In This Issue
NPSI Board of Directors
Letter from the President
Letter from the Acting Director of Training
Letter from the Candidate Group
In Remembrance
Regional and International News
NPSI Society News
NPSI Institute News
NPSI Member and Candidate News
Analyze This!
Next Issue Deadline
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Selected Facts
Newsletter of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic
Society and Institute
Spring/Summer 2020

 
Welcome to the Spring/Summer 2020 edition of Selected Facts: Newsletter of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.
 
This issue includes two letters from Maxine Nelson, one as President, and one as Acting Director of Training as well as a letter from the NPSI Candidate Group.
 
Given the current state of affairs, this issue will be a bit different. Included are reflection pieces from candidates and members on how they are navigating work through the pandemic. Also, in memory of Jim Gooch and Austin Case, we have also incorporated remembrance pieces from our community.
 
In Regional and International News, NAPsaC President Robin Deutsch fills us in on the activities and upcoming programs at NAPsaC, and CIPS President Batya Monder reports on upcoming events at CIPS.
 
In Society News, we provide you with information on how to access our video recordings via the My NPSI program.
 
If you have questions or comments about the articles we publish, or if you have a topic you would like to see addressed in an upcoming issue, please email me at admin@npsi.us.com.  Also, feel free to forward the newsletter to colleagues. Forwarding directions are at the bottom of every issue.
 
Tese Mason
Managing Editor  
 
NPSI Board of Directors
 
President:  Maxine Nelson
President Elect: Barb Sewell 
Director of Training Elect:  Dave Parnes
Secretary: Michael Dougherty
Treasurer: Eileen Fletcher
Director: Caron Harrang
Director: David Jachim
Director: Alison Kneisl
Director: JoAnn Mills
Director: Carolyn Steinberg
Administrator/Recording Secretary: Tese Mason (non-voting) 
Candidate Representative: Anna Delacroix (non-voting)
Candidate Representative: Nicole Wiggins (non-voting)
 
Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute is a non-profit corporation dedicated to educational and scientific activities based in Seattle, Washington. The primary mission of the organization is to provide the highest quality psychoanalytic education and training for individuals seeking to become psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed psychotherapists. The organization also supports the ongoing professional growth and development of our psychoanalyst, candidate, and community members. In so doing, the organization aims to contribute to the current regional, national, and international psychoanalytic understanding of mental life and to the emotional health, creativity, and well-being of those treated through the practice of psychoanalysis.
Letter from the President
 
"It is catastrophic in the restricted sense of an event producing a subversion of the order or system of things; it is catastrophic in the sense that it is accompanied by feelings of disaster in the participants; it is catastrophic in the sense that it is sudden and violent in an almost physical way."
                                        - Bion in  Transformations (1965)

"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
                           - Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963).  Letter from a Birmingham Jail

As I began writing my last President's letter for  Selected Facts , it occurred to me that we are experiencing several epic phenomena simultaneously: the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in over 100,000 deaths, and the epidemic of systemic racism and police brutality, which has resulted in the tragic deaths of far too many black people and with the ensuing demonstrations which have erupted into riots and more police brutality. I quote Bion and King above as they are speaking in different ways to the urgency of the present moment and, although the purview of our work of psychoanalysts is primarily in our consulting rooms, we can't help but be aware and impacted by what occurs in external reality. 

The word "pandemic" originated in the mid-17th century: from the Greek pandēmos (from pan 'all' + demos 'people'). Interestingly, the word "epidemic" also originated in the 17th century: from the French épidémique, from  épidémie, via late Latin from Greek epidēmia 'prevalence of disease,' from epidēmios 'prevalent,' from epi 'upon' + demos 'the people,' We are all in this together, whether on a cellular or a societal level.

Although a clear statement of non-discrimination is included as part of the application for psychoanalytic training at NPSI, we have not focused as a community on the need for explicit attitudes and policies on diversity as a way to address what British psychoanalyst Fakhry Davids has termed  internal racism : how racial difference is processed in the mind. Davids argues that the mind relates to racism not as an abstract category but on the basis of a perceived difference between self and socially stereotyped other, which is enshrined in a specific internal object relationship. Ubiquitous, and thus invisible, this relationship exists within a defensive organization, or normal pathological organization, which Davids sees as a universal feature of the human mind and refers to "othering" of all kinds, including racial. As a result of current events rocking our worlds outside the consulting room, it is my hope that this can change and that discrimination and its sequalae can be addressed more explicitly in our training and continuing education programs.

This Fall, I will be "handing off the baton" of the NPSI presidency to Barbara Sewell, MaMFC MDIV MRE MIPA. As used by my predecessor Caron Harrang when she turned the presidency over to me two years ago, this expression is an apt description for the transition of leadership within an organization. The past six months have been turbulent for NPSI as well as for the world at large but, as Bion taught us, turbulence can also promote creativity. I have experienced NPSI pulling together and moving forward as a community in response to the catastrophic changes resulting from COVID-19 and the tragic death of George Floyd and its violent aftermath, and I have confidence that we will emerge stronger and with greater capacities for inclusivity and learning from experience as a community. I am including some of the many highlights of the past six months here.

NPSI was involved in a self-study process for most of 2019 for the purpose of investigating and understanding how group dynamics might have been hindering our organizational development. The Self-Study Committee spent many months compiling, aggregating, and anonymizing the results of a survey that had been sent to full members and candidates, culminating in a report summarizing their findings and a retreat held on February 1 and 2. We are excited to announce that a follow-up retreat, which will also include NPSI community members, will be held via Zoom in November.

Among the many positive developments evolving from the Self-Study is a new NPSI leadership team consisting of Barbara Sewell as President Elect and David Parnes as Director of Training Elect. If elected, both would begin their terms following the Annual Meeting on October 23. Barb has a background in literature, education, religion and counseling. She is a graduate of NPSI (2013) and is currently Chair of the Curriculum Committee. During her seven years as Curriculum Chair, Barb has the distinct honor of teaching, or co-teaching, every class in the curriculum. She sees adult patients in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in her private practice in Bellevue where her work is informed by her educational background and British Object Relations theory. I introduce Dave in my Acting Director of Training letter below.

Another change that has occurred since the last issue of the newsletter is that Tese Mason has taken Hollee Sweet's place as NPSI Administrator and Managing Editor of
Selected Facts . Tese has a degree in communications and brings her own unique personality and skill-set to the position, including a familiarity with marketing and the use of social media. As evidenced by the visuals included in this issue of the newsletter, I suspect that we will continue to see a different graphic layout in future issues. Please feel free to reach out and say hello to Tese by email at admin@npsi.us.com .

New to NPSI, two study groups were held via Zoom during the past six months, both of which were received positively by their respective participants. Judy K Eekhoff, PhD FIPA facilitated  Clinical Perspectives on Trauma , using the book Trauma and the Destructive-Transformative Struggle: Clinical Perspectives by Terrance McBride and Maureen Murphy, Eds. as her text. Published in 2019, the book contains chapters by several NPSI members, including Maxine Anderson, Maxine Nelson and Judy K Eekhoff. In addition, Maxine Anderson, MD FIPA facilitated the study group Protecting Our Humanity in the Midst of Tribal Warfare , based on her 2019 book From Tribal Division to Welcoming Inclusion. My thanks to both of you for using 21st century technology to offer your wisdom and creativity to the greater NPSI community!

When the pandemic began, Continuing Education Chair Jeff Eaton made the decision to suspend the  Scientific Meeting: A Forum for Community Conversation  series but plans to reinstate meetings when public gatherings are once again considered safe, hopefully sometime in early 2021. Despite this temporary postponement of face-to-face meetings, you can access the full library of recordings of past Scientific Meetings on our website at: https://npsi.us.com/news-media/my-npsi . New recordings will be added as they become available.
 
The pandemic has loomed in our minds since early February and, in response to the myriad questions and concerns our community was experiencing surrounding COVID-19, the NPSI Board of Directors set up a series of Zoom meetings to assist full members, candidates, and community members in being able to think together about issues related to practice management. The meetings have been facilitated by Caron Harrang,  LICSW FIPA  and Carolyn Steinberg, MD FRCPC FIPA and, in addition to maintaining a sense of community, those who participated have found them to be both informative and supportive.

In addition to the meetings focused on practice management, NPSI co-sponsored the training  Supporting Healthcare Providers in the Time of COVID-19: A Short-term Therapy Model on April 11 with the Northwest Alliance for Psychoanalytic Study (The Alliance). Led by Laura Takacs, LICSW MPH, Clinical Director for Virginia Mason Grief Services, the training proved to be rewarding, with over 70 participants, and was used as a model for a similarly titled training sponsored by CIPS on May 30, which was attended by 55 participants.

The  Analyze This!  column by David Jachim, PhD FIPA returns in this issue with a thoughtful essay about the vicissitudes of analytic experience under COVID-19 titled, "Paradise Lost." David's intention is to stimulate conversation among readers and invites your comments. Please write to him directly at dpjachim@comcast.net .

I want to thank all of our dedicated Board and Advisory Council members for their commitment and hard work during my tenure which has contributed to the ongoing sturdiness and success of NPSI. Board directors and officers include Michael Dougherty, Eileen Fletcher, Caron Harrang, David Jachim, Alison Kneisl, JoAnn Mills and Carolyn Steinberg in addition to Candidate Reps Anna Delacroix and Nicole Wiggins. Our esteemed Advisory Council members include Bradford Cokelet, Teddy Jachim and Doug Ulrich.

There have been two significant losses to the NPSI community the past several months, both of which are memorialized in this issue: Austin Case, MD FIPA, one of NPSI's founding members, and James Gooch, MD FIPA, who was an influential psychoanalytic clinician and teacher for many of us, as well as having been a significant part of our faculty during NPSI's early days

From our unique perspective as psychoanalysts, simultaneously witnessing and participating in a world undergoing catastrophic change, it has somehow felt easier to confront "not knowing" by being part of a group. Beyond the profoundly tragic loss of lives and livelihoods for millions of people there also seems to be an emerging idea of the present moment being a transition period for all of us collectively and, as such, a harbinger of possibilities leading to growth and transformation.

Happy summer!
Maxine Nelson, LICSW FIPA
President
_____________________________________________________________________
Letter from the Acting Director of Training
 
"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it,
move with it, and join the dance."  - Alan Watts
 
I want to begin by welcoming David Parnes, LICSW FIPA as Director of Training Elect and to, hopefully, pass the baton to him after the election at the NPSI Annual Membership Party and Election on October 23. Dave graduated from NPSI in 2018 and is currently the chair of NPSI's Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program, including its two-year Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis course. He was the recipient of the 2015 IPSO Writing Award for his paper entitled, "On Growth, a Gift and Goodbyes: Initial Thoughts on a Termination," presented at the 23rd IPSO Conference in Boston. Dave is a past president of Seattle's Child Therapy Association. He provides psychoanalysis and psychotherapy to children and adults in his Capitol Hill practice. He also plays drums and piano and writes songs.
 
Although it has been less than five months since COVID-19 became a pandemic, it feels as if we all have been living under virtual lockdown for a much longer period of time. As we collectively attempt to make sense of the caesura this new reality brings, there's a growing realization that we have needed to trade off the emotional closeness that occurs through direct physical proximity for the necessity of health and safety for ourselves, our colleagues, and our patients. Among other things, this time will be remembered as one in which the realities on both sides of the couch overlapped, in much the same way that the dictatorship in Argentina was written about by Janine Puget and the way the impact of 9/11 was memorably described by a group from the Contemporary Freudian Society (CFS) of Washington, DC which included Nancy Goodman, Paula Ellman, and others.
 
Washington was the first state to identify deaths from the novel coronavirus and many of us responded quickly to transition our practices to working remotely, by telephone or video conferencing, beginning the first week of March. For NPSI, this meant that all of our classes, study groups, and meetings were transitioned to Zoom even before Governor Jay Inslee established his first stay-at-home orders for all but essential businesses on March 23. At this point, it is predicted that our community will continue to meet, work, teach, and learn remotely for the foreseeable future.
 
Psychoanalytic training is an intense and arduous enterprise in the best of times and was made even more so under the backdrop of the pandemic. While our candidate group was vocal in their responses to the loss of direct contact with their training analysts, supervisors, and cohort, they were appreciative for the clear communication about this transition to remote training. Used to staying at the Institute on Fridays after classes ended, the group has continued the tradition of a weekly happy hour, albeit now taking place virtually. The NPSI Progression Committee deliberated over how the training requirements might be changed to adjust for remote analysis and supervision and decided to count control case hours and supervision that were being conducted remotely. This message was communicated to all faculty and candidates as an expression of the degree to which the entire NPSI community has been impacted.
 
I recall attending the Presidents Meeting at the IPA congress in London in 2019, where the possibilities and challenges of remote training were discussed. It occurs to me that, due to the pandemic, institutes worldwide are now beta testing the pros and cons of remote training, which will hopefully serve as a resource for the IPA Psychoanalytic Education Committee (PEC) as they consider changes in the IPA Procedural Code.
 
I would like to thank all the dedicated faculty who have taught our psychoanalysts-in-training this past year. For didactic seminars they include: Caron Harrang (Infant Observation), Esti Karson and Barb Sewell (Neurosis/Freud), Stan Case, Denise Fort, Julie Wood and Carla Hershman (Child Psychoanalysis), David Rasmussen, Barb Sewell and Mirta Berman Oelsner (Process and Technique I), Jeff Eaton (Bion I), and Melissa Stoker (North American Psychoanalysis). For facilitating the clinical seminars, I want to thank Elie Debbane, Marianne Robinson, Caron Harrang and Dana Blue, as well as substitute faculty Jeff Eaton and Mirta Berman Oelsner.
 
The NPSI Education Committee and Faculty has completed its first year of having a rotating EC Chair, with each person serving for four months at a time. The Institute plans to review this structure and make a decision about whether or not to continue it. My deepest thanks go to Barb Sewell, Caron Harrang, Don Ross, and Julie Hendrickson, all of whom served in this role over the past year.
 
Weathering the pandemic will be a challenge but feels more possible when I remember that we are all in this together and will come through it stronger for being connected as a community .
 
Wishing everyone a safe, healthy and relaxing summer!
Maxine Nelson, LICSW FIPA
NPSI Acting Director of Training
Letter from the Candidate Group  

"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived; but if faced with courage, need not be lived again."  - Maya Angelou
 
To the NPSI Community, Its Leadership, and The Wider Community Which It Serves:
 
The recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the deaths of so many other Black Americans killed by police, have brought the NPSI candidate group together to begin more seriously addressing the many ways that systemic racism plagues our country, our field, our institute, and ourselves. As psychoanalysts-in-training, we recognize the need to reflect on our own biases and aggression, conscious and unconscious, and the harm that comes from them. Furthermore, we are asking ourselves how we can stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and other major social movements, in a concerted and ongoing way, to continually confront the various ways that we - as individuals, professionals, as a group, and as an institute at large - unwittingly carry forward the brutal legacies of racism, discrimination, and bias that plague our communities. We are committing ourselves to the long overdue process of making NPSI more inclusive and racially diverse, and to better prepare ourselves to practice psychoanalysis in a more inclusive, anti-racist way. 
 
We believe that psychoanalytic thought can contribute to understanding, reparative action, and meaningful change. However, with regard to becoming a more anti-racist organization, NPSI needs to do more - not tomorrow, not next week, or next year - but now, and to heed this call as an ongoing thread that touches the heart of our work. We regret that we have relied on our privilege within a highly stratified, unequal society, and that we have unconsciously retreated from addressing these issues, instead of using our minds to address them. We wish to step forward more. As candidates, we have several preliminary thoughts about how to rectify this. These ideas (which are at the end of this letter) span several areas of our organization, including curriculum, membership, and ethics, and we hope that our ideas will continue to grow out of collective efforts.
 
We recognize that the United States has a long history of racism and many other forms of discrimination, bias, and violence. Psychoanalysis teaches us to listen for history - not only its narrative form, as something already past, but quite more crucially, how it lives on - in the experiences of our patients, ourselves, the groups we're a part of, our communities, and our whole society. We believe that our institute and psychoanalysis at large have much to learn about how to take history more seriously as a living and breathing force. We aim to actively take on the evolving task of making a more equitable, inclusive, and just world, within and beyond our roles as analysts-in-training.
 
We call on our leadership, and on ourselves, to take this task with the utmost seriousness - both now, and in an ongoing, committed way. Below are some further, more specific ideas we wish to put into action:
 
1) Establish a committee to address Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
2) Establish institute-wide learning about race, racism, and white supremacy/white privilege, inviting Black people and other people of color to teach us.
3) Establish a scholarship program for colleagues of color to attend Fundamentals and/or Analytic Training.
4) Bolster our referral service to include better outreach to communities of color, those with low income, and other groups whom we could better partner with.
5) Revise/add to the curriculum to address race and diversity in psychoanalysis as a core part of our training.
6) Establish an ongoing venue for continued dialogue, including perhaps a regular newsletter addressing evolving ideas, actions, and reflections.
7) Stand in solidarity with other organizations - psychoanalytic and beyond - that are, and have been for many years, fighting for causes of social justice.
8) Make amends, repairs, and reparations wherever we can, as part of our journey towards greater responsibility and collective healing
 
Respectfully yours,
NPSI Candidate Group, June 2020

Mara Applebaum, MA PhD LMHC
Margaret Bergmann-Ness, MA LICSW
Lynn Cunningham, MA MA MSW (LICSW) PhD
Anna M Delacroix, MA LMHC
Samantha Good, MSW LICSW
Ambre Lane, MD
Dina Maugeri, MA LMHC
Becky McGuire, MS LMHC
Jack M. Ringel, MA LICSW
Mary Sacco, LMHC
Helen Widlansky, PhD
Nicole Wiggins, MA LMHC
In Remembrance of Jim Gooch and Austin Case

Jim Gooch Memorial
 
It is with a great deal of sadness and deep regret that I inform you of the death of James Gooch on April 4th. A talented analyst, sensitive supervisor, inspirational and generous teacher, and loyal supporter of both The Psychoanalytic Center of California and The New Center for Psychoanalysis, he profoundly impacted all those who knew and worked with him. He will be remembered for his pivotal role in the establishment of PCC, having been its founding president from 1984 to 1990. He was also a founding member of The Confederation of Independent Psychoanalytic Societies and served for eight years as the North American Representative to the IPA Board. Jim taught nationally and internationally and at the Reiss-Davis Child Study Center held the positions of Assistant Medical Director, Director of Education and Research, and Chief Psychoanalyst for many years. We will honor Jim's memory with gratitude for his unique and tireless contributions to psychoanalysis both in Los Angeles and beyond. He will be greatly missed.
 
Jennifer Langham, PhD FIPA
President, The Psychoanalytic Center of California (PCC)
 
* * * * *
 
In Memory of Jim Gooch
 
He held sway like an old growth oak,
So wise, so down to earth, when he spoke;
Inside an acorn he could see
The seed, the sapling, the family tree.
 
He was all heartwood, not the sap --
The music of mothers, the father's lap.
The cradle's been rocking since the bough broke;
The acorns are mourning our fallen oak.
 
Stan Case,   LICSW PhD FIPA
 
* * * * *
 
I first met Jim Gooch when he came to Seattle to help out as we were going for our status as an IPA Society. Jim and his wife, Shirley, were a frequent presence here helping to teach. During this time, I lost my first analyst. Jim was my supervisor on my second control case and became a very needed and inspiring support as I stumbled through the loss of my analysis and my ongoing training.
 
Jim pushed me into new territory during my supervision with him and opened me up to the discovery and fulfillment of finding my way of working with my patient. He was encouraging and challenging at the same time. Even after finding my second analyst, Jim remained a very important part of my training life and as time went on he also became a great friend. Jim was on my final paper committee and worked so closely with me to hone my thinking around the importance of humor in psychoanalytic work. I remember how proud he was when I graduated from NPSI.
 
During these years, Jim stayed with my husband, Adrian, and myself during a number of his visits to teach and present here in Seattle. I so fondly remember those late nights after a paper presentation sitting around and talking and drinking bourbon and learning and laughing.
 
Jim is definitely one of the Good Objects that will travel in my mind and heart until I no longer need them once I lose this mortal coil. Jim was wise and funny and real. I will miss his presence in the physical but not in my heart.
 
Rikki Ricard, MA FIPA
 
* * * * *
 
Jim Gooch figures prominently in the palette of psychoanalytic mentors that I have internalized. I first met him thirty years ago in Los Angeles when I took a course he was teaching. Since then I've taken multiple classes he taught, been supervised by him for several years, and I have had the privilege of knowing him personally and visiting with him on trips to LA.
 
From that first class that intrigued me by its level of depth and gravitas, I have always found Jim to be inspiring, organizing, and effective in his manner of teaching and supporting my learning. He taught me ways of managing material that really stuck with me. Many of his ideas were taken from his close relationship with Bion who came to Los Angeles in the 1960s. However, I always felt that Jim had his own way of holding Bion inside and yet being himself. One that stands out is learning from Jim to listen to the music and dance of the patient's communications and to respond by speaking the truth to them from the heart.  Jim's particular ineffable style of conveying that idea helped me to feel my patient in Jim's presence in the supervisory hour, and then to take that experience back to the analytic work. When Jim taught me about communicative counter-transference, he did not label it as such, but would poetically say that when the analyst can really feel what the patient cannot stand to feel, the patient will be helped to give birth to the experience.
 
Jim taught us that there are necessary conditions for a treatment to have a chance to go well. He was very clear about it. He even offered a long and detailed list of conditions from multiple vertices. Some were obvious, others gave me pause, and I have often called up this guidance as it helped me to preserve the quality of my own work and the work of those who consult with me. It has also helped me to know the limits of our work.
 
On one occasion Jim compared psychoanalysis to a kind of homeopathy. He said we support our patients' natural systems until they start to function on their own. He emphasized that psychic pain was useful and that those who can bear it are more likely to grow. He likened it to going to the gym: one has to practice and work hard in order to develop. We spoke of the need to develop our mental muscle. Each time we do something that is hard for us, we increase the likelihood of doing it again next time, he said. Each time we face into the pain rather than avoiding it or denying it, we grow. Jim further emphasized repeatedly that one has to approach our difficult work of psychoanalysis with integrity, discipline, and compassion. "Compassion, discipline, and integrity" - I carry this three-pillar plan with me every day to the work that I do.
 
Jim introduced the idea of parental reverie and the need for parents, or the masculine and feminine part of our internal objects, to work together so that patients/children can grow. Taken from Freud, Jim would elaborate that maternal masochism and paternal sadism need to come together "under the aegis of genital libido." I alluded to Jim's gravitas earlier, and he was indeed very serious about this statement when he made it. But there we were, in subsequent didactic classes in analytic training, struggling to repeat his words, giggling from time to time as we floundered, yet realizing how powerful this idea was. And with the years, we have discovered how helpful it has been for us in our work, and how it has stayed with us.
 
Jim was an amazing husband and a proud father of four sons. He will be sorely missed by all who knew him and learned from him. We now stand on his shoulders as we soldier on or, maybe, follow the path he paved, or both, fortified by his kind manner, capacity for containment, and great ideas. May his memory be a blessing and an inspiration.
 
Esti Karson,  PhD FIPA
 
* * * * *
 
A Welcoming Heart: Remembering James Gooch, MD
 
Early in my psychoanalytic training I was referred a very difficult child case. The child had significant complex infantile trauma and was acutely psychotic. I had already consulted with two other child analysts before seeking Jim's help. After listening to me describe the intimidating details of the case Jim said, "Well, Jeff, I don't know what is possible, but I'm willing to help you find out."
 
Jim supervised the child's four times a week analysis for several years. She improved greatly. I learned a tremendous amount. But it was Jim's attitude of openness to experience that is probably the single most important thing I learned from him.
 
I visited Jim many times in LA, but most of our supervision took place over the phone. I remember in the early days of the case I just mentioned I would present detailed sessions to Jim and I could hear him sobbing on the other end of the line. At first this troubled me. After some time I realized that Jim was allowing himself to really imagine the child's experience. He could become so immersed in the details of the child's experience that he was registering real pain that I realized later she was trying to communicate.
 
Though far away, and having never met her, Jim was more in touch with my patient's experience than I was. He made it clear to me that my job was to help this little girl find words for her experience. But not just any words would do. Jim certainly eschewed the jargon of psychoanalysis when talking with patients. He made me appreciate that my words must come from trying to comprehend her from the inside out, not from some distant place. One day he said to me, "Jeff, it's not enough to understand. You have to feel it in your heart."
 
Jim was a keen observer and a deep listener. He embodied Bion's emphasis on curiosity and a willingness to get to know. He asked questions and his voice was deeply expressive. He would often lean into a conversation. He had a good sense of humor and a wide smile.
 
Everyone who knew him knew that Jim liked to tell stories. Jim told stories in an old-fashioned way, to illustrate a point, even to teach a moral. I remember many, but I will recount just a few.
 
Jim loved and admired his grandfather. As a boy he would walk with his grandfather around the farm in Kentucky. He learned from watching his grandfather. His grandfather would point to things and ask questions about them. For example, Jim and his grandfather might pause by a tangle of tree roots growing in the side of the hill. "Look at that," his grandfather would say. "What kinds of conditions do you think produced something like that?" It was a real question, meant to be puzzled over and wrestled with. The important thing wasn't knowing the answer, but directing attention to something in order to see what might be discovered or revealed.
 
Jim often told me that this was Bion's attitude too. One of the most important things you could do was to learn how to look. Looking gives rise to questions. Questions arise from the details of the circumstances and from what you select to give attention to. From questions you develop ideas and you create hypotheses. It is from your lived experience in the world (or the session) that you deepen your understanding.
 
Clinically, Jim was very interested in what people could be aware of. He emphasized how important it is to embody experience. Feelings are not in your mind, they are in your body. Jim would say that I should try to get a feel for the texture of a patient's experience. He'd evoke his grandfather's hands. He'd talk about how his grandfather would pick up a handful of soil and test it with his fingers, smell it with his nose, and study it with his eyes. By combining all these senses you register a fuller sense of the object you seek to study. Psychic reality is, of course, immaterial. However, as Meltzer taught, it can be treated concretely. Jim had a sense of this paradox and of how deeply our intuition is connected to it. 
 
Jim listened to experience. He would wonder what a patient is aware of at the level of sensation, image, idea, or anxiety. Only by building up the data of the patient's experience can you then make deeper inferences. Jim admired Meltzer and had his own version of muscular psychoanalysis. He built on the work of Bion and Meltzer in important ways. 
 
Jim was deeply influenced by his analysis with Bion. He often said that Bion made psychoanalysis alive again after he had suffered a period of disillusionment after his first training.
 
I remember expressing my frustration struggling with a feeling that there was one right way to do analysis. Jim told me a story of a patient that he took to Bion for supervision. The patient was not communicating. Bion wondered why. Jim did not know. Bion felt that both patient and analyst were somehow trapped in a stalemate. Bion said to Jim, "If the patient needs to stand on his head in the corner of the room in order to communicate, then that is what you must let him do."
 
Once I was lamenting an intricate Kleinian formulation that seemed too far fetched. I could not see what the "evidence" for it might be. Jim was great in trying to show me what he thought and why. But this time Jim said, "We need to be humble, Jeff. We are already so far out on the edge of an epistemological limb."
 
Another time he told me a story about how Bion interpreted to him. Bion said to Jim, "I tell this to you not because I know it to be true, but because it may be of some use to you and it may help you to think about your experience from another angle."
 
Jim and I had so many valuable discussions. I know what I will remember most is how intimate our conversations were. I felt Jim was not just teaching me about psychoanalysis, he was sharing his own mind, heart, and values. His generosity will stay with me because it changed me. Jim helped me to discover and get in touch with my own listening heart by sharing his. I will remember not just what he taught, but how he taught me.
 
Jeffrey L Eaton, MA FIPA
 
* * * * *
 
Remembering Jim Gooch
 
Jim Gooch was born in 1934, and grew up on a farm in Kentucky. Like 2020 so far, 1934 was a year of calamity, with Hitler's rise to power transpiring in tandem with the worst year of the Great Depression, and the conversion of millions of acres of farmland to Oklahoma dust. Jim lived his whole long brilliant and fruitful life in the span between. To me, Jim was an influential supervisor; later a colleague and friend. A tall soft-spoken man, Jim loved the natural world. In one of our last conversations, he talked at length about his Kentucky grandfather who nourished that awe in him, and as we chatted in the golden California sunlight of an early evening, I felt we were on a tour of the growing things outdoors. That was the thing about Jim, or one thing, anyway. He'd just pick you up and take you along, offering you the chance to learn about the world in a most companionable way.
 
Jim taught me to try to speak psychoanalysis honestly and simply, in an experience-near way. This was not explicit, but modeled by example. He didn't teach in any didactic or instructional way. Rather than commenting on points of technique, he offered his associations to the clinical material at emotional full throttle. Sometimes he laughed. Sometimes he wept. Or he expressed the way his anger was provoked by the material, why and how it might be relevant. Once he told me a poem evoked by the work. He'd say, "I don't know if this will be helpful to you, it's just my association, but..." and then share something apt that illuminated the dynamics of what I was working with from an angle I'd not yet considered. He shared his experiences with Bion, with Shirley and his family, with people he'd encountered in practice. He was a very generous and generative man who loved psychoanalysis. Jim stressed that to do our work we need one another, and advised that we surround ourselves with trusted others "so they can tell you when you run off the rails." Manifesting this belief, he tended not only patients and students, but helped found organizations that include PCC, CIPS and NPSI, groups of trusted colleagues committed to the psychoanalytic endeavor.
 
Many times, in public meetings and events, I heard Jim tell a story of conception. Specifically he would tell the story of how he answered his own son, when that little boy wondered where the baby in his mother's womb came from. He told it in loving detail, in full awareness of the child's (and likely the audience's) turbulence on hearing these facts of life. The room was invariably rendered quiet by his recounting. I am reminded now of Roger Money Kyrle's statement that the unconscious is "simply rife" with misunderstandings of conception and imagine Jim knew some of his gift was to be able to right misunderstandings of this nature, the elemental framework that undergirds the foundations of the capacity to perceive and think about right relation to the painful facts of reality. He once told me that if he could have only one psychoanalytic book it would be Meltzer's Sexual States of Mind.
 
At the end of many supervision sessions, he'd say, "Now, forget everything we've talked about and go do your work." I recognized that he was offering a Bionian koan on forgetting in order to open to new truth, as well as communicating his faith in me to use my own mind. But honestly, Jim, at another level, I hope I never do forget the many rich and vivid and emotionally powerful things we spoke of, in supervisory sessions and in life.
 
Dana Blue,   LICSW FIPA
 
* * * * *
 
Hearing with great sadness and indeed a bit of shock about Jim Gooch's passing this past weekend, I was prompted to recall many of those early memories re: NPSI's founding that he and his wife Shirley were so much a part of.
 
Jim and Shirley, of course, were mainstays for us coming from PCC, our companion Kleinian-Bionian Institute in LA. We began our sojourn toward becoming an IPA Institute back in 1996, as I recall. And shortly thereafter, I believe they came up nearly monthly for weekends to teach and to mentor, and to my mind Jim especially inadvertently also become a psychoanalytic father-like figure for many of us. I would suggest, looking back, that without their whole-hearted support, NPSI would not have survived. Their availability to us as individuals and as a growing institute remained for years.
 
Jim had a kind of down-home quality (from growing up on a farm in Kentucky), which helped him to lay bare the aggressive-destructive parts of the personality. Many of us will remember his depiction of that which would 'show bare steel' to the dependent part of the personality if left unaddressed, unattended. And he mentored us as well in terms of his supervisory style by rarely saying 'right' or 'wrong' but usually beginning his statements with 'what comes to mind is...,' thus entering into conversation with the presenter, and thus encouraging dialogue.
 
Another nourishing element was his and Shirley's exposure to Wilfred Bion. Both had personal experience with Bion during the years he was in LA. And I believe many of the manuscripts and books Bion wrote or acquired while in LA were left with the Gooches when he returned to London shortly before his death. So, a rich legacy from Jim and Shirley to many of us in that way as well.
 
Several other NPSI folks have had significant experience with Jim and Shirley and are likely offering their thoughts in this sharing of memory and appreciation. Gratefully, the spirit of their work will live on in us as individuals as well as within our psychoanalytic community.
 
Maxine Anderson   MD FIPA
___________________________________________________________________ 

Austin Case Memorial

Austin McClain Case, 90, passed away on Tuesday, May 26. Born in 1929 to Austin Ford Case and Dorothy McClain Case, he grew up in Seattle. He had fond memories of raising chickens and a cow for several years when the family moved to Vashon Island. He graduated from Stanford University and then medical school at the University of Washington. Stationed in France from 1955 to 1957, he served as a flight surgeon in the 48th Fighter Bomber Wing, US Air Force. He loved to tell about night flights in the starry expanse over the Mediterranean and the Roman ruins of Lapis Magna near Tripoli. The only vestige of a white baby camel that caught his eye in Morocco is a camel saddle he brought home. Back in Seattle, he was Medical Director at his father's insurance company, Northwestern Life Insurance Company; when it was sold, Dad insisted that all employees be given jobs by the purchaser.

After completing his psychiatric residency in 1962, he practiced as a psychiatrist in the Medical Dental Building in downtown Seattle, became a clinical instructor and soon professor in the UW Department of Psychiatry, and served as staff psychiatrist for the Veterans Administration. After beginning psychoanalytic training at Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute, he pursued further training in London at the Tavistock Institute in 1973. A candidate in the British Psychoanalytic Institute, he attended post-graduate seminars with Herbert Rosenfeld, Betty Joseph, and Leslie Sohn, was trained in infant observation by Esther Bick, and received his personal analysis from Hanna Segal. He was a research fellow at Brunel University, where he worked with Elliot Jacques on research in applied organizational theory, tasked to reorganize the National Health Service. His days in London, the center of Kleinian thinking then, left room for evenings at the theater, especially Gilbert and Sullivan which he never missed.
 
Upon his return to Seattle, he joined the faculty at Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute, serving as its President from 1980 to 1981. Soon he co-founded with Maxine Anderson the British Object Relations Group, the study group which became the Center for Object Relations and later divided into the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Northwest Family Development Center. In the early days their office on Elliot was busy with new ideas and visiting speakers from abroad.
 
Austin was an inspiring teacher, presenter, and dedicated student of Klein, Bion, and Bick's work. He was co-speaker and panel member with Bruno Bettelheim on "Clinical Application of a Child's Fairy Tale" (1983), discussant of papers by Hans Loewald and Mel Lansky, and coordinator of the Mahler Symposium with John McDevit. He regularly taught courses on Freud, Klein, Winnicott and Bion, primitive states, and infant observation. He was appointed a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of California, as well as at the British Association of Psychotherapy. He founded Secure Beginnings, serving high risk mothers and infants, served as member of the Board of Directors of the University of Washington Nursing and Child Development Program, was on the Board of the UW Certificate Program in Infant Mental Health, and was a founding member of the Washington State Association for World Association for Infant Mental Health (WA-AIMH). In his later years, he volunteered his help with a bonding program at Learning Tree, a day care center in Bremerton.
 
Austin was the father of the British Object Relations tradition in Seattle, a revered teacher and mentor to generations of students, supervisees, and analysands. His creativity, generosity, and rich experience made a large mark. His spare time was equally productive; he did things big: Great Danes, developing and renovating farm property with sustainable practices, planting an orchard beside a picturesque waterfall. He drew the deepest joy spending time at Illahee, in Kitsap County, on the shores of Puget Sound with family near his childhood roots. We will miss him in a big way.
 
Stan Case, LCSW PhD FIPA
 
* * * * *
 
Remembering Austin Case
 
Some memories stand out. My first contact with Austin Case came when he presented a seminar on Infant Observation as part of a Northwest Alliance for Psychoanalytic Study yearlong seminar series on differing approaches to psychoanalysis. I do not remember the year, but I imagine it was when the Alliance itself was new, perhaps in the early 1990s.
 
Austin was presenting with Maxine Anderson. I remember the room, the chairs, the atmosphere and my doubts. How could infant observation be so important? Perhaps I remember those vivid details because their descriptions of infant observation captured my imagination and changed my life. Today, after leading infant observation groups for more than twenty years, I cannot imagine what my clinical work would be like without the knowledge it brings me. Austin's commitment to working deeply and to trying to understand the most primitive mental states influenced all of us studying British Object Relations. More importantly, the Institute - NPSI - he helped found is grounded in deep, emotionally directed exploration. The Institute is part of his legacy.
 
Austin's passion about infants, his belief in early mother/infant intervention and the program Secure Beginnings which he founded, influenced the development of COR Northwest Family Development Center and Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. His wish that clinicians in the Northwest would have the opportunity to study and learn about British Object Relations was realized in these two dynamic organizations. He also understood Bion and the importance of emotion in the development of the mind.
 
He had a unique ability to see the big picture in organizations and valued the work he did in London with Elliot Jacques. I am grateful for his vision in wishing for an Independent IPA certified Object Relations Institute in Seattle. He also wished that the psychoanalytic training institutes here might join together towards our common goal of seeking psychic truth and training others to work deeply and analytically.
 
Austin's influence runs deep and continues to stimulate my imagination and creativity.
His openness and curiosity came from a passion for learning from observation of cultures, organizations, groups, and individuals. His belief that we have much to learn from infants inspired me to become a psychoanalyst. I was a member of the first class trained by the IPA Study Group that was formed here in Seattle. Austin was my analyst. His continuing presence runs deep.
 
Judy K Eekhoff,   PhD FIPA
 
* * * * *
 
Remembering Austin Case, MD
 
When I applied to become a psychoanalytic candidate in 1995, it was to the first class for a psychoanalytic certificate program offered by the Center for Object Relations. My Training Analyst was Austin Case. I chose him as my analyst because of how powerful my experience had been listening to him lead an Infant Observation course I had taken with him for the previous eighteen months.
 
Austin had a tremendous interest in 'primitive mental states.' Listening to observations the group shared, he could convey in vivid non-technical ways the value and depth of influence of the earliest experiences of life. At the time, he was trying to develop a fetal observation project in the Northwest, inspired by the work of Piontelli and Negri. He went on to help inspire Secure Beginnings and Listening Mothers.
 
Austin had retrained in London as part of the Klein group in the 1970s and 1980s. We all got a sense of the depth of his experience in London and of how much commitment he had to sharing a Kleinian view in the Northwest. Austin had a strong admiration for Hanna Segal, Herbert Rosenfeld, Esther Bick, Leslie Sohn, and Donald Meltzer. He would sometimes talk about their influence as an instructor in our courses. He invited many senior British analysts to visit us in Seattle. The one who impacted me the most was Meltzer. The aura of London was strong in those days.
 
The most interesting stories he told in classes were about his analytic work with schizophrenic and psychotic patients. Sohn had supervised his analysis in a hospital with a schizophrenic patient. I was deeply intrigued by this and it helped inspire me to explore the creation of the Alliance Community Psychotherapy Clinic with Tom Saunders.
 
Austin also admired Bion and Frances Tustin. He encouraged my work as a child therapist and supported working analytically with autistic and psychotic children.
 
My sense of what analysis is and can be owes a lot to Austin. Working with Austin helped me to start finding out what really mattered to me.
 
Austin paid as much attention to nascent creativity as he did to destructiveness and the many ways people can become trapped by their primitive defenses. It was his openness to the complex relationship between creativity and destructiveness that I think helped me most and continues to influence me. I'm grateful to Austin for helping me begin to learn how to learn.
 
Jeffrey L Eaton, MA FIPA
 
* * * * *
 
Austin Case was the messenger who brought British Object Relations to Seattle and he laid the main foundation on which NPSI is now building and thriving.
 
My first contact with Austin was in 1981 when he offered a SPSI-sponsored, biweekly course on the work of Melanie Klein and object relations to the Seattle clinical community. I was living in Anchorage, Alaska at the time and had long been searching for avenues for further professional growth. I registered for the course and added a note saying that although I lived far away I would be able to attend.
 
I arranged to fly down to Seattle for each class and soon realized that I had found what I had been searching for. Several members of the Seattle course had a similar experience. I soon asked Austin for individual telephone supervision, an arrangement that lasted until 1991.
 
When Austin and Maxine left for London in 1984, our class group had bonded and we formed BORG (British Object Relations Group), a working group for the purpose of continuing our studies. We met monthly on the phone with Austin to discuss papers and present cases for supervision. I flew down from Anchorage for those meetings and in the process made rich connections with the Seattle clinical community. By the time Austin and Maxine returned to Seattle in 1992, the Northwest Alliance for Psychoanalytic Study had been established and British Object Relations had found a substantial voice in Seattle. On the strength of that I moved my practice to Seattle and, after a several month break in supervision, began an analysis with Austin.
 
The years that followed energized the psychoanalytic community in Seattle in a way that was palpable to those of us who were part of it. Austin, with Maxine's increasing contribution, conducted classes and began leading infant observation groups. During this time Austin also forged an important relationship with the Psychoanalytic Center of California (PCC) which resulted in regular offerings by Jim Gooch, Albert Mason, and many others who came for intense teaching weekends. They presented at community-wide conferences, conducted classes in a growing syllabus of courses, and responded to requests for supervision. By the late 1990s, the accumulated course work and the number of committed students had taken the shape of a budding psychoanalytic training program. This made possible the ambitious thought of becoming an IPA Study Group. (Along the way, I fulfilled the training requirements and became a member of PCC.) Austin discovered a window of opportunity to apply for study group status and he spearheaded the application which resulted in NPS being granted Study Group Status and assigned a Sponsoring Committee in 1999. Under their guidance, NPSI became a component Society in 2007.
 
While Austin's role in the growth and development of NPSI ended shortly after we became a study group, he was a founding member and had provided an anchoring frame from which our creative clinical and organizational growth could continue.
 
I am grateful for Austin's contribution to my growth and for his role in establishing my professional NPSI home. As a teacher, Austin invited participation in an ongoing journey that opened clinical and theoretical material to reveal space and depth in the present while always hearing the infant's experience of its world in relation to the maternal function, all heard in the present through the overlay of subsequent formative experiences. As a supervisor, I came to value Austin's sentence-by-sentence approach to write-ups of clinical material. It highlights the transference-countertransference relationship of the analytic couple and often yields unexpected and surprising associations.
 
In my analysis with Austin I found an opportunity to live the elemental events that made the theory some alive. Austin emphasized the importance of coming in touch with psychotic parts. I can still remember that acute pain of my first conscious negative (paranoid) thought about him in his idealized role. That experience made for my lasting empathetic understanding of any attempt to avoid such pain while also being in touch with the inevitability of separateness, reality, and  growing-pain.
 
Today, thirty-nine years after taking my first class from Austin, I can look back and know that what I gained has endured and given space for ongoing growth.
 
Marianne Robinson,   PhD LICSW FIPA
 
* * * * *
 
I would like to express my gratitude to Austin Case for his supervision and gentle encouragement to put words on the page.
 
Best, Sarah Townsend
Regional and International News

Report of the North American Psychoanalytic Confederation (NAPsaC)
by Robin A Deutsch, PhD FIPA, President
 
At the beginning of May when I wrote this contribution to the [CIPS] newsletter, we were all deeply immersed in our responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, its effects on our communities, our families, and our patients. With the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor,  we are confronted, literally face-to-face, with the reminder of our second and on-going pandemic: cycles of racial hatred, violence, and trauma in the United States and the treatment of African-American lives as expendable. Racism is embedded in our culture and we are now not only witnessing history but active participants in writing history. As individuals and psychoanalysts, what we do and what we don't do, counts. Caron Harrang, NAPsaC Secretary, offers us the following thoughts: " My own credo for the current moment is: listen, feel, think, act. Psychoanalysts do this day in and day out in our consulting rooms, but we've not seen acting in the cultural context as an ethical imperative. Perhaps this moment gives us collectively a chance to reconsider the scope of our professional responsibility (responsible = able-to-respond)."
 
Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic: Bearing the Unknown: COVID-19 and Catastrophic Change
 
All NAPsaC members are invited to submit short essays (up to 500 words) on the theme of 'Bearing the Unknown: COVID-19 and Catastrophic Change' to be collated and shared with members in Fall 2020. Given the ongoing documentation of the unequal impact of the coronavirus on communities of color, your essay may certainly include your responses to our dual pandemics.
 
Each essay should be not more than 500 words, Times New Roman, 12 point. Please submit your contribution to Caron Harrang at caron@caronharrang.com . She will compile the essays and Mary Kay O'Neil will edit them for readability. Authors will be contacted for permission if there are significant edits. After editing, they will be made into PDFs and distributed to the NAPsaC membership via the Board of Directors. Final submission date is August 31, 2020.
 
Speaking for the ExCom, we are looking forward to sharing our experiences with each other during these very challenging times.
 
Finally, I'd like update readers on NAPsaC events. The mission of NAPsaC is to promote cooperation amongst all the North American IPA Societies, Japan, and IPA Study Groups of Vermont, South Korea, and Taiwan. The Board's current focus is further refining of NAPsaC's organizational structure. One of our goals is to establish a structure that is unique to the needs of North American psychoanalysts. At our in-person February 2020 Board meeting, the Board approved establishment of a President Elect position, and agreed to sunset the Vice President position. 
 
Our first President Elect is Mary Kay O'Neil (Canadian Psychoanalytic Society). She will serve for one year and assume the NAPsaC Presidency at the end of the February 2021 Board meeting. At that point, the Vice President position will officially sunset. Beginning with the February 2020 Board meeting, all NAPsaC officer terms will become 2 years. I will provide additional updates on NAPsaC's organizational structure in the next edition of the newsletter.
 
Recent Programs

Since my previous President's letter we have held the NAPsaC Clinical Workshops at APsaA's winter meeting (February 2020) in New York, developed by the Program Committee (Randi Wirth, Chair). In this workshop, NAPsaC created an opportunity to observe the functioning of our analytic minds in real time with clinical material not previously reviewed by discussants or by the group. Discussants were Batya Monder, Gary Grossman, and Mary Kay O'Neil, with additional input from audience participants.
 
Upcoming Programs

Psychoanalytic cultures differ not only across the world, but across town. NAPsaC's collaboration with other psychoanalytic organizations offers all of us the opportunity to share with other analysts the unique perspectives each analyst and analytic organization has developed. With this in mind, NAPsaC's Program Committee is continuing to develop co-sponsored workshops with other psychoanalytic organizations. The Program Committee, chaired by Randi Wirth, are developing programs with the Program Committees of the European Psychoanalytic Federation (EPF) and Federação Psicanalítica da América Latina (FEPAL) for the upcoming IPA Congress in Vancouver in 2021.
 
International and IPA News

NAPsaC continues to work together with the IPA and the two other regional organizations, the European Psychoanalytic Federation (EPF) and Federación Psicoanalítica de América Latina (FEPAL), and with the Regional Association (APsaA) on issues of joint interest. While NAPsaC is still a relatively young regional organization, it is gaining recognition alongside the other Regional Organizations. NAPsaC is a partner in the online eJournal Psychoanalysis.Today, along with APsaA, EPF, FEPAL, and the IPA. 
 
Join Us

NAPsaC is growing! If you are enthused about bringing your creativity and joining with other analysts in developing NAPsaC as a vibrant regional and international organization, please contact me at robindeutsch@earthlink.net . NAPsaC currently has openings on the Speaker's Bureau to respond to events of social/cultural/political importance, such as immigration, climate, and economics. With additional human resources, we hope to develop a Communications Committee to monitor and improve content for the website and social media outlets. 
 
* * * * *

Report of the Confederation of Independent Psychoanalytic Societies (CIPS)
by Batya R Monder, LCSW BCD FIPA BCpsa, President
 
When I last wrote for Selected Facts, life was "normal." I could tell you about a CIPS reception, a gathering in New York that would include upwards of 50 people, and even hope that some of you would travel cross country for the APsaA meeting and the CIPS party. But just a few months later, none of that is possible. Now all receptions and clinical conferences are on Zoom as are our remote sessions with our patients. We have all had to adjust to a lot of change and a lot of loss in the past few months.
 
Despite the profound shifts in our personal and professional lives, CIPS has continued to plan for the future. We were in the process of putting together our next Biennial Clinical Conference, to be held in Los Angeles in Spring 2021, when COVID-19 overtook our lives. The plans were suspended; that is, we could not book a space for the conference without a date, but we could line up the panelists. And so we did. The conference title is "#Me Too. What about Me? Men, Women and Analytic Practice." Michael Diamond (LAIPS) is chairing the panel, and the panelists include Past President of the IPA, Claudio Eizirik, from Brazil; President Elect of the   IPA, Harriet Wolfe; and Yale professor Rosemary Balsam. Michael Diamond and all three panelists were in agreement about not wanting to have a Zoom conference. They preferred to wait out the pandemic and hold this meeting in Los Angeles at some future date.
 
What CIPS could schedule was a Trauma Training following on the heels of the one that was held in Seattle and turning to the same presenter, Laura Takacs. Maxine Nelson had invited me and Lisa Halotek, Vice President of CIPS, to join in on the Training in Seattle, and as an outgrowth of that, we decided to turn to Laura and see if we could offer the training to the rest of CIPS. That training happened on May 30th. CIPS has a new News Briefs Editor, Leslie Wells, and the first issue under her editorship will be out before the end of June. Much of the issue will be devoted to COVID-19, focusing on how the CIPS societies have responded to the pandemic and on memories of some CIPS members whose lives sadly ended in the past few months.
 
The CIPS Board also has three new Directors: Laurie Grotstein from PCC and Gloria Demby and Chrissy Wallace from CFS. They each bring new energy and ideas to the Board. The work of CIPS continues to move forward. The Certification Period that was postponed in part because of COVID-19 will be scheduled in the Fall. New video conferences on a variety of subjects are also being organized by Elizabeth (Beth) Reese, video conference chair, for the next academic year.
 
I hope all who are reading this are safe and have found reasonable and satisfying ways to manage life in this suspended time period. While we have to stay apart physically until it is safe not to, we need to continue to find new and better ways to come together professionally.

NPSI Society News 
 
N PSI Community in Conversation: Practice Management & COVID-19
by Caron Harrang, LICSW FIPA and Carolyn Steinberg, MD FRCPC FIPA
 
  Introduction
 
Early i n March 2020, our mental health communities became aware that the simmering outbreak of COVID-19 would significantly impact our lives. We had been inundated with information from the news media and local health authorities about the virus since January and were beginning to see the effect on our practices. Sensing the urgency of the situation, the NPSI Board of Directors created a venue for members to come together online to better understand the impact of the pandemic through online meetings to discuss this rapidly evolving health crisis. 
 
The first online meeting was held on March 18, 2020 in two parts: one section for Training and Supervising Psychoanalysts (TAs) and Full Members moderated by Caron Harrang and another section for Community Members moderated by Maxine Nelson and Carolyn Steinberg.
 
Candidates in the Institute met separately with Acting Director of Training Maxine Nelson and Education Committee Chair Don Ross on March 20 to consider the impact of moving classes online just one week earlier.
 
In response to requests from participants, a second round of online meetings was arranged for Community Members and Candidates on May 20 and for TAs and Full Members on May 27. Both rounds are detailed below showing the evolution in how our members are thinking about and responding to the evolving pandemic and recently erupting sociopolitical conditions in the United States. 
 
March 10, 2020 Meetings
 
Though an agenda had been drawn up, by March 10 when it was time for the meetings, the pandemic situation had already progressed at lightning speed. For example, organizers anticipated members would be seeking reliable sources of information about the pandemic. However, that need was already being met and most were more concerned about strategies for working remotely, many having already begun transitioning their practices. In attendance were members from Seattle, rural Washington State, Vancouver BC, the Gulf Islands, and Alaska. For those already working remotely, all spoke of how dramatic the change was for both therapist and patient.
 
The TA and Full Member meeting gave those of us who are used to seeing one another at NPSI on Fridays when teaching in the Institute or for monthly Scientific Meetings a welcome chance to lay eyes on one another for the first time in many weeks. 
 
In both meetings, members reported being motivated in this transition from office to telehealth by an ethical responsibility to protect both parties. For many it was the first time working via remote technology, which all agreed impacted the psychotherapist's and analyst's mental state. Members shared stories of which platforms we were using and reported a sense of the frame being radically altered and needing to be reestablished in new ways. For example, greetings at the beginning of the session are different when by phone or online than when engaging patients or analysands at the beginning of in-office sessions.
 
Tracking the countertransference was deemed inadequate as a model when the pandemic or external environment is so dramatically impacting both analyst or psychotherapist and patient. The reality of this unprecedented situation affecting all of us and patient's realistic concerns about the psychotherapist's or analyst's health and safety were commented on. Analysts, usually in an older demographic, were at a higher risk of COVID-19 becoming a serious illness or deadly. As more information reached us, it became clear that changes in our day-to-day office planning were needed.
 
The news rolled out quickly. It had an exponential curve to it, just like the spread of the virus. This required all of us to respond to the intensity of the changes yet still remain engaged with our patients. For many there was a defining moment when the risk of seeing people, particularly those in higher risk occupations such as healthcare workers, intruded on our capacity to deal primarily with the unconscious, internal aspects of the situation. We were faced with the challenge of providing treatment which requires long-term commitment within a context that now included the physical risk of being in the room together with our patients. Although the decision to move to telehealth was (and continues to be) an individual decision and mental health providers are considered 'essential workers' in Washington State, the overwhelming majority of members reported transitioning to remote psychotherapy and analysis due to the need for social distancing to slow the pace of the virus and in light of the lack of testing for individuals without symptoms.
 
At this point in time on March 18 only one member reported treating a patient who was mourning the loss of a loved one due to COVID-19. We were in various stages of the process of adjusting to this heart-rending new world situation. The specter of death was creeping into our consulting rooms. Some of us who had transitioned to working remotely spoke to both the relief of reducing risk and the tremendous loss of not seeing patients in person. As our minds were populated by the realistic concerns of our patients, they also resonated deeply with our own. Some spoke of challenges to maintaining an analytic frame in the context of this new practice paradigm. At the same time, members expressed feelings of gratitude for being able to continue working as well as the deep sense of fatigue resulting from working in this entirely new way that none of us were trained to do.
 
As we took in the depth of anxieties stirred by the pandemic, the assumption of life as we know it came to an abrupt halt. As analysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, we have cultivated the capacity to live with doubts, uncertainties, and the necessity of remaining open to what is evolving. Bion's concept of "O" pervaded the group dynamic in both meetings.
 
Out of the seriousness of our predicament, as witnesses and participants in a world changing so precipitously, ironically it facilitated an openness to 'not knowing' in both meetings. Slowly, ideas of this being a transition period, a harbinger of a new order leading to positive change, began to emerge in our discussions. Some speculated that socioeconomic inequalities in our local, regional, national, and international communities as well as concerns about climate may be taken more seriously and effectively addressed in light of the catastrophe we are facing. A spark of curiosity, interest, and acceptance of that which we cannot change, emerged in the group, much as new green growth often emerges out of the ashes of last season's forest fire. As one measure of this transformation, one of the facilitators noted she slept more restfully following the meeting than she had since the beginning of the pandemic.
 
It was clear from this first round of meetings that participants found the forum meaningful and requested NPSI sponsor future meetings in coming weeks or months.
 
May 20 & 27, 2020 Meetings
 
In the second round of meetings, Candidates and Community Members convened on May 20 followed by another meeting a week later for TAs and Full Members on May 27. These meetings were again bifurcated to protect dual relationships and to facilitate Community Members and Candidates having greater access in conversation with one another.
 
The Community Member and Candidate group discussed at length their accruing experience of working online. Telehealth fatigue was a common phenomenon associated with loss of sensory contact available when working with patients in the room together. Though richness of sensory experience is diminished, some members commented on finding new ways to deepen clinical work. Attention to how boundaries are maintained and changes to the frame require new thought. As before, the environmental situation is ever changing and participants touched on anticipating the process of adjusting again to 'opening up' when it becomes safe to once again work with patients in our offices. It was clear, however, that no one is in a rush to make this transition; by and large patients too feel cautious about contact with individuals outside their sequester 'bubble.'
 
Notably, in the TA and Full Member meeting, there was a palpable sense of how well analytic training has prepared us to deal with the unexpected and the unknown. Along with the fatigue associated with working remotely, a number of members spoke of settling into the rhythm of working by phone, which all agreed allows for greater reverie than when working by video conference. Many spoke of finding the analytic work proceeding much as before, particularly with analysands with whom we have established relationships. At the same time, some have begun treatment with new patients and this too seems workable when it would not have been imaginable previously. A majority of members anticipate waiting for a  vaccine before reopening their office practices. Yet no one relishes working remotely or anticipates continuing to work this way when it feels safe to return to office practice and teaching in the Institute. As in the previous meeting. there was appreciation expressed at the opportunity to see one another and to feel part of a caring collegial community.
 
Concluding Thoughts
 
The Board's wish to bring the NPSI Community together as we face unprecedented changes in our lives, our patient's lives, and in our ways of working seem to have been well received and appreciated. Everyone who attended expressed interest in continued periodic meetings to discuss how our practices are evolving and as social and political changes continue to unfold. Now, with the explosion of protest over the second 'virus' affecting American culture - racism - on top of the pandemic, there is more need than ever before to support one another as we endeavor to offer psychoanalysis and psychotherapy to all those whom we have the honor to treat. 
 
Both groups have requested a third round of meetings with others in our community later this summer. Together facing the stresses and strains associated with being physically apart is the most important thing we can do as a professional community, both to weather the pandemic and also to strengthen the ties we have that sustain us in troubled times and beyond.
 
Caron Harrang, LICSW FIPA is a Past President and current Director on the NPSI Board of Directors.  
Carolyn Steinberg, MD FRCPC FIPA  is a Director on the NPSI Board of Directors .
My NPSI  Library

Access the full library of Scientific Meeting recordings on our website at https://npsi.us.com/news-media/my-npsi.  New recordings are added as they become available, so check back often.
 
If you need help accessing recordings, please contact NPSI Administrator Tese Mason at admin@npsi.us.com. 
 
"Intuition: An Emotional Foundation of Analytic Transformation" presented by Judy K. Eekhoff, PhD FIPA (Scientific Meeting - December 2019)
Intuition, like emotion, cannot be seen, heard, tasted, or touched. Yet we often say, "I sensed it." Sometimes we might say, "I just knew it." Intuition - sensing or knowing an emotional truth - is an essential element of psychoanalysis. In this video recording, Judy K. Eekhoff uses Bion's ideas of reverie and his models of transformation as well as a clinical example to illustrate his ideas about Transformation in O.
 
Click   here  to purchase the December 2019 Scientific Meeting Recording.   
 
"Contributions of Neuroscience to Intuition" presented by Maxine Anderson, MD FIPA (Scientific Meeting - February 2020)
In this presentation Maxine Anderson proposes that neuroscience considerations are significant for our understanding of intuition. She outlines how the right brain and autonomic nervous system may usefully be thought of as major contributors to our intuitive capacities.
 
Click here to purchase the February 2020 Scientific Meeting Recording.
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NPSI Institute News

Education Committee
Maxine Nelson, LICSW FIPA (Acting Director of Training)
David Parnes, LICSW FIPA (Director of Training Elect)
Dana Blue, LICSW FIPA (Chair, Admissions Subcommittee)
David Parnes, LICSW FIPA (Chair, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Subcommittee)
David Rasmussen, PsyD FIPA (Chair, Progression Subcommittee)
Barb Sewell, MaMFC MDIV MRE MIPA (Chair, Curriculum Subcommittee)
Becky McGuire, MS LMHC (Candidate President, Candidate Group)
Margaret Bergmann-Ness, LICSW (Candidate Group)
Tese Mason (Administrator, Recording Secretary)

The mission of NPSI is to provide the highest quality psychoanalytic education and training for individuals seeking to become psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed psychotherapists. We are currently accepting applications for our Fundamentals program for Fall 2020 and for our Psychoanalytic Training program for Fall 2021. For more information, please visit www.npsi.us.com/the-northwestern-psychoanalytic-society 
NPSI Member and Candidate News

Full Members in Action
by David Parnes, Reporter

Reflections from Maxine Anderson, MD FIPA
 
In April, philosopher Simon Critchley wrote in the New York Times: " Anxiety, by contrast, has no particular object... It is instead a state in which the particular facts of the world recede from view. Everything suddenly feels uncanny and strange. It is a feeling of being in the world as  a whole, of everything and nothing in particular. I would argue that what many of us are feeling right now is this profound anxiety." ("To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die." New York Times , 4/22/20).
 
Amidst this pandemic we all are pausing to some degree and taking stock of ourselves and our surroundings. In general agreement with Critchley, following are some of observations and wonderings from a psychoanalytic view.
 
In mid-March, reading from Bion's Transformations, I once again came across the thought that when we cannot envision defining boundaries (such as the depth or the scope of the coronavirus), we feel that the immeasurable is infinite and thus we conclude that we are destined to be overwhelmed. 
 
Aware of several familiar qualities of experience which seem inconstant at this time:
- how time itself seeming so fast-moving and yet at the same time to move so slowly, as if there is no time for anything to happen;
- how feeling frightened may lead us to lose ourselves, in that whenever we are not in the embrace of whole-mindedness, we lose parts of ourselves; thus fear diverts us to old ways, as if familiarity will offer protection;
- how important but perhaps difficult it is to have compassion for ourselves amidst the stress and panic;
- how as we feel more fractured, we likely feel hard-edged, due to the violence of the fracture; at these times it is difficult to hold ourselves in the softening atmosphere which compassion offers, for to do so in this hard-edged state of mind would only be felt as welcoming weakness.
 
Appreciating that in this strange (and estranging) time there seem to be few familiar markers by which to sculpt our boundaries, including our emotional skin. With a porous self, we may feel we leak out, losing touch with our inner selves, becoming at one somehow with the virus. This may scare us, and indeed our fear of death may be a kind of fear of losing our innards to the virus.
 
Similarly, the virus as the alien 'other' which seems to be everywhere is likely to be at this time a universal fantasy, or reality, inviting us to do what we always do when something feels as if it is more than we can manage. We utilize splitting and projection to try to rid ourselves of that awareness. But, sadly, that projection only adds to our fear of external threats, while also making us feel diminished.
 
An early April musing while gardening: the crust of the sod I encountered this morning reminds me of the protective crust of certainty we nearly always feel in terms of 'who we are and what we know.' This crust is startlingly jarred when we are plunged into uncertainty, such as in our current experience. This is not a gentle experience; it is more like being swept into turbulent unknown territory, which may be the unconscious regions where our split-off doubts and terrors abide.
 
In late March, musing upon the creative side of denial: we cannot face the dreads all around and still fully focus on the necessary activities of the day. We need distance from those unbearable aspects of reality in order to carry on in life. Appreciating, then, the shielding function of denial when at present we usually condemn denial as dangerous. Indeed, in times of pandemic, denial may be risky, as if flaunting danger. But appreciating its wider function in overall life may offer some balance.
 
* * * * *
 
Reflections from Adriana Prengler , LMHC FIPA , IPA Vice President Elect - excerpted from Adriana's speech at the APsaA Town Hall, April 5, 2020.
 
This pandemic represents an historic moment becoming a point of reference for the rest of our lives. 
 
I am originally from Latin America and I had the painful but enriching experience of having to emigrate twice. I was born and raised in Buenos Aires, and due to the military dictatorship there, I emigrated to Venezuela during my adolescence. I lived in Caracas for 39 years, but due to the emerging dictatorship and socio-economic destruction of my adoptive country, I was once again compelled to emigrate, this time to the United States, to the Seattle area.
 
In both situations, a governmental threat compelled me to leave my beloved homelands behind, uproot myself, and transplant myself in a new and unknown land. I mention this because in some ways, the experience of forced migration is similar to the situation we are all living today. We are all suffering an unexpected change, uncertainty, doubt, anxiety, loneliness, and longing. We are adjusting to a familiar but somehow unknown place without being able to guess what our life will be like from now on. We are not sure of what we lost, or what we will gain. In the current situation, we didn't leave our home territory but our territory changed and suddenly it feels like we all emigrated while remaining at home.
 
We are trying to adjust to the new situation, and like most analysts, I continue to work remotely with all my patients. Obviously, this does not replace the experience of physical presence, but it is a good enough compromise that permits the process to continue and even engages transferential and countertransferencial reactions.
 
The virus affects us all, causing the analyst-patient relationship to become less asymmetrical than usual, offering interesting challenges to our technique.
 
This virus has invaded our territory, violated us, and penetrated the very heart of our world. As such, it constitutes a collective trauma whose shadow falls upon everyone. As a traumatic event, it exceeds our ego capacity to manage, understand, and elaborate. It exceeds our imagination and perception of external reality, and on top of that, it is invisible, which gives us a feeling of being constantly in danger and persecuted. But everyone experiences it in relation to his or her own psychic structure and previous traumatic history. In our clinical practice, it constitutes a new and on-going traumatic situation in both the patient AND in the analyst, as we are all living under the same threat.
 
Many who have lived under governmental oppression find "virus anxiety" to be a familiar experience. My cousin, born only a few months after me, was kidnapped by the government during the Argentinian Dirty War at the age of 19. She was snatched off the street, tortured by the Argentinian police, and thrown alive out of a plane to her death in the local river. In political oppression one wonders where are the government agents that will come out of nowhere and suddenly take us? And now we wonder where is the virus lurking that will come out of nowhere and suddenly take us?
 
We see different reactions depending on psychic structure and personal history. We commonly see the reactions of denial, panic, and fear. In denial we ignore the reality of the situation and expose ourselves to the virus, which then infects us and then spreads onto others. Panic, on the other hand, is an over-reaction to a dangerous situation that precipitates erratic and impulsive behavior, making a bad situation much worse. And finally, there is fear, an emotional reaction to a dangerous situation, which compels us to take appropriate action in the face of the realistic danger.
 
My psychoanalytic society in Seattle has met, from the first week, by Zoom to talk about our on-line clinical work, and my society in Caracas, which has suffered the emigration of more than 60% of its members and candidates, organized for the first time, a meeting by Zoom of all our members from all over the world in the various countries to which they have emigrated. For the first time we were all together again after many years outside Venezuela.
 
History will evaluate these days and when it does, I hope it will be seen that we were united in a global way.
 
* * * * *
 
Community Members in Action
by Connie Sais, Reporter

Reflections from Connie Sais, MA LMHC

I didn't and don't want to write a reflection for submission to the newsletter on how I am navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. Writing will remind me of too much pain, too much loss, the
many shadows converging along my many walls. The  other reason is because all I have  running through my mind are country songs to link me to feelings about my dependency and vulnerability and what I have learned in psychoanalysis and from my psychoanalyst. Still, at this moment I want to do the opposite of forgetting. I want to remember.

Making room for all my feelings puts me on sturdier ground for acknowledging what I don't know. I love my analyst. The first lyric that comes to mind is about how I miss the experience of being in the office with her, a primitive experience akin to drinking cheap whiskey. "Chasing that freedom, chasing that feeling that got gone too soon / Chasing that you and me, I only see in my rear view" (Wallen, 2018, Track 9). I don't know how to drink good whiskey so nothing helps the painful burn of our physical separation. Sometimes I want to go back to the way it was before the pandemic.
 
Because I can't go back to the way it was, I need to cut through the distance to say what I'm saying now to all those I love. I feel extremely lucky and really scared. "Cause every single day, before I knew your name, I couldn't see your face but I prayed for you" (Stell, 2019, Track 6). In my work for the Department of Corrections, we had our "first" death. Anthony was at work one day and three weeks later died on May 17, 2020 from COVID-19. My stepmother, Cruz, died of cancer on April 26, 2020. She, along with my stepdad, took me and my four siblings in when I was twelve years old. Only her four children and five grandchildren attended her funeral. The rest of us watched on Facebook the next day. There are no guarantees about what's to come or what it will look like.
 
The mask in its many variations is my constant companion. "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows" (Tempest, 2. 2., line 33-41). Condensation in the form of fog and tears keeps me from seeing myself and others clearly. When looking at my children, I am reminded I need to look up even when I feel down. "When it rains it pours / But you didn't even notice / It ain't rainin' anymore / You hold tight to your umbrella, well, darlin' I'm just tryin' to tell ya / That there's always been a rainbow hanging over your head" (Musgraves, 2018, Track 13). COVID-19 cannot mask the beauty in the unconstrained nature of life and death. At this moment I have surrendered to the inevitable. This transition reveals a newness that wasn't here before because I have faith in what endures.
 
* * * * *
 
Reflections from Sarah Townsend, MA MFA LMHC
 
When I walked through the doors of the Seattle writing center Hugo House on a Tuesday evening in early March, it was indeed a threshold moment. Not only was I a new instructor there, I had been asked a few days prior if I would be willing to offer my first workshop - Narrative Intimacy in Creative Nonfiction - both in person and simultaneously via Zoom teleconferencing. We were in the early days of becoming the nation's hotspot for the COVID-19 epidemic and the hybrid nature of the evening's format reflected a larger uncertainty as to whether institutions would remain open or closed.
 
I was greeted with a generous bottle of hand sanitizer, a box of gloves, and a small team of twenty-somethings ready to provide a crash course in Zoom and to prop up my already ambitious plans to include audiovisual clips. Twelve students would make their way into the classroom, and another three appeared on screen from their homes. Many expressed a longing for community, and as we listened to the spoken word of Warsan Shire and Yusef Komunyakaa's Advice to Young Poets , I felt grateful that this shared experience of deep listening would become a predominant association with a time of increasing uncertainty and suffering. By the following week, Hugo House had closed its doors and all classes would be delivered remotely.
 
Teaching a course on narrative intimacy in a time of social distancing is inherently paradoxical, but what I learned has everything to do with psychoanalysis. In addition to the rhythm and structure provided by our scheduled meetings, literature has the capacity to bridge gaps and offers a containing function of its own. Taking turns reading selected excerpts as well as sections of generative writing aloud, we observed a narrator's capacity to puncture isolation, as if she were the closest of companions whispering in your ear. Some say we read for voice.
 
When challenging myself to hold silence - something that felt especially risky via Zoom - I noticed how my students began speaking not just to me, but also to each other, the conversation growing evermore robust. Over time, our reflections accrued cumulative meaning by virtue of not trying to know our destination ahead of time in order to see where our process might take us.
 
While I experience ongoing grief over proxy contact, I believe there is beauty in bearing witness to a world being lived at a distance, as well as an enhanced capacity to forge connection across space. On a recent Zoom meeting with a friend who slipped out to the bathroom leaving me for a bit with her school-aged daughter, the child stared into my eyes for a time. Next, turning her back to me, she pulled out an iPad and turned on a favorite program. I had the sense that she wanted me to watch her watching something, to feel less alone.
 
Sarah Townsend is the author of Setting the Wire: A Memoir of Postpartum Psychosis (The Lettered Streets Press, 2019).

* * * * *
Candidates in Action - Reflections on COVID-19
by Jack Ringel, Reporter
 
  Fibre Optic Reverie
  by Jack M Ringel, LICSW
 
  Can you hear me?
 
The static is slight at first, a buzzing in the background, like a distant sound machine,
      Used for sleep, or to muffle streets, fill waiting rooms,
      White noise, zeroes and ones,
          How does one find transference when connection is spanned through telephone lines, a fiber optic reverie, an image of the patient, the analyst, like a day dream filling in the emptiness of vision,
      A lack of smell, no usual waiting room, buzzer to get in,
          Hoping to find, be found,
          Fearing a broken bridge.
 
News reports of infections in the hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, an escalation eventually to a million worldwide, and climbing,
          Along with heart rates, blood pressure, growing pressure and closing space,
      Imagining that each number is a person, a whole internal world, feels like too much to bear,
      Just bear the patient's pain, and one's own, as a start,
      And sometimes this task, too, feels like a bear,
          Wooly and with teeth,
          Hibernation in Spring time,
          Looking for a soft underbelly,
          We hide from Corona - a punishing sun,
          Hoping that enough warmth makes its way.
 
HIPAA compliance and consent to tele-health and how do you send a bill electronically and is it safe to receive a paper check,
      And other ripe grounds for obsessing, compulsively - attempted brief flights from an enveloping uncertainty.
 
And yet...
   Amidst the buzzing, the tightness, the unknown - always there, now, more apparent - a connection is made, a window in a cave:
   Yes.  And can you hear me?
   I can... now what can we make of this dream,
 
As ever, let's see what comes to mind
 
* * * * *

Working with Vulnerability in the Time of COVID-19
by Margaret Bergmann-Ness, MA LICSW

Mid-March of this year, in response to COVID-19, I began working from home via telehealth. It was not the first time I had participated in remote sessions, but it was the first time I had made this practice a condition of treatment. Most of my colleagues have also made this change, leaving the setting that many of us have held as ideal.  I have been unseated from many of my comforting habits through this change. It has been undeniably stressful and upsetting to lose so many activities and opportunities. And I realize - with daily astonishment - that just about everyone in the world has been advised to make similar drastic changes. The scale of this moment in human history feels unprecedented: there are 7.8 billion people struggling with new individual and group demands.
 
At the same time that I have felt challenged by the changes COVID-19 made necessary, I have discovered many opportunities for gratitude. I know that I am privileged to be able to make these painful yet protective changes. I have also been grateful for my mind, which has helped me see that my changes are appropriate for the current reality. I am grateful that I can continue in my work, and that work is both organizing and stimulating.
 
Another change that I have come to value is my growing awareness that I cannot be in control of the future. My convictions about how much influence I have are decreasing, and I am finding some freedom in accepting this. I feel freer to acknowledge my not-knowing. I have no choice but to acknowledge my physical vulnerability, as well as my patients'. I feel grateful for certain moments with my patients when the clarity of our shared human vulnerability levels our view of the emotional field. I feel an increase in the opportunity to become part of a working team when I see the limits of my power.
 
Last night, citizens across our country protested the violence that racism nurtures. In the pain of seeing racism so repeatedly, so murderously displayed, I feel helpless. I feel the limits of my power and I realize that my insistence that "there must be something I can do!" is part of my privilege. The truth is that we cannot always protect ourselves from helpless suffering. My work now is to continue appreciating that these helpless and vulnerable experiences may be survived, and that the fact of vulnerability makes our human relationships most meaningful.
Analyze This!

Paradise Lost
by David Jachim, PhD FIPA
 
"Ay, in the very temple of Delight/Veiled
Melancholy has her sovran shrine."  - Keats
 
Recently I worked with a man, a wealthy investment advisor, who assured me that he "had it better than most" in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. After all he was well off financially, having maintained significant capital reserves. His immediate family was healthy and he had not lost anyone close to him to the ravages of the virus outbreak. Nonetheless, as we continued to talk and, as he would say "drill down further," he began to notice his deep sadness over the loss of his usual office routine, the absence of physical intimacy with friends, and the downturn of his positive relationships with customers on the cusp of financial ruin. He broke down and sobbed with the recognition of his loss of the simple pleasures of life he had taken for granted.
 
The current pandemic has wrought unimaginable losses of human life and economic security. Less vivid, yet perhaps more powerful tragedies occurred in daily life, such as the severance of the freedom to choose and the multi-sensory stimuli of social contact. Even routines that were once considered "ruts" are now longed for. People miss people far longer and more deeply.
 
The detriments of social isolation, e.g., kinesthetic sensation with the other, subtle physical cues, tone and temperature have putrefied the sources of social nourishment. As technological demands rise (e.g., constant Zoom contact), anxiety and depression begin to prevail. We are staying at home, but at the price of depleting our emotional immune system.
 
This dilemma creates a fertile field for the growth of splitting and paranoia. Conspiracy theories multiply. There are good people who abide by the rules, bad people who flaunt them. Uncertainty breeds both the quest for enemies (e.g., China, an invisible viral strain) and the need for concrete answers (e.g., the loss of Bion's "K").
 
The lack of good object (parental) leadership fertilizes the growth of this discord. The current American political administration infuses chaos by making uniformed pronouncements that are later proved false. Thinking is absent. Money, in the form of "opening up the economy," is held as the ideal answer to security. Empathy is absent, e.g., "80,000 (referring to the number of people who have died from COVID-19) is really a very small number."
 
As therapists and analysts we suffer from the same dilemma. We have our losses and stresses too in our daily and professional life, e.g., "Zoom fatigue," working harder with less sensory information. Countertransference multiplies like a virus.
 
And now a popular slogan has erupted, "We'll get through this alone together." Perhaps we can only say right now is, "I hope so." Nothing will be the same for a very long time. Each of us must find our own unique, emotional, social and physical nourishments. We must be empathic with ourselves as well as with others. We must also be willing to face what we have lost. We will all be grieving for some time.
 
"Accept your losses or you'll have no gains."  - Kopp
 
David Jachim, PhD FIPA, is a psychoanalyst who practices in Seattle, working primarily with adults and older adolescents. He is a Past President of NPSI and currently serves as a Board Director for that organization.
 
You can read all of David Jachim's Analyze This! essays here.
Selected Facts: Next Issue Deadline
   
The next issue of Selected Facts will be published in November 2020. The deadline for submissions is October 1, 2020.
 
Please feel free to contact Tese Mason with general questions or our reporter with news items or ideas for stories.

Tese Mason
Managing Editor
Anna Delacroix
Copy Editor
David Parnes
Reporter, Full Members
Jack Ringel
Reporter, Candidates

Connie Sais
Reporter, Community Members