Hello Community,
Happy Spring! I can't believe it is almost April as I write this. Time really does fly by as I get older. This is a special time of year for me. I love the warm weather in the Sierra Foothills. One the ways I take care of myself is that I love being by the water. I can sit for hours by my swimming pool, or on the little beach at the American River or looking out at a local lake. Self-care is an important topic in our field. We who spend our days caring for others often need to slow down and take time to nurture and support ourselves. On Friday, April 24, Ginger Rhodes will be giving a two-hour talk on Self Care at our Ladies Luncheon. I am very excited about this opportunity to hang out with some of the fabulous women we have in our membership, have a delicious meal and to learn more ways to nurture myself and avoid burnout. So dig out your straw hats, dust off your sandals and join me in Mill Valley at Piazza D'Angelo. We have limited seating so register now! You can sign up on the website at sfprg.org.

Earlier this month we had our International Conference on Control Mastery Theory. I was able to attend many interesting talks including Sexual Countertransference, Safety, and Working with Children. As usual, we had wonderful topics and presenters. Over the last few years our attendance at the conference has dwindled. We are looking for ideas and suggestions for widening our audience and increasing the attendance. The Education Committee is forming a sub-committee to review the current structure of the conference and to generate ideas for change. If you are interested in being on this committee please contact Jack Maslow or myself.

Stay tuned for other events that are in the planning stages including our Annual Awards Dinner.

Take care,
Susan Landes

This year's March Workshop has come and gone and we are already beginning plans for next year. While our attendance was down some from last year, the courses offered were well received, and participants felt that they gained greater understanding of and greater depth in Control Mastery Theory. Thank you to all members who gave their time and expertise to the annual event. Your participation is greatly appreciated and highly valued. We would also appreciate your feedback regarding any thoughts you have about the conference itself or ideas you may have for the future. All input is welcome.

We are justifiably proud of our education programs at SFPRG. Along with psychotherapy research, and the clinic, education is at the heart of who we are. Whether it is the March Workshop, our Spring and Fall conferences, case conferences, clinical training, and so forth, our programs are presented in a highly professional manner covering a wide range of subjects of interest to the clinical community. For those of you who attend these events, you know exactly what I am talking about. For those who have not attended, you are missing out on valuable educational and social experiences. The conferences are great venues for reconnecting with colleagues, and feeling part of SFPRG.

Along those lines, we want to encourage members to actively participate in the educational process, either as presenters or as members of the Education Committee. Your input is crucial to our ability to provide interesting and relevant programs. Whether you are a seasoned clinician, steeped in Control Mastery Theory, or a pre-licensed or newly licensed practitioner, we want to provide educational programs that will be most helpful and informative for you at your particular stage of professional development. Please feel free to email me with any thoughts or suggestions.

On another note, we are beginning to develop courses and workshops outside of the immediate Bay Area. For those of you who work in agencies, clinics or academic settings, we would appreciate the names of the appropriate people to contact regarding presentations by members of our SFPRG community. If you have any thought or ideas about such programs for your area, and would like to help spread the CM message, we want to hear from you. I can be reached by email at: maslowj@comcast.net or by phone at: 1(415) 454-7698.

Greetings from the clinic
We have just emerged from one of the busiest times of our year. We have completed the interview and matching process and created our next cohort of fantastic interns! We are thrilled to welcome the following talented therapists to the 2015-2017 class: Noah Asch (JFK)
Alisha Eastwood (Pacific)
John Sanders (CISS)
Denise Stilwell (CISS)
Elizabeth Wake (CSPP)
Jay Reid (PLCC intern)

We will introduce them to your formally in the fall. There were many more qualified candidates that we would have liked to include but we are limited by space. Many of our current interns are remaining with us for yet another year. You may have met our pre docs:
Trina Zavala
Victoria Mycue
Brittany Friedrich
David Becker
Erika Vadopalas

Next year we will have the following post docs:
Denise Lew
Nina Grayson
Beth Mitchner
Valentina Gandini

The only hard part is saying goodbye to our graduating trainees as Jodi Engstrom, Josh Rothenberg, Lindsay Durgan and Camerin Ross launch their private practices. They will tell you about their work in the coming months. As always we are so grateful for all the help the Control Mastery community offers the clinic. Our interns love their supervision and training and we simply couldn't do it without you! If you haven't had the pleasure and fun of working with our students and would like to please let us know!

The women of SFPRG are having a luncheon on Friday, April 24th 11:30am to 2:30pm at Piazza D'Angelo in Mill Valley. Ginger Rhodes will be giving a talk on Surviving Our Work: The Responsibility of Self Care. (2 hours CE) $50.

For more information and to purchase your lunch, please go to our website.

This is the second installment of the lecture given by Hal Sampson in April 1997 in Italy. See the previous newsletter for the beginning. Our newsletter Archive is accessible from our website homepage, on the right hand menu below the newsletter sign-up.

Weiss began to construct hypothesis that could explain his observations. Before turning to these hypotheses, I will present a brief clinical vignette that illustrates the type of change process that Weiss often observed in process notes of psychoanalyses and which we we later found in verbatim transcripts of psychoanalyses and psychotherapies. These are processes of change that take place without prior interpretation.

The patient, Ms. White, was a 38-year old single woman whose manner conveyed a sense that she considered herself uninteresting, unimportant, and unattractive. She sought analysis because she often felt bored, restless and uninvolved in her life. She described herself as not needing others; but sometimes she felt lonely and depressed.

Ms. White spoke with little affect and made no demands on the analyst. He found it hard to engage her in psychological work. She seemed responsive, however, to his interest and warmth and became a bit more involved in the analysis. But near the end of the first year she announced that she wanted to stop analysis for a while. She did not feel as depressed as when she began treatment and she was getting tired of analysis. Did the analyst have any thoughts about her stopping?

The analyst, for reasons unknown to us, did not ask her to explore her thoughts or feelings about the decision she was considering; nor did he offer any interpretations about the decision. He simply said that he thought it would be useful for her to continue their work without interruption.

Ms. White, after a brief silence, said she felt relieved by the analyst's comment; although she did not understand why. She began to talk spontaneously about her childhood relation to her mother. At first she mentioned familiar thoughts: her mother encouraged her to be independent and was proud of the child's ability to do things on her own from an early age. Then, Ms. White introduced a new theme: Her mother had not been very involved with her. Mother rarely played with her, did not read with her, did not ask what she did in school, rarely inquired about her friends or interests. Mother did not neglect her physically but ignored her. Ms. White said she had assumed that mother ignored her because she was not an appealing or attractive child. She remembered feeling she did not have a right to make any claims on her mother's time or interest. Ms. White suddenly felt sad. She had wanted her mother to be emotionally involved with her. She became tearful, although she did not cry.

This is a miniature therapeutic process: that is, a single incident in which an action by the patient and a response by the analyst led to immediate progress. I am going to propose a story to explain this incident. Although other stories may occur to you, I ask you to put them aside for a moment in order to enter into and understand our ideas and intuitions.

My story is this: Ms. White had entered analysis with implicit and perhaps unconscious beliefs that she was unappealing and unattractive, that she had no right to expect much from anyone and that she could not and should not rely on others. Over the first months of treatment, the analyst's continuing interest and warmth led her to begin to question these maladaptive beliefs.

As she began to question these beliefs, she became confident enough to unconsciously carry out a trial action, a test of these beliefs in relation to the analyst. The test consisted of announcing a wish to interrupt the analysis. In testing her pathogenic beliefs, she sought to find out whether the analyst's response might further disconfirm her unconscious belief that she did not deserve his help. The analyst's actual response, by indicating his wish that they continue their work, did contradict her pathogenic belief. This is the reason she felt relieved. She felt accepted by the analyst and closer to him and this made her feel safe enough to face her painful perception that her mother was uninvolved with her, as well as to face her unrequited wish that her mother be closer to her and responsive to her emotionally. She also made her pathogenic beliefs conscious and began to explore the relational context in which these beliefs arose. She began to experience for the first time in analysis her sadness about her mother's lack of emotional connection with her.

The vignette illustrates certain concepts in Weiss' theory of therapy:
First, it illustrations the concept that patients work unconsciously to solve their problems. One major way they do so is by unconsciously testing pathogenic, i.e., maladaptive, beliefs in relation to the analyst. Ms. White's proposal to interrupt her analysis was an unconscious test rather than a resistance to analysis. Moreover, she tested the analyst in this way because she had acquired some confidence from his earlier behavior, that he would support her continuing the analysis. Her request to stop is not an expression of discouragement about the analysis and a wish to leave it but rather is an expression of hope derived from earlier positive experiences with the analyst.

Second, the vignette illustrates the concept that patients make progress when they believe they can do so safely. They are then able to lift repressions and make unconscious contents conscious. The fact that patients may lift repressions when they believe they can do so safely also implies that patients are strongly motivated to face and resolve their unconscious problems.

Third, the vignette illustrates that analytic change, including insight into unconscious mental life, may take place without interpretation. It may take place on the basis of relational experiences that begin to contradict and challenge a patient's pathogenic beliefs about himself and his interpersonal world. Such experiences function as implicit interpretations.

Fourth, relational experiences may in themselves bring about reliable internal change. Freud assumed that changes brought about by the therapeutic relationship without interpretation and without subsequent analysis were caused by suggestions. Such changes were thought to be superficial, because they did not change the unconscious play of forces in the patient's mind. Such changes were also thought to be unreliable because they depended on a positive transference which induced the patient to comply with the analyst's influence. Whenever the transference shifted, the patient's improvements would disappear. But Ms. White's feeling of relief and her spontaneous deepening of the analytic work imply that she wanted to continue analysis but first needed to be sure that the analyst was interested in continuing to work with her. His recommendation derived its therapeutic force by conveying emotionally significant information that weakened her pathogenic beliefs and created in her the capacity to face maternal rejection, unrequited love, and feelings of sadness.

This vignette also illustrates our own intent to learn from nature as well as from authority; that is, it illustrates our empirical commitment. We did not evaluate the analyst's behavior in terms of whether it fitted any particular theory of technique. We evaluated his behavior on how it affected the patient; specifically on whether it enabled her to make progress.

To be continued in next month's newsletter.

Noted psychoanalyst, researcher, and author Beatrice Beebe, PhD, will be featured as the speaker at this year's Robert S. Wallerstein, MD Visiting Lectureship on Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy on Wednesday, April 8 from 1 - 5 p.m. in Cole Hall on the UCSF Parnassus Heights campus. Her keynote address, "Infant Research and Adult Treatment: Nonverbal Communication," will be followed by a question and answer session moderated by Marc Jacobs, MD, and discussion with Stephen Seligman, DMH.

Beebe is a Clinical Professor of Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry) at the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and the New York State Psychiatric Institute's Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, where she directs a basic research lab on mother-infant communication. She is also on the faculty of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center, the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, and the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She also currently serves as the director of the 9/11 Mothers and Young Children Project, a primary prevention program for mothers who were pregnant and widowed on September 11, 2001.

This event is free, but advance registration is requested. CME credit will be available. For further information, visit psych.ucsf.edu/wallerstein or contact contact Gina Martinez at (415) 476-7755 or gina.martinez@ucsf.edu.

If you live outside of the Bay Area, SFPRG needs your help!

We want to present conferences on CMT outside of the Bay Area. Do you have connections with an organization that could either sponsor us or allow us use of a mailing list? We are APA approved so we can give CE hours anywhere in the U.S. If you know of an organization that would sponsor us, we can provide a lecturer; if you can get us a mailing list and leads on venues, we can do the rest.

Please contact Rob in our office (rob@sfprg.org) if you can help!

Amazon.com has a program called AmazonSmile which will give a small donation from your purchase to the nonprofit of your choice. Thank you to those who are participating. We have already received small checks from Amazon! Please bookmark AmazonSmile and designate the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group as your charity of choice! Link to AmazonSmile here