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 emphasis 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 involved a site visit team from the IPA visiting twice yearly to aid in the establishment of a new psychoanalytic society that would meet criteria established by the IPA. Thus consultation by the site visit team was offered with the aim of helping to establish the psychoanalytic training program, to evaluate candidates and faculty and to foster the many aspects needed for form and function of a fledgling psychoanalytic society. Study Group status lasted five years.
The second step or Provisional Society status was conferred at the IPA Congress in 2005 when the site visit team recommended to the IPA that NPS was ready for the next degree of autonomy. Site visit consultation was maintained on a yearly basis during the ensuing period when NPS was operating more independently.
The final step toward full autonomy as a psychoanalytic society is that of Component Society. This status was attained in July, 2007. This means that NPS group has full autonomy in its own governance and standards, abiding within the guidelines of the IPA.
Each component society relates directly with the IPA but also on a coequal 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 the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society will now do.

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