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DIRECTORS' COLUMN
By Seth Warren, PhD
 The end of summer always makes me aware of time passing, change in the weather, feeling-memories of the new school year starting up, the end of vacations, and the approaching holidays. This year I had another reminder of the passage of time, when I learned of the death of Al Shire, the founding director of IPPNJ. Al was my first clinical supervisor after I finished graduate school, as I was just beginning to see patients in private practice. That was around 25 years ago, though it doesn't feel nearly that long. I worked with Al for a few years, and got to see him fairly often as I had an office in the same building he worked in, until about six or seven years ago.
I wanted to use this column to talk a bit about Al's contribution to our institute from my perspective, even though I did not have any contact with Al in the context of his directorship at IPPNJ. I became a member of IPPNJ much more recently, around 12 years ago, and by then Al was long gone from his role as director. So, there are others who can speak with more experience and authority about Al's impact on IPPNJ, especially in its early years, and I hope some will take the initiative to do so, and help to sustain our collective memory of the origins and early development of our institute.
I felt I got to know Al pretty well over the years, and it is very clear to me, as the current director of the institute he helped to found, that he had a great impact both on a personal level and also on the organization as a whole.
One of the things that most struck and impressed me about Al was his great openness, intellectual interest, and curiosity. He was trained as a psychoanalyst in the 1960's, long before the opening up of American psychoanalysis to British object relations theories, and before the development of Kohut's Self Psychology or the relational movement, and yet, by the time I met him in 1989 he was teaching Klein and Winnicott, and was interested in all new developments in psychoanalysis. There was always another new book beside his chair, something cutting edge and current, or an older classic text he was revisiting.
Some of you may recall that Al became very interested in hypnosis relatively late in his career and began integrating it into his clinical  work; I think by then he was well into his seventies. I recall being so impressed and appreciative that after a lifetime of clinical work he could develop a whole new area of interest and expertise at that stage in his life. The enthusiasm he expressed about the results he felt he could get using these new techniques with certain patients conveyed so much about his continued aliveness, openness, and curiosity.
In 1993 when I started teaching a course at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology that Al had taught since the founding of GSAPP for some 19 consecutive years ("The psychoanalytic theory of personality," otherwise known then as "Al Shire's class") I got a copy of his syllabus to help me get started, and found a wonderfully diverse and thorough overview of theories ranging from classical Freud, through Ego psychology, Melanie Klein and object relations theories, Self psychology, and contemporary Freudians. While I found things to add over the years, there is no doubt in my mind that Al's eclectic framework and intellectual openness helped to shape my own approach to teaching (and learning).
Al and I shared another connection. Al completed his psychoanalytic training at the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at NYU, as I did some 30 years later. This connection too, has been important for both my own personal development and in the development of IPPNJ. Bernie Kalinkowitz , the director of the Postdoc from its inception until his retirement some years after I began there, help to found the Postdoc in an academic setting on basic principles of inclusiveness, dialogue, and openness to the varying traditions in psychoanalysis. This pluralistic approach, which involved the inclusion of non-medical candidates as well as faculty from Freudian and interpersonal traditions, fostered the conditions that eventually led to the creation of the "Relational track," the core faculty of which contributed greatly to the evolution of relational psychoanalysis.
I don't know much about how Al experienced the Postdoc, but I would like to believe that he carried with him part of the spirit of that institution, and that he infused some of that spirit into IPPNJ as it formed and developed. I would like to imagine likewise that Al's intellectual interest and openness, along with his kindness and warmth, helped to set a tone and create an atmosphere that has continued until the present at what is now called CPPNJ. I believe that we are successors to Al's open and generous spirit; that it is present in our very diverse and eclectic faculty, representing different psychoanalytic traditions, and in our broadly-construed training programs, which seek to reflect the diversity and vibrancy of our evolving field.
I would like to end on a more personal note. Those of you who knew Al knew that he laughed a lot. It was not at all that he did not take his work seriously; rather, he conveyed his enjoyment of the work, and a pleasure in the process - and after all, Freud viewed humor as one of humanity's great accomplishments. From Al I got very clearly the understanding that psychoanalytic work need not be a dreary and somber affair. I also learned from Al how useful humor could be, how one might be able to say something to a patient or supervisee with a warm and gentle laugh that could not be tolerated if said in a more serious key. I have sometimes thought of him as a "laughing Buddha," an idea that was reinforced by the lovely figurines and objects from India and China he kept in his office, collected during his travels there earlier in his life.
Al very often had a particular facial expression that many of you will recall: let 's call it a look of bemusement. To me it was a special kind of smile that conveyed a kind, non-judgmental, accepting, and yet perceptive and attentive attitude. I have seen that facial expression in others, and have come to associate it in my mind with true wisdom: knowledge that comes from openness to experience combined with a compassionate and loving outlook toward ones fellow humans. I believe this look of Al's captures and conveys the essence of a psychoanalytic spirit, and in this he offered a beautiful example that we can all aspire to.
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Cheryl Nifoussi and Al Shire celebrating his 72nd birthday at a Northern Region Brunch
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CPPNJ Welcome Back Brunch
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Time: 9:30am-1:30pm
Location: Maplewood Community Center, Maplewood, NJ
RSVP: By September 24, 2015
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A Home Within and
CPPNJ Sponsored Movie Night
September 18, 2015
By Debi Roelke, PhD
A Home Within is planning a gathering for Friday evening, September 18, 2015 from 6:00pm-9:30pm at the home of Debi Roelke in Morristown. We will honor our volunteers, bring friends and colleagues to learn more about A Home Within, and view and discuss a movie about attachment and identity issues.
Please rsvp to Debi at droelke5@gmail.com
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CPPNJ Cultural Forum II:
Impact of Immigration:
Trauma & Growth
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Significant psychological processes take place when an individual migrates to an unknown land with a different culture, language and lifestyle. The impact of multiple losses (loss of home, major attachment figures, family, community, culture and social networks) is a traumatic experience that can cause nostalgia and mourning, threatening a person's identity and sense of self. At the same time, migration can represent a new beginning with new opportunities.
The Great Migration was the movement of six million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest and West. They were in search of jobs and found them, due to the large industrial base that existed at the time. When industry began to fall off in the latter 20th century, African Americans suffered from poverty, crime and other trauma due to the deteriorating economic conditions. The movement of African Americans, especially the older generation, back to their communities in the South has resulted in a significant population shift. As therapists, we need to understand a patient's history and appreciate what their life experience has been in order to engage them in the therapeutic process.
Click HERE to register for this program
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Al Shire: A Remembrance
and Some History
By Nancy McWilliams, PhD
 Al Shire's death this past month was not unexpected, and yet it was a painful loss for many of us. As several people commented on the CPPNJ listserv, Al embodied the best of psychoanalytic values: courage, honesty, integrity, generosity, compassion, and devotion. At his funeral, whether it was family, friend, or colleague speaking, the word "kind" kept rising to the surface of the collective reminiscences.
There are many who can testify to Al's personal qualities, but it has occurred to me that there are not so many who witnessed close-up, and remember clearly, his organizational and leadership skills. As a former student of political science, I found Al's style as a leader both fascinating and enlightening. Because much of what he accomplished set the stage for CPPNJ's eventual culture, Al's achievements on behalf of psychoanalysis in New Jersey constitute an important part of our history that his death has inspired me to get into print.
Like his older colleague, Sam Kutash, Al set a tone that embodied the essence of the Freudian tradition with none of the rigid perversions that so many people came to believe defined "classical" analysis.
In a recent profile for CPPNJ, the term "renegade" was applied to Al, in recognition of Herbert Strean's having described him as such when our parent organization, IPPNJ, originally separated from the New York Center for Psychoanalytic Training. This is certainly how Dr. Strean viewed Al at the time. But a renegade is someone who finds his identity in opposition to the community, and Al's tilt was always toward preserving bonds. He was a forgiving person; he loved to work with couples to save their partnerships; he quickly saw things from multiple empathic perspectives; and he never fomented or participated in revolts, psychoanalytic or otherwise. He did have an independent spirit and a deep-dyed intellectual honesty, but that is a qualitatively different psychology from that of the rebel.
Al led a secession from NYCPT only reluctantly and with the full support of the board of what was then its New Jersey division. I was intimately involved in these events. The following is only my own recollection of what happened two and a half decades ago; I invite my colleagues from the era to corroborate and/or correct my memory.
At the time of the split in 1989, NYCPT's leaders insisted on framing IPPNJ's secession as a rebellion because they were oddly deaf to our actual, explicit reason for leaving: their ongoing violation of our financial agreement. When IPPNJ began, as a satellite of NYCPT, both parties agreed that NYCPT would do the administrative tasks, including collecting fees from candidates in both New York and New Jersey. NYCPT would keep two-thirds of the New Jersey money as payment for their administrative costs, returning one-third to us for use in developing a psychoanalytic infrastructure here.
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A Perfect Storm
By Maureen Gallagher, PhDDirector, NJCTTP
 Working with couples is terrifying for most therapists. It also provides a perspective on both partners that would not be available without seeing the couple in action. So much is present in stark relief when we see a person with their partner, often accompanied by a high emotional charge. The pace and volume of material revealed, particularly in a charged environment, can easily overwhelm even an experienced clinician when they start to see couples. It can be like jumping on a boat already in motion. So why would a clinician move from individual to couples work? Most couples' therapists highly value relationships, both as integral to the meaning of our lives as well as a source of our sense of well being-both for ourselves and our clients. Relationships reflect back who we are, ourselves at our best-and, not at our best. For therapists, it provides a window on aspects of our clients that may take years to ferret out when seen individually. Disavowed aspects of self, deeply held beliefs about self and other have little protection from our closest relationships. Our most significant relationships have the greatest ability to threaten us, activate our attachment fears, and spark reactivity, all of which contribute to the speed and volatility with which issues emerge in couples' therapy. If as a therapist you can slow things down enough to bring some awareness and order, you might be able to help partners see themselves and each other in a way that increases clarity of their conflict. Therapists have many tools and theories that aid them to help couples. In addition, we each have a way of viewing our work with couples, a compass that guides us through. For me, one such landmark is a moment, usually fairly early in treatment, that I think of as a perfect storm. Sometime after each partner shows you the characteristic, often rigidified, position they take in relation to one another in a conflict, they start to reveal the underlying wounds they carried prior to coming into the relationship. When each is willing to explore what they are protecting, an underlying wound is revealed around an unmet need, around which the couple has created a dance in their attempts to get close while protecting their injured selves and unmet needs from further harm. It's a painful but perfect moment where each partner's deeply injured self and unmet need is clear, as is the necessity of their protection from their partner, who has also been injured in their needs. There is a perfect impossibility of either's needs being seen or met by their particular partner, based on their respective wounds. In that moment, it feels like a tragedy. The pressure of unmet needs to find expression and reception, foiled by the even greater need to protect ourselves from further hurt, in direct opposition to the needs, wounds and protections of the other feels like an impossibly complex matrix of projections and projective identifications. The choice each has made in terms of a partner is clear: they were chosen to work through this particular issue. They were chosen because of their unique ability to NOT meet their partner's need. Instead, each brings the wound of the other into sharp relief in a way that no other partner could, holding the wound up over and over, often in protest and recrimination, protection meeting protection. The wounds fit together like a lock and key. Each is faced with a painful choice in the relationship: to move from their need for protection from the other to an awareness of their own unmet need. Many, many partners try the doomed strategy of avoidance in this scenario-blaming or insisting their partner changes. It's a strategy guaranteed to produce rigidity in their interactions, as they each insist the other must change, and guaranteed to produce stagnation in themselves. Many come to therapy to gain leverage with this strategy, in effect asking their therapist to help strengthen their position in showing their partner how and why they are wrong and need to change. Much, much harder is the decision to grasp the mirror with both hands and take a good, long look at the wounds they brought into the relationship with them. Terry* and Emma* are one such couple who struggled to see how their attachment wounds were being ignited in their relationship. Terry had a mother who loved to talk, but not to listen. His father had a deep need to pass on his strong, idiosyncratic views on life to his son. He emerged from this childhood with a deep need to be seen and heard for who he is, and an abhorrence of being told who he is. Being viewed in ways he did not experience himself felt annihilating. |
NJCTTP Going Forward
By Sandra Sinicropi, LCSW
Associate Director, NJCTTP
 The New Jersey Couples Therapy Training Program, which began training candidates in 2010, trains couples therapists to integrate various approaches to couples therapy theory and clinical practice. Couples therapy has evolved since the days when clinicians were trained in and relied upon a single approach such as Family Systems or Psychoanalytic Object RelationsTheory to explain and treat dysfunctional relationships. While these two approaches continue to inform our work with couples, advancements in the field have made couples work more powerful and the potential for healing ruptures between partners even greater.
Historically, many therapists practiced couples therapy without formal training. The idea was relatively simple: help the pair understand the other and themselves, and find new and more effective ways to negotiate the inevitable conflict inherent in intimate relationships. While this sounds simple, the process can easily backfire, leaving the couple feeling even more discouraged and hopeless about ever having a harmonious relationship with the one they love and in many cases have built a family and a life with.
What we have learned in recent decades is that how people form loving attachments exerts a profound influence on couple security. In many cases we see couples that have never experienced the feeling of trust and security. While psychoanalytic theory explains how relationships are structured dynamically, attachment theory explains how individuals may never have developed the capacity for feeling and expressing their needs while trusting that they will still be loved. Attachment theory helps us to understand when an individual has deficits in the ability to tolerate feelings that get activated by being dependent and vulnerable or conversely, having someone dependent and vulnerable with them. For some, many of the feelings that one would experience from being in love; excitement, desire, uncertainty and need, may turn quickly into feelings resembling fear and terror. Couples therapy has evolved to incorporate the necessary component of guiding couples to safely express and receive feelings in an experiential way that simultaneously builds capacity to trust and be trusted. As treatment progresses, the couple increases their ability to turn to each other and begin to heal some of the wounds inflicted by the relationship and if all is going well, heal wounds from past relationships. In my mind, this is essentially what healing is about in relationships and what couples therapy seeks to accomplish.
Faculty of NJCTTP bring a wide range of theory and practice to their teaching and supervision. We have and will continue to successfully train therapists in an integrative approach to couples therapy with our new leadership. We deeply appreciate the members of the board and CPPNJ community for the support this program has received and look forward to continuing its growth for many years to come.
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The Social Work Diaries: Reflections on my People-to-People Trip to Cuba
By Estelle Krumholz, LCSW
 This summer I participated in a Social Workers' People-to-People Group Program to learn about social work and healthcare in Cuba. Our days were packed visiting healthcare facilities and community centers and meeting with social workers and other health care providers and community workers. We visited mental health and community based clinics and educational and cultural centers, and met with doctors, psychologists, nurses and social workers, all of whom graciously shared their knowledge and experience. Also included was a day trip to Las Terrazas, a UNESCO-designated Bio Reserve and model rural community in the mountainous region outside of Havana. It is not possible to discuss all that we did and learned but I will attempt to highlight some of the activities and my impressions.
David Strug, PhD, Professor Emeritus of the Wurzweiler School of Social Work and in clinical practice, led our group of twenty-three, including a few spouses. David has led prior social work groups to Cuba and has published extensively on health care and social work in the country. We were fortunate to have him and our Cuban guide/ interpreter as leaders. We were a mixed group of private practitioners, agency and hospital social workers and educators.
Upon our arrival in Cuba we were taken for lunch to the home of renowned Cuban artist Jose Fuster, whose home served as his fanciful Gaudi-like studio and gallery, with colorfully designed walls and pictures, many of which were for sale. Fuster's was a combination private gallery and paladar, or privately owned (as opposed to government-owned) restaurant that are patronized primarily by tourists. The government allowed a small number of private businesses to start in the early 1990s but then stopped this policy. However, private businesses have been flourishing on the Island since the government introduced economic reforms in 2008 and it has issued close to 500,000 licenses to small entrepreneurs. (Strug, email communication). Artists, restaurateurs and others have found creative ways to be entrepreneurs with government approval. Most operate from home, as was the case with Fuster, but sometimes, if their owner is able to get the financing, they may be housed in elegant pre-Revolution mansions.
Click HERE to read the rest of this article
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INTRODUCING OUR TWO NEW FACULTY MEMBERS
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 Patricia Chimienti, LCSW
My love for psychoanalysis is now on par with my lifelong love of social work. And despite the differences, for me they work great in tandem. After graduating in 1995 with a MSW from New York University, and working primarily in residential settings with children and adolescents, I was eager to learn about psychoanalysis. I began at the New Jersey Institute for Training Psychoanalysis in 1999 and finally graduated in 2010. Since then I have been in private practice and love my work with a wide range of patients. I took some couples classes at CPPNJ and found them fascinating. This sparked my interest in becoming involved at CPPNJ.
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 R. Hope Eliasof, LCSW, LMFT
I am so pleased to be part of CPPNJ and its esteemed faculty and excellent student body.
I graduated with my MSW from Wurzweiler School of Social Work in 1983. I received my certification in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy from the Institute of Mental Health Education in 1988 and a certification in Supervision from NIP in 1993. I have been an outpatient psychotherapist in a full time practice for over 30 years. During that time, I also directed and facilitated a Parenting Center and consulted for Nursery Schools in Bergen County. My teaching career involved 16 years as an Adjunct Instructor in the MSW program at NYU Silver School of Social Work both in the areas of Human Behavior and Clinical Practice. In addition I have supervised clinicians both at an agency and privately. Over the past 10 years I have become passionate in my work as a Couples Therapist. I studied and continue to actively learn diverse theoretical approaches to working with couples. My work with couples created an awareness of a need for greater training in Sex Therapy, facilitating my training and becoming certified as a Sex Therapist. The field of Sex Therapy is often dominated by Cognitive Behavioral approaches and I am committed to incorporating more psychoanalytic understanding and interventions in my work in this area.
On a personal level I love dance, movement and film. Spending time with family and friends and nature fill my soul.
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CPPNJ WELCOMES NEW PSYCHOLOGY EXTERNS
CPPNJ is pleased to welcome four new psychology externs to our training program for the 2015-2016 academic year. They are all advanced graduate students in doctoral psychology programs at Rutgers. They complete externship placements at different mental health agencies or training programs as part of their graduate work. At CPPNJ, the externs will take didactic courses, participate in a case conference and receive individual supervision; many of them hope to apply their year with us to continued psychoanalytic training once they graduate. We are looking forward to another successful year in running this program.
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Adam Herbert
 Adam is a fourth year Clinical Psy.D. student at the Graduate School of Professional Psychology (GSAPP). His clinical experiences include working as an evaluator on a depression prevention research project, treating patients through the Rutgers Psychological Clinic, working as a counselor with middle school and high school students in Highland Park, NJ, conducting short-term relational therapy at Fordham University's Counseling & Psychological Services in Manhattan, and currently working as a therapist at JFK Medical Center's Center for Behavioral Health in Edison, NJ. Adam is interested in psychoanalytic/psychodynamic theory and practice, identity development, personality disorders, depression, and the psychology of group conflict. He has been been married for two years and has a 9 month old son who keeps him busy. His other interests include music, music history, and basketball.
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John Machalaba
 John is a fourth year Clinical Psy.D. student at GSAPP. His academic interests include the application of existential philosophy to psychoanalytic theory, intersubjectivity, and group therapy. In addition to his externship at CPPNJ, he is also an extern at Damon House, an in-patient treatment facility for drug addiction. Previously, John has worked in both Kean and Drew University's counseling centers, as well as in a middle school treating at-risk adolescents. In his leisure time, John enjoys playing and teaching guitar, biking, and cooking. He is looking forward to the year's experience and meeting the CPPNJ community.
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Cassia Mosdell
 Cassia is a doctoral student in the School Psychology program at the GSAPP. She has worked for over ten years in the field of early intervention and infant mental health doing mental health consultation in early childhood programs and psychoanalytically-informed dyadic work with parents and infants. Most recently she has worked with mothers who are in recovery for heroin addiction and their babies and will spend an additional year with these women to write her dissertation on the parent-child relationship in the context of race, gender and class-based oppression. Cassia is interested in the application of psychoanalysis to social justice and to liberation psychologies as well as in community and school-based applications of psychoanalytic principles. In her free time, Cassia enjoys reading, hiking, and building legos with her wonderful 8 year old son Finn. She is very honored and excited to join CPPNJ as an extern this year!
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Alison Tripptree
 Alison is a fourth year student in the School Psychology doctoral program at GSAPP. Throughout graduate school, Alison has primarily worked with adolescents and young adults in middle school, high school, and college counseling center settings. Alison's academic interests include personality theory and assessment, diversity issues, and interpersonal approaches to therapy.
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Member Presentations and Publications 
Eric Sherman, LCSW
Publication: New York Times' Couch column of the Opioninator. August 4, 2015.
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Thank you for joining us. Look for our next newsletter in October 2015.
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No need to print this email - for future reference, all issues are archived. |
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Stephen B. Levine, MD