Dear Colleagues,

First of all, congratulations to Jodi and John Engstrom on the birth or their daughter, and welcome to Emily, our newest member of the SFPRG community.

Next week, I will be having lunch with Hal Sampson, one of our most established members in our SFPRG community. We will be discussing the planned honorary dinner this year in September where Hal will be one of our honorees. Last year's honorary dinner was very meaningful to those who attended to honor Suzanne Gassner and Irwin Gootnick. We don't have a concrete date yet but we are hoping to find a restaurant in the East Bay for either September 8 or 15, 2012. Please loosely save both dates on your calendars and we will let you know next month.

Suzanne Gassner mentioned that she did a full audio-taped interview of Hal several years ago for the Psychoanalytic Institute. We will try to transform that interview into a digital format that will be available for viewing at the honorary dinner and eventually will be available on our website.

Two other dates to save are June 2 and October 27, 2012. On June 2, SFPRG will offer a special conference on treatment outcome, featuring Louis Breger, a renowned psychoanalyst, founder of the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and author of several books. His most recent book, Psychotherapy: Lives Intersecting, describes the elements of therapy that were important to outcome in his patients' own words in their therapies with Louis over many years. His work will be presented along with the important research of George Silberschatz who has shown that Pro-plan interventions predict outcome in over 40 brief therapies. Suzanne Gassner will be the discussant. Read On

As the 2011-2012 training year is coming to a close we are so pleased we are able to offer such a rich diverse training program to our interns. We want to thank all of you who have participated in the past as well as this year's fabulous teachers.

We are having our annual thank you party on May 16 to toast you and express our most sincere appreciation. Please come even if you had the year off! We love to see you. If you haven't supervised or taught in awhile please consider joining us even if only for one hour- the interns soak up your wisdom!

Our supervisory staff includes:

Stan Steinberg, MD

Steve Foreman, MD

Kathryn Pryor, PhD

David Auld, PhD

Marcia Herman, LCSW

Joe Cristofalo, LMFT

Carol Drucker, PhD

Paul Ransohoff, DMH

Claire Arbor, MSW

Molly Sullivan, PhD

Andy Sweet, PhD

Marshall Bush, PhD

John Gibbins, PhD

Steve Kusch, PhD

Jane Weisbin, PsyD

John Curtis, PhD

Susan Landes, PsyD, LMFT

Barbara Sapienza, PhD.

Melanie Clark, LMFT

Susan Badger, LMFT

Norman Sohn, PhD, LCSW

Peter Schumacher, LMFT

Jamie Edmund, PhD

Michael Lowenstein, MD

Jessica Broitman, PhD

Bill Meehan, PhD

Merrie Jaffe, LCSW

Our interns participated in at least one of the following Case Conference:

Peter Schumacher (Mondays 10:30-12),

Steve Foreman (Wednesdays 2:30- 4)

Michael Lowenstein (Fridays in Berkeley 9:30-11)

Our interns also participated in Research with John Curtis and George Silberschatz on Fridays from 1-2pm and Marshall Bush on Fridays 2-3. Read On

Hello from SFPRG Membership Committee! We are busy preparing for our Membership Drive which begins on June 1st this year. We look forward to welcoming you all back to a dynamic and forward looking group.

If you want to be ahead of the crowd, click the link below and renew/become a member today. We thank you in advance for you support and dedication to SFPRG and Control Mastery Theory!

If you are interested in becoming a member, please contact me at kathiedunnmft@comcast.net if you have questions about how membership will be of value to you, your clinical practice and other colleagues.

Also, the Membership Committee is eager for feedback from members, newsletter subscribers and interested people on how you value SFPRG. This newsletter heads out to you all and we have yet to find a reliable method to bring messages in from you all.

If you have thought about becoming more closely connected please join our Membership Committee. We can use your insight and brain muscles!

Joe Cristofalo has been a part of SFPRG since the mid 1980s when a friend introduced him to Control Mastery theory via Joe Weiss's Thursday case conferences. As a clinician only two years post licensing he was immediately attracted by the spirit of inquiry and the openness and availability of the conferences. And, it was free! He was also impressed by how bright and committed the participants were. Joe was struck by the theory's systematic way of formulating cases, formulations that not only make a lot of sense, but are also very orienting for the therapist.

As a person who was and is interested in analytic therapy, he felt that control mastery theory really humanized the analytic work for him, especially with its assumption of an intrinsic striving for health. Joe states that the theory has "formed the backbone" for his clinical work over the ensuing years, and finds it compatible with other psychodynamic theories, and is applicable in all of the modalities in which he works, which include individual, couples and group therapy.

After attending the case conferences for about six months, he felt the need for something more intimate and helped organize a consultation group led by Marshall Bush which met regularly for about six years. These ongoing consultation sessions helped deepen his understanding of the theory and strengthened his clinical work. Like many other control mastery therapists, Joe sees the theory as a relational one, in which the interactions between the therapist and client are paramount to the treatment process.

Over the years Joe has written papers (see controlmastery.org), presented at Control Mastery workshops, supervised and trained clinic interns, and this year for the first time presented at the March Workshop, which he found to be a stimulating and rewarding experience. His clinic teaching has focused on the treatment of chemical dependency, one of his areas of expertise and a major focus of his clinical practice. He is interested in the application of control mastery theory in working with parents of addicted teens.

Along with his involvement with SFPRG, Joe has also taught and presented papers to other bay area organizations, such as the Psychotherapy Institute in Berkeley and the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. Joe Cristofalo is an MFT with practices in Oakland and Lafayette. He can be reached at (510) 654-2288.

We have an upcoming day-long conference on psychotherapy outcome (click the link below for brochure details). This conference was inspired by the recent publication of Louis Breger's book in which he interviewed patients who had completed therapy and asked them to describe what was helpful and what wasn't. The conference also includes presentation of a process-outcome study that my colleagues and I recently completed. Please feel free to forward this to your colleagues, friends, and students who might be interested. Many thanks. We look forward to seeing you there! George Silberschatz

Saturday, June 2, 2012 from 9:00am to 4:30pm

JCC, 3200 California Street, San Francisco

More infor: 415.561.6771 or email: rob@sfprg.org Register online: at http://www.sfprg.org

Note: Thank you to those who responded to our Spring Fundraising Drive! Our membership drive will get underway in June, and we appreciate these additional funds that help keep things running. As the fundraising email stated, membership dues contribute only a fraction of our operational costs. We are still short of our goal; if you would like to make a contribution during this Spring Drive, please click Donate on our website or click the link below. Thank you! SFPRG does amazing work only having one full-time paid staff person. Our members and colleagues volunteer to teach, run committees, do research, supervise interns, fundraise, write for the newsletter, and sit on the Board of Directors and guide our organization.

Teaching and supervising are rewarding and it is enjoyable to speak to a roomful of eager trainees or have exchanges with colleagues at a case conference.

Attending to the running the operations of this organization is not as exciting. Most of our volunteers with SFPRG spend an hour a week supervising cases with an intern and others spend 2 or 3 hours a month in a committee or board meeting and working on organizational projects.

Yet, we cannot have a training center, research center or case supervision without effective an management structure, finances and a robust organization.

Those volunteers on committees, projects and the board make, monitor and approve our budget. Money needs to find its way into the bank account; bills have to be paid. Someone has to plan the events, get the word out, register people and staff the event. Someone has to schedule the volunteer teachers and supervisors. Someone has to write fundraising appeals. Someone has to send out the monthly newsletter. Let these someones be you!

All this is to say, we welcome people who want to get involved with running SFPRG. All of our committees could use a few more people to help plan, help publicize and help coordinate. Our board could use a few more folks to help run things. We have a working board - not just a board that fundraises (although that is important too!) - each board member serves on a committee or two. We have been looking toward the future - what we can do to ensure that knowledge of Control Mastery Theory expands and continues to be helpful to clinicians, interns and patients.

Board and committee meetings are usually on Fridays at noon in our offices in the Presidio. (The Board meets the 3rd Friday of the month at 11:30. Other committees to consider joining include the Education Committee, Membership Committee, Research Committee and Fundraising Committee.) Some folks occasionally telecommute to meetings as an alternative too.

Our mission statement reads: To improve the practice of psychotherapy through the further development of Control Mastery Theory by educating mental health professionals, conducting research on psychotherapy, and providing mental health services to the community.

We want to hear from you - our stakeholders and our constituents - on how you think we are doing in fulfilling our mission. We are always open to hearing new ideas and we especially welcome those with the energy and time to contribute to furthering our mission.

Email Steve Foreman, Board President, at Sfskydive@aol.com or contact Rob in the office: sfprg@sfprg.org to get involved!

NORTH BERKELEY: Beautiful, very large office in a converted Victorian house in North Berkeley (Hopkins Street area) available for a full time rental, beginning May l5, 20l2, or beginning June 1. The office has a bay window and a full wall of built in floor to ceiling wood bookcases. Two other psychotherapy offices share the suite.

Street parking is easily accessible. Close to bus lines and walking distance from North Berkeley BART. Wireless Internet available. Please contact Suzanne Gassner at smgassner@aol.com, and tell me about your practice and any other information that I should know in order to determine whether what our building offers and your office needs are likely to make a good fit. I will be unable to reply to you until April 28th or thereafter, but I will respond to your inquiry as soon as I can.

San Francisco, 4333 California St.: 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 bus 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

On October 27, SFPRG will be offering a conference called "A Dialogue Between Attachment Theory and Control Mastery Theory", featuring David Wallin and Steve Foreman. The conference will grapple with how psychotherapy works through the lens of both Attachment Theory and CMT. David Wallin, who wrote the excellent book, Attachment in Psychotherapy, will discuss his ideas of how psychotherapy works from the perspective of Attachment Theory and Intersubjectivity. I will present Control Mastery Theory in terms of its common assumptions with Attachment Theory, but emphasizing CMT's novel contributions of the patient's plan, how patients test the therapist in order to get better, and the role of compliances and pathological identifications in pathology and therapy. Both presenters will be asked to present their own cases and try to explain the therapeutic process in terms of both Attachment and Control Mastery Theories.

The education committee is making a concerted effort to expand our presentations of Control Mastery Theory by reaching out to a larger audience and by inviting renowned co-presenters. We are renting larger venues and at times investing in larger speaker fees. If this year's conferences are successful and we reach large enough audiences, we will be able to bring in other well-known luminaries in the future. We are thinking of people such as Diana Fosha, who developed AEDP (Accelerated Experiential-Dynamic Psychotherapy) or Anthony Bateman, the London based author with Peter Fonagy of many books on Mentalization Therapy.

We believe that Control Mastery Theory shares many exciting virtues with these cutting edge ideas in psychotherapy and perhaps offers something unique that none of the other models offer. We need support from our members to make these conferences a success so we can offer more of them. Please come to these conferences if you can.

In addition to these conferences, we have our usual array of excellent educational programs. Don't miss Denny Zeitlin's day-long workshop on Couple Therapy in November. Our weekly case conferences and research meetings are in full swing.

We need people to help us on our committees. Welcome to former intern, Jamine, our latest member of the Education Committee. We need more people to help on our Education, Membership, Fundraising, Finance, Research, and Clinic committees. The organization does great work teaching the conferences and weekly classes, putting on the yearly International Conference, running the Clinic, and supervising and teaching the interns. But we can't have any program at all if we don't have people thinking, talking, planning, and organizing the programs. If you love Control Mastery Theory, the Research Group, or the Clinic, please get involved. We always need teachers, speakers, and supervisors. We need board members and committee members. We would love your input.

See you next month.

Steve Foreman

The didactic and case conferences they had last year included:

Alan Rappaport worked for 4 weeks introducing control mastery theory to our newest interns as well as offering a 10 week class listening to taped therapy sessions. Larry Hedrick taught them about medications for several weeks; Michael Bader spoke on Male sexuality; Ginger Rhodes covered the important topic of self care; Jack Maslow taught about groups. Jules Burstein covered ethics and the law.

Terry Meyers reviewed testing with Jessica following up on Learning Disabilities; Janice Cummings on trauma; Karen Godfredsen- Parent/child interviewing; Ginger returned for several weeks of trauma treatment; Merri Jaffee covered play therapy; Jay Seiff-Heron covered EFT; Heather Cleaque spoke about Collaboration and Safety; Jane Rubin- taught 4 weeks in case conference; Heidi Minick introduced us to Guided Imagery; Pam Balls-Organista - Health related issues with immigrant populations; Karly Kaplan on Body image.; Mollie Sullivan in a 8 week case conference on working with suicidal patients.

Coming up in the next 2 months we will have Jaime Nisenbaum talking to us about treating men; Camerin and Alyssa on eating disorders.; Barbara Sapienza will spend four weeks working her magic; Marcia Herman will help us look at the use of humor in therapy; Susan Badger will lead a case conference on working with adolescence; Jane Weisbin will talk about Unconscious Leveling.

Every year we have our past interns come and talk to our current interns about setting up their lives after training. We invite all the old interns to return to share their wisdom on Private Practices May 30. Please join us that day from 11-12.

What an amazing year!!!!! We couldn't have done it without you!!!! Thank you all.

Carol Drucker, Ph.D.

Jessica Broitman, Ph.D.