Dear Colleagues,

Congratulations to four new Board Directors who were elected September 3, 2008, Claire Arbour, a recent graduate of our training program, David Auld, a longtime member, a child and adult therapist interested in several committees, Kathie Dunn, our newsletter editor, currently active on the Membership Committee, and John Gibbins, another long term member, a child and adult therapist and researcher, who is interested in the Education Committee. Welcome to all new Board Directors. We are looking forward to working together. We plan to add one more Director to the Board from the current group of Clinic Interns, which will give us a total of fifteen directors.

Speaking of interns, I would also like to welcome back two interns from last year, Laura Fannon and Deborah Kory and nine new interns, Jon Belford, Jamine Ergas, Helga Fasching, Ilysa Goldblatt, Jillian Goldstein, Fred Loya, Jay Seiff-Haron, Eric Taggart, and Mary Jane Weatherbee (see the Training Center article for more info). Our clinic staff is very excited to have such an enthusiastic and bright group of interns who have an unusual breadth of experience. There is also a strong possibility there will be a twelfth intern joining our clinic in the spring from Norway. Read On

SAVE THE DATE! SAVE THE DATE! SAVE THE DATE!

Our annual Town Hall Meeting / Mambo will be held Sunday, October 26 at the Swedenborgian Church at 3200 Washington St at the corner of Lyon in San Francisco from 5:30 to 8:30 PM and we invite prospective new members to join us. The Swedenborgian Church is a lovely space that has an adjoining garden.

In the event you cannot find street parking there is a garage 3 blocks away (and down the hill) at the JCC garage on California and Presidio.

Please join us for a fun evening of socializing, good food and the opportunity to exchange ideas and information with new and old SFPRG colleagues and friends. RSVP to Rob Petitpas by phone or thru the website.

We look forward to seeing you there.

On September 10 we started the training year and it promises to be a very exciting one. The program we offer immerses the trainees in Control Mastery theory.

Wednesdays we provide a three hour training block that includes one case conference, one didactic seminar and a clinic meeting. Then each trainee is asked to attend another case seminar as well as at least two hours of supervision. We are indebted to all of you for helping us make the program so rich by giving your time and energy to the clinic.

We welcome nine new trainees who come from diverse backgrounds and different schools. We also have two returning trainees. This year's trainees include two post docs, seven Ph.D./PsyD. Interns, one social work trainee and one MFT trainee. We hope that you all have a chance to meet each one as the year progresses. I will begin the introductions here with some information about four of them and over the next few months about each trainee. Read On

Listed here are the upcoming workshops open to all interested people, members or not. By clicking any Presidio picture you can enter the website for workshop info, registration and membership. We encourage readers of the newsletter who have not become members yet to experience these offerings. There is a higher fee for non members, so, double your experience by joining SFPRG; reduce the fee and enjoy the opportunities and benefits!

Steve Foreman writes:

Please Come to the "Introduction to Control Mastery Theory"

Because of its success and demand SFPRG has expanded this course offering this year to two introductory courses in CMT. George Silberschatz, Jan Schreiber, and I have been presenting this course for the last nine years.

This year, I will be teaching an introductory course October 18 with Steve Kanofsky and Jan Schreiber. George will teach another introductory course with faculty to be announced before the March Workshops in the spring.

The first part of this introductory conference will be a theoretical discussion of the origins of psychopathology according to Joe Weiss' theory. We will talk about how children have natural developmental strivings to grow and develop but these strivings might get derailed by real traumatic experiences that end up holding children back. Kids develop pathogenic beliefs about themselves in relation to the world that become internalized and cause problems over time such as depression, anxiety, inhibitions, and troubled behavior.

We will talk about the importance of compliances and identifications to the development of pathology, and look at the parallels with what goes on in psychotherapy, including transference and turning passive into active.

Steve Kanofsky will discuss

-the theory of what goes on in psychotherapy,

-how the therapist infers the patient's plan,

-how the patient works consciously and unconsciously in accord with this plan to solve their problems,

-how patients test the therapist hoping to overcome pathogenic beliefs and pursue healthy goals,

-and how the therapist works to understand and pass these tests.

Steve will also discuss the added therapeutic leverage and flexibility gained by processing the patient's core affect states, attending to cultural factors and highlighting successful experience in helping to overcome pathogenic beliefs and develop coherent, new, and preferred narratives about self and others.

In the afternoon, Jan Schreiber will conduct two case enactments with two presenters in the audience acting the role of their patients as Jan plays the role of the therapist who interviews them. We will have a chance to discuss each case with the presenter, our teachers and the audience. We will also have plenty of time to discuss and review questions that arise as well as clinical examples and problems that the audience may have.

For those of you who are interested in the theory we highly recommend this conference. Please also check out the other courses and conferences offered on our website. We hope to see you there on October 18, 2008. Read On

For info and registration, click on the Presidio picture to go to SFPRG website.

• Monday Case Consultation Seminar
• Peter Schumacher, MFT
• Mondays: September 15th thru December 15th
• 10:30 AM to 12 Noon
• 16.5 CE hours*
• SFPRG, 9 Funston Ave, The Presidio, San Francisco

The group started on September 15, but there is still room in the Monday Case Conference Seminar with Peter Schumacher. We have a lively group of of both seasoned therapists and new interns. Organizing and presenting a case to a small group of supportive therapists is a powerful experience, and not as difficult as it may seem. We will use Control Mastery language to structure the case presentation so that it naturally leads to more understanding of the therapeutic process. We are also including a focus on particularly difficult cases. Please call me if you have questions, or come to the class early to sign up. Peter Schumacher: 415-752-8501

This seminar will be a forum for developing an individualized approach to treatment based on each patient's unique history, with a focus on working with difficult patients. Using principles of Control Mastery Theory, we will make sense of the complex and often counterintuitive interactions and behaviors presented by patients who seek our help. We will discuss the effectiveness of treatment by attitude, and look at when and how to utilize this powerful technique. Participants will learn how to: 1) carefully make hypotheses about the nature of the patient's problems and the patient's goals from the first several sessions; 2) test these hypotheses by studying the patient's reaction to the therapist's interventions, and continue to check these as the therapy progresses; 3) identify the patient's tests and possible ways to successfully pass them; 4) offer interpretations that will facilitate movement towards the patient's goals; 5) track therapeutic progress by noting changes in the patient's behavior and feelings outside of therapy; 6) interpret the meaning and origin of the patient's symptoms and character disorders.

Click "Read On" at the bottom of this article for five other case consultation group information. Read On

As you may have read in the recent membership letter, SFPRG is redesigning its website. We will have a much smarter site, with links to a therapist search function for anyone looking to find a therapist from our membership; a page for research discussions, links and postings; a page for community resources like our low-fee clinic; a page for our educational programs with the ability to sign up online; the ability to renew your membership online; a link to the current newsletter and archived newsletters; and a new look for the home page, with even more to come.

We want to change the look and feel of the site as well, and I am looking for suggestions from our members about possible designs. If you have a favorite website, one that is intuitively easy to navigate and esthetically attractive, let me know. If you have other suggestions about content and style, let me know. I appreciate any help you can give us. Thanks!

My tenure as an intern at the SFPRG clinic began as an experiment, as I was the only social work intern at the clinic. As a second-year MSW student at Smith School for Social Work in Massachusetts, I wanted an internship in an outpatient clinic with a psychodynamic focus, a strong training program, a smart and dedicated clinical staff and, of course, excellent supervision. I told the school that I was willing to move anywhere in the country (from my home of 3 years in Boston) to have this kind of experience.

I was excited to be placed in San Francisco at the home of Control Mastery Theory and I felt ready for the challenge that I knew was coming but didn't yet fully understand. When I arrived at SFPRG I was the "unknown intern". It seemed that no one quite knew what to make of the Masters student in Social Work. As for me, I was interested in Control Mastery Theory and thrilled by the prospect of gaining further training with smart, committed and curious budding therapists with whom I could build both a professional identity and a personal stance as a therapist. Read On

Thanks for updating (or is it backdating?) the research information to include the first year of the clinic when we first gathered and analyzed the data collected as our training program and clinic was developing. I was grateful to be acknowledged and want to further recognize Lynn O'Connor's contributions which I feel have not been emphasized enough.

Lynn was the Clinical Director of SFPCTC and, at some personal and professional cost, made those beginning years possible under the aegis (and responsibility) of the Wright Institute. She was also the Director of Research for that SFPCTC/Wright Institute collaboration for those first few years, chose the instruments so that we would have a solid outcome study (most of which continued to be used), and supervised the process of data collection. She then chaired my dissertation, in which I --with the help of Jack Berry-- analyzed the data from that first year of the three year study. The results of year one were presented to our group at a Saturday morning workshop during the March conference in 2004, and then as a poster at the APA convention in Hawaii that same year.

Jack, Lynn, and I have recently resumed analyzing the data from year two and three, after taking a few years off while I got licensed and began building my practice. Lynn was truly a mentor for research-minded Control Mastery students, and even made researchers out of those of us who were sure we were not. Lynn, working with me and other students, brought the spirit and fact of research into our new training program and clinic, from its beginning. As those who were a part of the Mount Zion Brief Psychotherapy Project know, it may take some years before all the data collected in a study is fully analyzed.

Lynn recently published an article in this newsletter some months ago, to which I direct anyone who is interested in the legacy of research at the SFPRG. As a student, I felt proud to be a part of that research legacy, and I look forward to being a part of the next stage of our data analysis. We discovered strengths (and some weaknesses) from empirical study of patient outcome in the first year of the training program and clinic. Hopefully soon we will be able to describe what happened for our patients in the next few years of treatment in our program.

Per-Einar Binder and Helge Holgersen in Norway have published the first article about control mastery theory in Norwegian in the Journal of the Norwegian Psychological Association (5,000 readers, most of them clinicians). A link to that article is below.

While the article is in Norwegian, the abstract is also in English, reprinted here.

"Testing filled with hope. Case-formulation and growth-promoting therapeutic interventions in light of control-mastery theory": How is the relationship between case-formulation and relationally anchored psychotherapeutic change processes to be understood? In recent decades parts of the psychotherapy field both within psychoanalytic, humanistic and cognitive therapy has gone through a relational turn. Humans are understood to be meaning-making beings seeking relational bonds, both through their developmental history and the therapeutic encounter. The weight given to process and co-creation of the therapeutic here-and-now has put diagnostic evaluation and case formulation in the background, especially within relational psychoanalysis. Here, the control-mastery approach to case-formulation and conceptualising therapeutic change is presented, and similarities and differences with other relational approaches is pointed out and discussed.

Contact Per-Einar at per.binder@psykp.uib.no for more information.

For more recent publications click "Read On".Read On

Because of the hard work of the Clinic Staff and its attention to a smooth transition, each of the new interns has at least four clients starting out. This is a big improvement over last year and will result in a much smoother and richer learning experience for the new trainees. It will also allow a more consistent income stream for the clinic and the organization in general.

I would still like to remind all of the clinicians in the community to send low fee referrals to the clinic. Also remember we have an excellent group of recently graduated trainees who are open to moderate to full fee referrals. Please contact Rob Petitpas in our office for a list of recent graduates who are available for referrals.

The fall education program is in full swing. Please sign up for one or all of the great programs:

On Sept 27 is "The Paradox of Power: From Altruism to Auschwitz" presented by Heather Clague and Helene Goldberg.

On Oct 11 is the "Law, Ethics and Personal Values: What's a Therapist To Do?" conference with Jules Bernstein.

On Oct 18, please let colleagues know to come hear the "Introduction to Control Mastery Theory Conference" given by Steve Foreman, Steve Kanofsky, and Jan Schreiber, and, finally on

Oct 25, come hear Michael Bader present "What Is He Thinking? The Sexual Intelligence of Men".

All of these Saturday conferences will be held at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center. There are several case conferences beginning in September and October. Please see the SFPRG website for more details. (Click the Presidio picture to enter website)

The Education Committee is planning the Spring Conferences and the March Workshop. Our Research Committee is cataloging current and past research projects and planning new research programs. Our Fundraising Committee has been brainstorming about how to communicate our contributions to the local community and planning to raise funds through grants and contacting donors to help us expand our program. Our Membership Drive is underway and we are reaching out to old members to give as much as you can and to new members to join SFPRG, come to conferences and seminars, and think about teaching.

It is a very exciting fall. I hope to see all of you at the classes and conferences. Call us if you are interested in doing research or volunteering.

Please join the membership and let's get together for the Mambo/ Town Hall Meeting on Sunday, October 26th, 5:50 - 8:30. We are inviting prospective new members to join us at this annual event. Please, all who are attending, RSVP to Rob Petitpas by phone or through the website. Thank you

Laura Fannon, Psy.D., is a Psychological Assistant to Barbara Sapienza, Ph.D., and is beginning her second year at SFPRG. She graduated from the California Institute of Integral Studies in 2007 and particularly enjoys working with clients dealing with life transitions, one of the topics of her dissertation. She is a mom and an attorney whose son just left for college.

Helga P. Fasching; is a pre-doctoral intern who attended grad school at CSPP. She is so happy to be at SFPRG and is the mom of a 17-year-old daughter who'll be off to college next year.

Mary Jane Weatherbee has completed her coursework at the Wright Institute and is at SFPRG for her pre-doc internship. She has a special interest in working with children and is very interested in trauma. Also, she spent four years in Europe booking tours for, and touring with, punk bands.

Jillian Goldstein is in her second year of her Master's program from Smith College School of Social Work, Northampton MA, and will receive her MSW in August 2009. Jillian relocated to the Bay area three weeks ago for the internship at the SFPRG, and she will be an intern here until the end of April 2009.

If anyone would like to offer their expertise by supervising or teaching a didactic seminar, please feel free to contact me.

And, last, but not least, please remember the clinic when you have low fee referrals.

• The Paradox of Power: From Altruism to Auschwitz
• Heather Clague, MD and Helene Goldberg, Ph.D.
• Saturday September 27
• 9 AM to 1:15 PM
• 4 CE hours*
• The San Francisco Jewish Community Center
• 3200 California St (at Presidio)
• 2nd Floor

To get more info and to register click the link below

• Wednesday Case Study Group
• Norm Sohn, Ph.D, LCSW; Alan Rappoport, Ph.D
• Wednesdays, October 1st thru December 17th
• 9 AM to 10 AM
• 12 CE*
• 9 Funston, The Presidio, SF

• The Therapeutic Process
• Steve Foreman, M.D.
• Wednesdays: October 8th thru December 17th
• 2:30 PM to 4 PM
• 15 CE*
• 9 Funston, The Presidio, SF

This journey was not without its challenges but, as it turned out, Control Mastery is a fantastic fit for me; it makes sense in terms of how I think about the human condition and how I understand human nature. No other approach to therapy has so completely encompassed both my own value system and my practical experiences with people across all aspects of social work. CMT is inherently forgiving and flexible and it allows practitioners to be genuine in our interventions and our love for our patients.

As it turned out, SFPRG offered me one of the most supportive and encouraging learning environments that I have encountered, despite all of the challenges that go along with being an "unknown". And, I love being a part of a community that is thoughtful and deliberate about the way in which it cares for people - both clients and colleagues.

As I left San Francisco to finish my degree at Smith, my overwhelming feeling was, "but I am not done yet!". I returned for another year of post-graduate training after graduating with an MSW from Smith School for Social Work (August 2007). It has been a great year and my understanding of CMT and my comfort level have deepened considerably. At SFPRG I have been afforded opportunities to present cases, to ask questions of incredible therapists and to hone my skills in the art of therapy. I hope that the road to being a fantastic therapist will be a lifelong one and I feel very lucky to be associated with such a skilled group as the SFPRG community. And I am grateful that the supervisors at the SFPRG clinic opened their doors to me and took a chance on a new kind of student amongst their intern group.

Though I am leaving the SFPRG clinic and training center, I am not going far! I am excited to be serving on the Board of Directors at SFPRG beginning in the Fall of 2008 and I look forward to continuing to be an active member of the SFPRG community. I am also leaving the clinic to start my private practice in San Francisco.

I enjoy treating adults, couples and adolescents. I am particularly interested in working with clients who are capable of functioning well but who suffer from depression and self-defeating patterns, and who may be negotiating major identity, lifestyle, developmental, or life transitions.

Please keep me in mind as I start my private practice internship under the supervision of John Bogardus! I am happily accepting referrals:

• Clair Arbour, MSW
• 3237 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, 94115
• 415-373-1076
• clairearbourmsw@gmail.com

George Silberschatz :

"How Patients Work On Their Plans and Test Their Therapists in Psychotherapy" Smith College Studies in Social Work, 2008, Volume: 78 Issue: 2/3 PP. 275-286

Jo Nol, Cynthia Shilkret, Robert Shilkret:

"Control-Mastery Theory and Contemporary Social Work Practice" Smith College Studies in Social Work, 2008, Volume: 78 Issue: 2/3 PP. 263-273

Editor's note: This is a reprint from the August NL. More participants are needed.

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* 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 http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=xTqaNDAsvihuQrNrdjn02g%3d%3d (click the link below) 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.

In the fall we will apply the pathogenic belief scale to several brief therapy cases. We are also working on a goals inventory, a trauma scale and pathogenic expectations of others scale. The development of these measures should help to make basic concepts of control-mastery theory accessible to a wider network of clinicians and researchers. Many thanks in advance for your help in this effort.

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 DePaola, 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.

(Ed's note: This is a repeat of the August newsletter article. John wants to be sure you know to send those research projects to him for cataloguing.

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: the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group Clinic and Training Center.

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). However, 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, if you will, bringing research back into SFPRG, and I am pleased to serve as chair of the research committee that has been given the task of reinvigorating research in the organization. The committee (the current members of which 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.