October 16, 2011

Dear Colleagues,

The fall classes are in full swing with a new Introduction to Control Mastery Theory workshop with an emphasis on Plan Formulations. John Gibbins and Terry Meyers offered their considerable expertise teaching this course with me for the first time at the Presidio Conference Room and was well attended by enthusiastic participants.

We have also started the Post-Graduate Course in Control Mastery Theory Wednesday evenings from 7 pm to 9:15 pm. We have an excellent group of eight to ten participants but there is still room for more who want a comprehensive course in Control Mastery Theory. Please see John Gibbins' column for more details of our entire educational program and don't miss Denny Zeitlin's conference on Couple Therapy on November 5 and Susan Landes' conference in Sacramento "The Basics and Beyond" on November 12.

I also want to report on a wonderful experience shared by almost 50 people who attended our first Honorary Fundraising Dinner. Our guests of honor were Suzanne Gassner and Irwin Gootnick, who were both honored for their substantial contribution to Control Mastery Theory and the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group. Marshall Bush gave a tribute to Suzanne and John Gibbins spoke about Irwin. The room was filled with old friends and admirers of the honorees as well as newer members, recent, and current interns. Click the link below for pictures of this event.

It was very interesting for me to hear how Suzanne and Irwin both became aware of SFPRG, which at that time was called the Mt. Zion Psychotherapy Research Group. Suzanne was practicing in Boston when she heard about the Sampson and Weiss group. She moved across the country to study with Hal Sampson, one of the two great mentors that she credits as having changed her life. Irwin noted how he was in supervision with Joe Weiss as a psychoanalytic candidate at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute at a time when Joe was still formulating his theory. Irwin and Suzanne both started participating in the research group during the 1970's. Both were curious and active students of Control Mastery Theory but also helped introduce countless others to the group and to the theory by their teaching, /writing, and supervision. Read On

Fall classes have begun. The Fall introductory workshop was offered October 15th in the smaller venue of our Funston Ave. location, filling the conference room as participants heard Steve Foreman give an overview of CMT in the morning, followed by Terry Meyers and John Gibbins presenting Plan Formulation methods in the afternoon, first by having the group formulate a case presented to them, then by case presentations by the class members. It was a lively, stimulating day, enjoyed by the group, who expressed interest in our other class offerings.

The post-graduate course also started this month, on Wednesday evenings, with a solid turnout, covering the basics of CMT in a format of the class time divided into one hour didactic presentation followed by a one hour case conference. There are still places available in this first part of a year-long course. For those who join the class late, cost adjustments will made, and videos of the didactic portion of the early classes are available. If you are interested, check the course description on the website and call Rob to verify your place in the class.

The Education Committee is currently planning workshops for next year, along with planning already scheduled courses and the March International Workshop. We would like to hear from members and others reading this newsletter any suggestions for workshop topics that interest you; please contact me care of SFPRG.

Peter Schumacher has been an active member of SFPRG since being introduced to the theory by a friend over twenty years ago. Through a chance meeting in the old neighborhood near Mt. Zion Hospital, his friend told him about the case conferences he was attending. The man leading the conferences was Joe Weiss, whom the friend described as "brilliant". Peter was encouraged to attend and was "enthralled".

According to Peter, Joe seemed to immediately know what the essence of a case was, and could formulate treatment plans with clarity. It was an amazing experience for him, and the ideas presented in the theory made perfect sense to him.

Along with the depth of knowledge he gained in the conferences he enjoyed the active involvement of the participants and remained a participant for years. Peter's work and his relationship with Joe has been incredibly important to him and has shaped and informed how he thinks and functions as a therapist.

Peter also attended Hal's case conferences, and was influenced by Hal's ideas of "treatment by attitudes", recognizing that the healing is in the attitudes we take with our patients, and that the attitudes work to counteract pathogenic beliefs. He sees Control Mastery as a relational theory, and says that 'people draw conclusions from how they are treated". For those who have come to know Peter over the years, they know that he projects a warm, caring attitude that obviously carries over into his clinical work.

After Joe's death, Peter took over the running of the Monday morning case conference, first with Marshall Bush and now alone. Titled "Understanding Control Mastery Theory", the course includes a line by line reading of Joe Weiss's How Psychotherapy Works, and the application of the reading to case presentations. Peter has also been active on the organizational level of SFPRG and served on the Board as treasurer for over ten years. Peter's involvement over the years has been important for the vitality of the organization, and he brings a strong connection from the past to the present.

Peter maintains a psychotherapy practice in San Francisco, where he focuses on work with individual adults and couples. He can be reached by phone at (415)752-8501 or by email at pschum47@gmail.com.

Thank you all for your continued support of SFPRG, Control Mastery theory and our clinic and training center with your renewal of membership.

While renewals have been slower than expected we are confident our members find their membership valuable, especially in light of the heartwarming honorary dinner described by Steve in his article. We want to maintain that close contact with others in light of the relational nature of CMT. Perhaps those relations are what best describes membership in SFPRG.

Our current energy is moving towards developing a closer relationship with our interns at the clinic. We see them as the future of SFPRG and are looking at how to be the most responsive to their needs for inclusion and how to pass to them the heartwarming nature of our membership history.

If you have ideas on how to accomplish this goal, please contact me. Let's think and look outside the box as we connect with the future membership of SFPRG.

I recently finished a very interesting book by George Atwood and Robert Stolorow, Faces In A Cloud, Intersubjectivity in Personality Theory, Rowan & Littlefield, New York, 2004, that was recommended to me by Peter Schumacher. The book is divided into three parts. The first develops the thesis that psychological theories cannot be objective since "the observer is the observed". The authors argue that all theories of personality are based on images of the human condition that are "subjective and pretheoretical in origin; rather than being results of impartial reflection upon empirical facts accessible to everyone, they are bound up with the theorist's personal reality and precede his intellectual engagement with the problem of human nature" (p. 5).

The second part of the book is actually four chapters reviewing the theories, histories, and psychological analyses of four theorists, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, and Otto Rank. These chapters dissect the theories of each thinker, explaining the limitations of their ideas based on a psychological analysis of their personal histories.

The last chapter reviews the principles of Intersubjectivity as a guard against and a correction for the excesses of metapsychology, specifically the metapsychology of Freudian drive theory.

The book opens with a wonderful quote by Henry Murray from Explorations in Personality from which the title of the book derives:

"man - the object of concern - is like an ever-varying cloud and psychologists are like people seeing faces in it. One psychologist perceives the contours of a nose and lip Another psychologist is attracted to a lower segment, sees an ear, a nose, a chin Thus, for each perceiver every sector of the cloud has a different function, name and value - fixed by his initial bias of perception. To be the founder of a school indeed it is only necessary to see a face along another margin." Read On

Mark it on your calendar! SFPRG is hosting an exciting Art Show and Reception on Saturday, December 3 as a part of our Winter Fundraising effort! The event will be from 4-7 pm in our Presidio buildings, offering guests light bites and a wonderful wine tasting from Trefethen Family Vineyards.

Several SFPRG members and interns will be displaying their art, and some pieces will be available for purchase! The live auction of one of Joe Weiss' seminal paintings will begin at 6 pm. We can't wait to see you there!

Cost: suggested donation of $20 for adults, $10 for kids, and SFPRG members are FREE!

Click the link below for more info!

Zen Practice and Psycho­therapy: Resonant Paths

Green Gulch Farm

Sat, Nov 19, 9am-4:30pm

co-led by Dr. George Silberschatz and Steve Weintraub

Suzuki Roshi said that the important thing in Zen practice is to have a "smooth, free-thinking way of observation," an unhindered approach to experience that is both flexible and stable. Similarly, psychotherapists of varying approaches emphasize the usefulness of lessening "neurotic distortions" and "pathogenic beliefs" to better meet our life most freely and fully. We'll discuss and explore the root resonances between these two disciplines, how they differ, and how they can be complementary.

For more information and registration, click here the link below:

CE credits available (click link below)

George Silberschatz, Ph.D., is a Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. His book on psychotherapy, Transformative Relationships, was published in January 2005.

Steve Weintraub was ordained as a Zen priest in 1973. Steve has an MFT license, and a private psychotherapy practice in San Francisco and Mill Valley.

There are 2 openings in my psychotherapy consultation group, which meets on Wednesdays from 12:30 to 1:30 at my office on Sacramento Street. The focus is on case formulation -- identifying the patient's adaptive goals, pathogenic beliefs, traumas, and tests -- and how to use the formulation to better help the patient. The fee is $55.

Please call or email me if you have questions: 415 567-3669 George.Silberschatz@UCSF.EDU

Beautiful bright, very quiet, lovely furnished office, in a psychotherapy building. Available full or part time and may be shared by several therapists.

Excellent parking and public transportation. Three buses stop within one block. Convenient restaurants and shopping nearby.

The building has front door security lock and the office shares a waiting room and bathroom. The office has double doors, sound insulation, a signal light in the waiting room announces the arrival of an appointment. Contact Irwin Gootnick, M.D. (415)221-5204 or igootnick@aol.com 4333 california st. (google map) (yahoo map)

There is often a kind of obligatory quality to a fundraising event and several people told me that they originally agreed to come to the dinner because they thought they should. But they went on to say they were surprised how touched they were by the experience of seeing old friends who they hadn't expected to see, people they had sat across from at case conferences, or shared stories of supervision with Suzanne, Irwin, Joe, or Hal.

There is a depth of quality and a depth of experience that members of our group have had that makes the connection with SFPRG so important and makes experiences such as the Honorary Dinner so meaningful. We are pleased that we have the opportunity to recognize so many of our group who have made substantial contributions that we plan to do this again next year with new honorees.

By the way, in addition to honoring Suzanne and Irwin and offering a very enjoyable social event for all who attended, the dinner also netted the research group over $2500. (Note: If you attended the dinner we would love to hear your feedback. Email sfprg@sfprg.org with your comments, what you enjoyed, how to improve next year's honoree dinner, and any other thoughts you have about the event.)

We have scheduled another fundraising event, the SFPRG Art Party, for Saturday, December 3, 2011. Artists are currently submitting their art for review. We are asking the artists to contribute money for the honor of being displayed and we are asking for a small donation at the door for art lovers. SFPRG members are free. We are also taking a percentage of any art that is sold as a donation and we are auctioning one of Joe Weiss' paintings given by the Weiss family to raise funds for the group. It should be another enjoyable social event for lovers of art or SFPRG. Come, tell your friends, and enjoy the art over a glass of wine.

See you next month.

Steve Foreman

I have small quibbles with some assertions of the authors. For example, they contrast personality theory to the harder sciences of physics and biology and claim that personality theory can never attain the objective standards of these other sciences. My disagreement is that there are no absolute objective standards in the other sciences. The same problems of subjectivity and bias bedevil all the sciences, not just personality theory. Their argument that the rest of the sciences accept or reject a theory based "on exclusively rational terms governed by a dispassionate evaluation of the system's logical coherence and consistency with empirical reality" was debunked by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It doesn't weaken Atwood and Stolorow's critique of personality theory to note that the problem of subjectivity and bias is endemic to all of science.

Their middle section, analyzing and critiquing the theories of Freud, Jung, Reich, and Rank in light of each's own psychohistory is very interesting, insightful, and even amusing. Again, my complaints about the analysis are minor. For example, they criticize Freud's metapsychology based on their presumption that Freud harbored an ambivalent relationship with his own mother, but they use a very Freudian psychological analysis to conclude that Freud was actually repressing great rage toward his mother.

They report how Freud reported unambivalent idealizing descriptions of his mother and later his wife, Martha. They described a childhood dream that Freud reported during which he awoke in anxiety, worrying about his mother, and needed to wake his parents to be reassured she was not dead. Atwood and Stolorow conclude, "This childhood dream contains, we believe, a vivid and almost undisguised expression of Freud's hostile feelings toward his mother." They go on to quote Freud's own theory of dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) where he distinguishes two types of dreams about the death of a person of whom the dreamer is fond. One class is where the dreamer is emotionally unaffected by the death and those dreams may have various meanings. The other class, in which the dreamer is painfully affected by the dream, quoting Freud, "The meaning of such dreams is a wish that the person in question may die." They go on to reason that "Freud excluded hostile feelings from his recollections of his relationship with his mother, which remained in his memory exclusively affectionate and erotic."

In their last chapter, "Subjectivity of Theory to Theory of Intersubjectivity", the authors begin with a comprehensive critique of Freudian drive theory. They plead that psychotherapeutic technique should move away from interpretation of metapsychologic "truths" (that the authors consider false, misguided, and based on subjective bias and error on the part of the personality theorist). They ask us to direct our attention to "the mutual interplay between subjective worlds of patient and analyst, or of child and caregiver, that constitutes the proper domain of psychoanalytic inquiry." The authors sketch out an alternative psychological theory, highly influenced by Kohut and attachment theory, that parental failures of attunement lead to the child's failure to regulate affects and to dissociation in order to maintain the "needed tie" to the parent.

Similarly to my comments about David Wallin's book, I believe Atwood and Stolorow's approach sorely lacks Weiss' concept that patients have a plan and actively engage the therapist to test their pathogenic beliefs. The authors focus on the child's attempts to maintain a tie to dysfunctional parents but miss that children protect dysfunctional parents at their own personal expense. The role of childhood empathy and altruism is not given adequate attention in their model as exemplified by their formulation that Freud worried about his mother because he was angry with her (a very Freudian drive based formulation) rather than because he saw her as fragile.

Their repetitive formulation that parental empathic failure leads to the child's failure to regulate affects is an important step beyond drive theory, but does not capture the other forms of psychopathology resulting from guilt and inhibition because of excessive worry about parents and siblings. Ruptures in the therapeutic relationship are consistently understood by the authors to be results of the therapist's empathic failure. They do not have the concept of the patient turning passive into active, which in the view of CMT, accounts for a large percentage of what appears to be negative therapeutic interactions, particularly with more disturbed patients.

Intersubjectivity is an important thoughtful argument against the arrogance and "experience-far" quality of drive theory interpretations. My sense is that the authors' metapsychological assumptions about empathic failure leading to affect dysregulation and dissociation would be favorably enhanced by an appreciation of the roles of childhood altruism, empathy, loyalty, and guilt that Control Mastery Theory emphasizes in addition to those of loss, separation, and empathic failure.