this 2003 study Dr. Weisbin examined weekly follow up data in control mastery therapies of 11 patients at the SFPRG Clinic and compared the response rate over time to that in other psychotherapy outcome research. She found that the recovery rates were comparable to other dose-response therapies demonstrating the efficacy of Control Mastery Therapy, especially over longer periods of time. She writes in her abstract: "Survival analysis suggested that 25% of the patients beginning therapy in the dysfunctional range would reliably improve after 14 sessions, 50% after 19 sessions and 75% after 30 sessions. These figures are not statistically significant, but do compare favorably with prior dose-response literature, though they lean toward the higher number of sessions required. Level of distress at intake was found to be positively correlated with time to improvement which is correlated in several dose response studies." Dr. Weisbin has a private practice in Berkeley and has been a member of SFPRG since 1999.

Patsy Wood

Dear SFPRG,

As some of you might remember I am now in Germany, one year already passed by. I came here to work on a project with Professor Mergenthaler, a name known from the Group. He gave me the chance to apply his informatic method of research, the Therapeutic Cycle Model, used in psychotherapy, to contribute on the research about the Control Mastery Theory.

The Therapeutic Cycle Model, successfully applied to psychotherapy (Mergenthaler, 1996, 2008) makes use of two change agents, "Affective Experiencing" and "Cognitive Mastery", measured as Emotional Tone and Abstraction in the verbal expressions of patient and therapist verbatim transcripts. The main idea is to use transcripts coming from the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group and to apply Mergenthaler's method of analysis to study if the concepts of the Control Mastery Theory can find an empirical support by TCM. The research is meant to observe which phenomena, patterns of the Cycle, are taking place in terms of linguistic analysis during moments like: pathogenic beliefs, testing, plan and plan formulation. The decision to apply the Therapeutic Cycle Method was reached because it is considered a reliable method of research in psychotherapy to study conflicts, traumas, and change in the therapeutic process.

This method makes it possible to focus not only on the patient, but also on the therapist. This is crucial from the Control Mastery's point of view considering the testing and the plan formulation concepts, on order to understand the consequences of the therapist's responses to the events which demonstrate those concepts.

We would like to use for our project the case of AR, which was the object of recent analysis conducted by M. Bush. We unfortunately still have not managed to get hold of this material, but we still would like to count on that.

In the meanwhile we are using as a pilot case the transcripts of Myra, trying to organize the collection of data, and the analysis in order to provide guide lines useful for following cases. We hope to get some feedback about the material and what you think about my project, for any question or advice. I am still looking forward to be back to San Francisco for the next March Workshop, where I would like to be able to present much more about what we are trying to do over here.

Best wishes everyone,

Please, contact me: valentina.gandini@uni-ulm.de

+Rob Petipas announces that the fall class schedule is up on the website and a hard copy of the fall brochures will be out in September.

+Marshall Bush announces that his Friday 2pm research group will begin meeting again on Friday, September 5 in the conference room at 9 Funston Ave. We will be studying the process of testing and the patient's reactions to passed and failed tests in a recorded analysis and in a recorded short term therapy. My goal for this year is to complete at least one formal study. The group members are brilliant, the discussions are intellectually stimulating, and we do our best to make it a lot of fun. If you are interested in attending, please contact me at 415-561-6775.

+Office For Rent: Sunny, large and beautifully decorated office available in the Presidio at 10 Funston. The office has high ceilings, a fireplace, bay windows and a waiting room. It is available 2 days per week and evenings. Please contact Kathy DePaola at 415-561-6788, or depbigsf@pacbell.net for further information.

Last month I mentioned Patsy Wood's analysis of outcome data from the SFPRG Clinic but I neglected to mention that the first outcome study from the SFPRG clinic was done by Jane Weisbin under the supervision of Lynn O'Connor in 2003. I am hoping to develop a complete catalogue of all the research done by our group, so that everyone's work is acknowledged and appreciated.

It's important for people within our group as well as in the greater community to appreciate the tremendous empirical base upon which Control Master Theory is based.

Some of this body of work has been documented in Chapter 11 of George Silberschatz' book, Transformative Relationships. Some of these studies are printed in their entirety on Vic Comello's website, controlmastery.org (a link is available through our website, SFPRG.org, click on the link below). We do not yet have a comprehensive list of research performed by SFPRG.

John Curtis, chair of the Research Committee, is taking on the task of developing this catalogue and is asking people to email studies that have been completed, are currently underway, and are being planned. I would like to see all of these completed studies available in their entirety for viewing, or at the very least their abstracts. I would also like to see all of the dissertation studies and other research studies currently underway acknowledged and listed. The research that SFPRG is doing and has done is a tremendous achievement and should be a source of pride for our group.

The SFPRG Clinic is taking on eleven excellent interns starting in September. This is an increase of one intern from last year. The clinic did 110 intakes in the eleven months between September '07 and August '08. This is an increase from the 100 intakes done in the previous year from September '06 to September '07. The clinic is serving a tremendous function providing excellent low cost psychotherapeutic services to the San Francisco community. It is also providing wonderful training to psychology and social work interns who benefit from some of the best supervisors in the San Francisco Bay Area. Finally, it is a potentially rich source of data for studying "Control Mastery" therapies in formal process and outcome studies.

Our Fundraising Committee, under the able leadership of Karen Hubble, has been meeting and planning how to introduce SFPRG to the larger community. We are planning a brochure that testifies to how grateful patients are for Control Mastery Therapy, how grateful student therapists are for Control Mastery supervision, and how respected and seminal is Control Mastery research is in the world of psychotherapy research. We are also hoping to revamp our website to allow individual web pages for each member. We also want to improve the current website to make it more accessible to people who want to attend seminars, participate in the clinic training program, get therapy through the clinic, or just learn about Control Mastery Theory.

Because we believe that Control Mastery Theory is extremely valuable to clients, practitioners, and researchers, we would like to expand the program. That would mean we could give more conferences in the Bay Area and elsewhere, we could do more research, and we could improve our training program, and even pay our interns. In order to expand our program, we would need to expand our budget, which would require increased membership and increased donations from outside individuals and organizations.

We are asking current members to increase dues if they can afford it. We are also asking non-members to join, attend more seminars, and come to more conferences. We are trying to develop a thriving volunteer program where people help with putting on seminars or by assisting in research, and in return learn more about theory or research.

Our assets are that we have a large group of talented practitioners, teachers, researchers, and writers who are enthusiastic about Control Mastery Theory and have a lot to give. We are trying to organize that enthusiasm so that we at SFPRG can do more work - more teaching, more research, and more effective therapy. We want to test the theory empirically, improve the theory, and interface with talented practitioners, teachers, and researchers from other theories.

I wish you all a wonderful end of summer, and hope to see many of you at conferences, seminars, and wandering around SFPRG in the fall.

Steve Foreman

The second workshop featuring Jules Bernstein is "Law, Ethics and Personal Values: What's a Therapist to Do?" and will be located at 9 Funston from 9 am to 4pm on October 11th and will provide you with 6 CEU's for a very good price. This is a law and ethics workshop that examines some of the more charged issues that mental health professionals face and views them in a way that privileges the client as much as possible.

While the legal issues ethics of basic professional practice are covered, framing the workshop in terms of these more controversial issues gives participants a perspective they don't often get at most Law and Ethics workshops. I think you will find the workshop very stimulating and it will enable to meet your licensing requirements as well!

On Saturday October 18th we have an Introduction to Control Mastery workshop taught by Dr. Steve Foreman, Dr. Stephen Kanofsky and Dr. Jan Schreiber. (check the website for availibility!) Again it will meet at the SF JCC from 9 am to 4:30 and provide 6 CEU's of credit. For students the cost is $20 for the workshop so if you are working with students who are expressing an interest to know more about Control Mastery, this is the workshop for them. Please let your graduate students, psych assistants and supervisees know about this workshop. Participants will come away with a good overview of the model and how to readily apply it in work with clients.

Our final fall workshop is on Saturday, October 25th at the SF JCC from 9 to 12 is also a must for all members and interested parties. It is taught by Dr. Michael Bader and is titled, "What is He Thinking? The Sexual Intelligence of Men." Again for an amazingly good price you will come way with 3 CEU's of credit and a way of viewing male sexuality that is very different from the common cultural norms and values. Dr. Bader will explore how unconscious guilt and loneliness are central to male motivation and sexuality. As any who have attended his workshops can attest to, you will find yourself riveted and on the edge of your chair for the entire three hours. You don't want to miss this!

Finally, we have five ongoing case conferences this next year:

Peter Schumacher will be facilitating a seminar at 9 Funston on Mondays from 10:30 to 12 for 16.5 CEU's of credit this fall.

Alan Rappoport and Norm Sohn will be offering a case study group on Wednesdays from 9 to 10 for 12 CEU's this fall.

Steve Foreman will be facilitating a conference on the therapeutic process on Wednesdays from 2:30 to 4 for a total of 25 CEU's this fall.

Helene Goldberg will be offering a Treatment by Attitudes case conference in Berkeley from 2:30 to 4 on Thursdays afternoons for 19.5 CEU's this fall.

Michael Lowenstein will be offering a seminar on How Control Mastery Therapy Works that will meet in Orinda beginning in January.

And for those who would like to get involved in research Marshall Bush will be offering a research group on Friday afternoons in San Francisco from 2 to 3pm. For any of you interested in getting experience doing clinical research, this is a must!

Please feel free to participate in one or all of these wonderful educational opportunities. We look forward to having you attend.

Patsy Wood

Research was the raison d'etre and the bedrock of the MZPRG, and research has played an important role in the organization throughout its development. Control-Mastery Theory always distinguished itself from other theories by empirically testing and verifying its tenets. Research was very much at the core of the theory and played a huge role in garnering the respect and acceptance from other clinicians and theorists.

However, my sense is that in recent years the organization has placed less emphasis on research and that teaching and training have been higher priorities. This is not to say that no research is being conducted. George Silberschatz and Marshall Bush have each established groups that have been actively engaged in research, and other members of SFPRG have been conducting extra-mural research on the theory (some of which has been reported in this newsletter).

With all due credit, these research enterprises are very much the creations of the individual investigators - they are the products of their initiative and efforts, not of the Group.

The Group does not have a unified research program and there has been little or no organizational support for research. As a result, research is no longer a core component of the Group; it is not integrated into the training and education programs that the Group offers, and, as a result, potential gold mines of clinical data, such as the Clinic, have remained untapped.

Steve Foreman and the Board have expressed their support for bringing research back into SFPRG, and I am pleased to serve as chair of the Research Committee with the task of reinvigorating research in the organization. The committee (current members are George Silberschatz, Marshall Bush and myself) will be meeting soon to develop strategies for promoting and supporting both existing and new research programs. My bias is to encourage and support research on the basic processes of psychotherapy.

From its inception, the research of the Group has focused on investigating the basic "laws" of psychotherapy, not on Control-Mastery Theory or techniques per se. Despite the emphasis these days on trying to "empirically validate" various treatment approaches I do not think that there is any value in trying to prove the primacy of Control-Mastery Theory over other theoretical approaches to treatment. Too often such efforts represent little more than horse races between different approaches applied to an often narrowly defined clinical population.

In my estimation the results of such studies are often, at best, ambiguous and provide little if any guidance to the clinician on how to be of help to a given patient with his or her individual issues.

In future newsletters I will be reporting on the work of the Research Committee. In the meantime, I would appreciate receiving from the membership reports on any research that you are involved in on Control-Mastery theory. Also, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in being involved in research or have research interests that you would like to pursue.