It is my pleasure to welcome all our members and candidates to the new CPPNJ 2014-2015 academic year. I hope that all have had restful summer breaks, time away from work to pursue other passions and pleasures, and feel ready to take up the challenges of the coming year.

I also want to offer my welcome to the larger community of practitioners who receive this monthly newsletter, many of whom have participated in our workshops, conferences, and classes over the years. I hope you will read on, as there are some changes coming to CPPNJ that may be of interest to you.

Very soon after you receive this, our Annual CPPNJ Fall Brunch will take place, on Sunday September 21^st, and I want to remind all our members, associates and candidates how important it is to have you all there. This is the one opportunity we have each year to get together as a community, and exchange thoughts and ideas about what's going on at CPPNJ, what new projects we are developing, and to entertain proposals for future projects and future directions. It is also a chance for faculty and candidates to meet and socialize in a more casual context. And finally, it is an opportunity for those who are not regularly involved in our committees to offer feedback, and share thoughts and feelings about the direction of the institute and its priorities. This exchange of ideas and feedback is essential to the health of our organization and reflects our commitment to hearing from all perspectives within our community. CPPNJ, like many regional psychoanalytic training institutes, faces numerous challenges, which we can only successfully meet with the support of our full membership, with all its diverse talent, collective knowledge and wisdom.

Our center is continuing to grow each year. We have continued to add faculty both through graduating successful candidates and by attracting new members of the wider psychoanalytic community in New Jersey. Our Couples Therapy Training Program has continued to evolve into what I now feel very safe in describing as the premier training program of its kind in the state. Our Supervision Training Program continues to be sought after by our own members and this year, for the first time, will be open to the wider public of licensed clinical practitioners. Our Psychotherapy Center is continuing to successfully provide low-cost psychotherapy to those around the state who do not have insurance and are in need of treatment. And our three regional interest groups (Bergen region; Essex/Union/Morris region; and Central Jersey region) have gained quite a bit of momentum in the past year, reaching out geographically to our members and others from across the entire state.

Our major conferences continue to be very well-attended, and I think is also safe to say that these programs, along with the workshops, regional forums, and faculty forums we offer throughout the year are serving as a central focus of clinical training and continuing education to the wider network of practicing psychotherapists throughout New Jersey. Our classes and our programs together are being accredited for literally thousands of hours annually of Continuing Education Credits. And, in that context, CPPNJ has established a new Division of Continuing Education to help organize and coordinate continuing education opportunities available both to members and non-members, and to provide a structure within which we can offer new kinds of training and programming to a wider audience.

We are accomplishing all of this on a relatively tiny budget. We are able to do so only because of the devotion and hard work of our members, who contribute countless unpaid hours to prepare classes, teach, attend meetings, plan events, and share in social occasions. We have an amazing community of skilled and dedicated practitioners who share so much of themselves, offering reduced-cost supervision and psychotherapy to our candidates and other practitioners.

In a world in which the information age and consumer capitalism are intersecting in ways that no one could have imagined fifteen or twenty years ago, in which private business and corporate models are being applied to all sorts of human services, such as in education, corrections, so-called "behavioral health," and other public sector services, we represent a different kind of organization. The way we function may seem old-fashioned in some ways, but I am convinced it is much closer to what people actually want and need: connections to other people who are attentive, caring, and involved personally and passionately in their work. We support a model of human interaction that is fast becoming obsolete in our hurried and relentless culture, one that is based on human and personal qualities, face-to-face contact, dedication and love. We do so not only in the clinical work we support through our training and programs, but also through our own personal connections and the network our institute represents.

When it comes to marketing and recruiting, we obviously cannot compete with the vast resources of large corporations, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, major universities, and so on. We do not have the kind of support and established resources enjoyed by some of the "older" psychoanalytic institutes in the major cities. So our success will depend on a different approach, something much more like community organizing than corporate marketing.  We have ourselves, the personal relationships we all maintain with our patients, supervisees, students, and colleagues. Each one of us is the center of a social network of family members, friends, colleagues, and associates, and as I have suggested in the past, it is this large collection of intersecting and overlapping networks from which we will most likely recruit our future candidates and program participants. And each of them will bring with them their own social networks, with which we will then have contact, and so on. I believe this is where our future lies.

It may be that the idea of formal psychoanalytic training has lost some of the appeal it once had. It seems certainly to be the case that it is more difficult now than it was thirty years ago to succeed as a psychoanalytically-oriented practitioner. But there is also the reality that clinical work is as challenging as it ever was, there are no simple solutions to the complex situations we humans all face. I believe our work meets needs that are present as much as ever before. It doesn't take long for a new psychotherapist to realize how little they know and how much there is much to be learned. And, many such new clinicians also quickly recognize that personal growth and development progresses as it always has, through mentorships, through long-term committed connections, through quality training, and with the support of an outstanding professional community.  With your help and support, I believe that CPPNJ will be around for a long time to help meet the needs of our own community and the larger community we also serve.

Supervision is one of the three components we often think of as making up a psychoanalytic education.  The other two components are course work and personal analysis.  I have always been drawn to the supervisory process, I believe, because it allows me to bridge two things I greatly enjoy:  teaching and doing therapy.  When I was asked to prepare a talk to the faculty on the supervisory process I eagerly accepted as I saw it as an opportunity to consolidate how my thinking about supervision has evolved over the years.  My talk on March 15, 2015 will be an attempt to highlight some of the more important issues I believe need to be addressed in a supervisory relationship.  I'll give you a hint of some of what I'm thinking but it all won't be completed until talk time!  Here is an outline of some of the more important issues I'll be covering.

Firstly, I am interested in trying to articulate what the exact qualities and traits are we are supervising for in the first place.  As a supervisor, do I simply attempt to create a clone of myself doing the work, or are there certain skills and inner resources I should be trying to nurture?  Oftentimes this question becomes bogged down in broader theoretical questions having to do with the essence of therapeutic action and what an analyst must do in order to contribute to a good outcome.  I believe I have found a way around that dilemma and can identify what qualities and traits are central to doing the work, independent of one's theoretical bent.

My second area of interest derives from thinking about the implications of the fact that the only way we can ever know an "other" is as we create her within ourselves.  We can never truly know what it is like to be another person.  We are always experiencing each other through our own lenses, narratives, fears, and longings.  Well then, the question for me is how does this translate into how we actually do psychotherapy and how is that managed in a supervisory relationship.  In other words, what I will be exploring in my talk is who is the primary subject of focus in supervision?  Is it the patient and her dynamics that need to be understood, or does it have more to do with the therapist's dynamics and how she has "taken in" the patient?  I'll try to be careful not to get too bogged down into viewing these options as binary.

Finally, and as a corollary I will try to explore the relationship between therapy and supervision.  Are they different entities? variations on a theme? blendable?

I am looking forward to sharing these ideas and most especially, hearing from others regarding their thinking on these matters as well.

While there are many significant differences between the cultural contexts of Eastern & Western philosophy, the integration is rich with depths of understanding how personality is formed. Five Element Theory describes healthy, balanced development in contrast to unhealthy and unbalanced development.  One theoretical model that has been helpful is from Leon Hammer, MD. Dr.  Hammer is a psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and practitioner of Chinese medicine, including acupuncture.  In his book Dragon Rises, Red Bird Flies: Psychology & Chinese Medicine (2005)  he writes extensively about "natural functions of the energetic phases of Daoist (Taoist) Chinese medicine, and the parallel of ontological development of the human psyche." The energetic phases involved in development refer to Five Element Theory, the basis of all Chinese medicine, describe many ways to harmonize with nature and natural cylces.

In the tradition of clinical qi gong, it is believed that about 85% of physical illnesses are a result of emotional imbalance.  This is consistent with some reports from Western researchers that chronic emotional dyregulation leads to disease. Clinical qi gong correlates various organ energy systems with different emotions.  So for example,  excessive sadness is damaging to the lungs and associated energy functioning, while long standing dyregulated feelings of anger is thought to be damaging to the liver and its associated energetic system.  Having these types of awareness can sometimes help make sense of patients' psychosomatic problems, and help them become more aware of the emotions that are being kept out of awareness.

There are various ways to apply clinical qi gong to work with psychotherapy patients.  Partially this depends on the comfort levels of the patient and therapist.  Finding ways to address transference and resistance issues, while introducing alternative methods, is a creative process that requires good clinical judgment and intuition.   Many hospitals are developing and expanding their Integrative Medical Departments as a response to public interest.  As a psychologist and psychoanalyst, it's been an interesting process to learn and incorporate another modality to help patients alleviate emotional suffering, and to support personal growth and awareness.

Thank you Debbie for all your hard work over the past year. Thank you Mirel for stepping up to be the coordinator and to Alexandra and Sara for joining the screeners. Many thanks to our long term screeners: Sharon McCombie, Ann Rybowski, Madine DeSantis, and Wendy Wright.

We also appreciate all the candidates and faculty who make the PC a success, from taking cases to volunteering to supervise. We provide a wonderful resource for the community and assist CPPNJ by providing cases for candidates and helping the institute financially. We look forward to another productive year in the PC.

Any candidates or faculty interested in being part of the PC, please contact Susan Stein, director at susandstein@verizon.net  or 907-273-2822 or Mirel Goldstein, coordinator  at mirelgoldstein@gmail.com or 303-204-7039.

Steven Kuchuck, LCSW, author of Clinical Implications of a Psychoanalyst's Life Experience: When the Personal Becomes Professional (2013) also comments.  "We as analysts can be more creative in engaging our patients by our own willingness to expand our play in the cultural field we inhabit at this time in our history."

If you would like to contribute, please watch for more information in the October newsletter.