Overview and Objectives

The psychoanalytic endeavor involves the careful attempt to explore aspects of the vast unconscious realms of human experience. Such an exploration is not only an Odyssey toward origins more ancient than the 2700 year-old Homeric poem but also explorations toward the many unconscious components which color one’s experience of this moment in time. Like small boats setting out to explore vast and complex regions, we enter into such an effort with awe and respect for the depths of the human psyche. In preparation for such a voyage it is prudent to search out the ‘map and compass’ to follow (the psychoanalytic view) and the ‘vessel and crew’ (personal psychoanalyst and teachers or other mentors) which most suit our hopes and goals as well as our temperament. This website offers a statement of one such avenue of psychoanalytical investigation.The psychoanalytic training program of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society embraces four organizing principles:

1) To work to expand upon and deepen understanding of the basic psychoanalytic principles, which have evolved over the history of the psychoanalytic movement.

2) To offer, within the many psychoanalytic points of view thusly embraced, a contemporary Kleinian-Bionian viewpoint whose basic emphases include:

Deepening awareness of the multiple simultaneous levels of psychic reality and the task of focusing upon the relevant issue of the moment

An appreciation of:

The impact of the earliest emotional experiences, relationships and capacities upon subsequent experience.

The relationship between sensory, concrete (unthinking, unthinkable) experience and more symbolic and thus thought-based functioning.

The spectrum of mental processes available at different levels of experience and relatedness.

The role of ever-present and evolving unconscious phantasy in organizing these aspects of experience into a myriad of internal object relationships which are then conveyed or ‘transferred” into the experience of the present and may be apprehended and held in the analytic partnership.

The nature of the ongoing struggle for and against emotional growth and understanding.

3) To encourage psychoanalytic students who have chosen to learn about the unconscious regions from this point of view to also learn from their own accruing experience which may entail their authentic, as opposed to defensive or oppositional, creation of new “maps” toward new psychoanalytic points of view.

4) To respect the destabilizing, polarizing and fragmenting potential of diversities in the history of psychoanalysis, our Society feels it important to actively promote fuller awareness, forbearance and open-minded exploration of differences and the anxieties thusly aroused.

Psychoanalysts of Our Society

While each psychoanalyst’s perspective is unique our roster of Psychoanalysts and candidates may be considered to practice from a perspective informed by or compatible with British Object Relations theory.

Affiliations

Relationship between NPS and the IPA

NPS, the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society, was granted study group status by the IPA, the International Psychoanalytical Association, in 1999. This is the first of three steps toward full autonomy or component society status within the IPA. Study Group status involves a site visit team from the IPA visiting twice yearly to aid in the establishment of the various aspects of a new psychoanalytic society which will be abiding by criteria established by the IPA. Thus consultation by the site visit team is offered on the many issues involved in establishing the psychoanalytic training program, evaluation of candidates and faculty and the many aspects needed for form and function of a fledgling psychoanalytic society. Study group status lasts often from 3-5 years. The second step or provisional society status becomes possible to attain when the site visit team so recommends this move to the IPA Council. Some consultation is maintained but the society is operating with more autonomy. This status often lasts about 2 years. The final step toward full autonomy as a psychoanalytic society is that of component society. Once this status is attained the group has full autonomy about its own governance and standards, abiding within the guidelines of the IPA. The time frame from Study Group to Component Society status may be 5-7 or more years.

Each component society relates directly with the IPA but also on a co-equal level with other component societies. It is interesting that the American Psychoanalytic Association is considered a regional component society which offers standards and guidance for each of the geographically organized psychoanalytic societies within the US that consider it as their parent organization. Thus in Seattle SPSI, the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, answers to the American Psychoanalytic Association, not to the IPA directly as will the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society when it gains component society status.

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