Selected Facts, Winter 2016

Welcome to the winter edition of Selected Facts: Newsletter of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. In addition to a letter from NPSI President Caron Harrang this issue also includes letters from Director of Training Dana Blue and Candidate President David Parnes.

As usual, we offer brief accounts of the professional activities and accomplishments of some of our analyst and candidate members in "Members in Action" and "NPSI Candidate News." In addition, you'll notice a new column titled "Community Members in Action," managed by community member Eric Huffman. Our community membership is growing apace and you'll get to know what some of them are doing through this column.

This issue will launch a new column titled "Thinking about Thinking..." intended to feature musings by our members on psychoanalytic themes. If you are a member of NPSI, please consider submitting an essay before the next publication deadline. Two or three of the essays submitted will be featured in the next issue.

Finally, I will be stepping down as Managing Editor of Selected Facts after the spring issue due to my need to focus on other administrative responsibilities at NPSI. As current NPSI Secretary/Treasurer and Chair of Admissions, it is no longer possible for me to continue managing the editorial duties for Selected Facts. While no one else has yet stepped forward to be mentored by me, I am hopeful that someone will, so that NPSI doesn't lose this valuable resource. I welcome the opportunity to discuss the future of this publication's development with anyone who might be interested.

Maxine Nelson, LICSW FIPA

Managing Editor

NPSI Board of Directors

President: Caron Harrang

Secretary/Treasurer: Maxine Nelson

Director of Training: Dana Blue

Director: David Jachim

Director: Adriana Prengler

Administrator/Recording Secretary: Hollee Sweet (non-voting)

Candidate Representative: Julie Hendrickson (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
Caron Harrang

Winter is normally a busy time at NPSI with didactic courses full steam ahead and special events unfolding along with all of the work in the background that makes a psychoanalytic organization tick. This season is no exception in terms of a wealth of good work and productive activity underway at NPSI. And yet, there is cause for concern as well. What do I mean?

On the one hand, the organization is progressing vigorously with a well-functioning Board of Directors and an Institute that is growing at a steady pace. Dana Blue's letter as Director of Training (below) details the development of the Institute, so I will not focus my remarks on this aspect of the organization except to commend her leadership and the work of everyone on the Education Committee to strengthen our psychoanalytic training and expand our offerings to psychotherapists through the "Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis"certificate program.

I am pleased to report that Robert Oelsner, MD FIPA has accepted the invitation from the CIPS Liaison Committee to serve on the newly formed CIPS Board of Examiners. This board, consisting of a representative from each CIPS Member Society, will oversee the processing of applications for board certification in psychoanalysis from qualifying members. Board certification establishes an important national standard of excellence for training and supervising psychoanalysts and is a requirement for maintaining our accreditation obtained this past July from the Accreditation Council for Psychoanalytic Education (ACPEinc).

At our Annual Meeting (December 2), Sigrid Asmus, MLS, was presented with the fourth annual Outstanding Community Member Service Award for her editorial assistance to book editors Dana Blue and Caron Harrang whose forthcoming book, From Reverie to Interpretation: Transforming Thought into the Action of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2016), represents the collected papers from the 2014 International Evolving British Object Relations Conference. We are fortunate to have talented members like Sigrid willing and able to assist others engaged in psychoanalytic writing and publishing.

The NPSI library continues to grow thanks to generous donations from our members and friends. Erin Carruth, LMHC (Northwest Alliance for Psychoanalytic Study) donated Gregory Hamilton's book, Self and Others: Object Relations Theory in Practice, and Janet Savers' Mothers of Psychoanalysis: Helene Deutsch, Karen Horney, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein. Michael Ian Paul, MD FIPA (Psychoanalytic Center of California) donated a copy of his book, Before We Were Young: An Exploration of Primordial States of Mind. I also donated back copies of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis from the last several years. Any member wishing to access the library is invited to stop by on Fridays from noon to 4 pm when Administrator Hollee Sweet will be glad to assist you in checking out one of our publications.

Under the leadership of organizing committee chair Rikki Ricard, planning for our Eleventh International Evolving British Object Relations Conference (October 28-30) is well underway. It is testimony to Rikki's enthusiasm for the conference theme, The Feeling Mind and Lived Experience: Transformations in Psychoanalysis, and dedication to maintaining the international caliber of our conversation with analysts from around the world, that our most significant special event and outreach effort is continuing. I also want to recognize and thank everyone working with Rikki on the organizing committee, including Gina Balli, Margaret Bergmann-Ness, Claudette Cummings, Ken Cunningham, Lynn Cunningham, Charlotte Dean, Anna Delacroix, Tony Hacker, Bruce Hall, Julie Hendrickson, Barb Sewell and Christian Swenson. Your teamwork is an outstanding model we can all learn from.

A recent special event involved co-sponsoring, for the first time, a regional workshop with the Northwest Alliance for Psychoanalytic Study (NWAPS) titled, "Reconsidering the Contributions of Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion: Then and Now." The organizing committee, comprised of myself, Maxine Nelson, Erin Carruth and Susan Nelson, worked for nearly a year to bring psychoanalyst historian Joseph Aguayo, PhD FIPA (Psychoanalytic Center of California) to Seattle over the weekend of February 5-6 to compare the theoretical contributions of these two psychoanalytic luminaries and the organizational dynamics that have inhibited open discussion at the conference level up to now.

Leading up to this workshop, NPSI hosted three monthly seminars focusing on seminal papers by Winnicott and facilitated by Morry Tolmach, Ann Glasser and Jeff Eaton, and a fourth seminar concentrating on Bion's Italian Seminars led by Maxine Nelson and myself. These scientific meetings were well attended and facilitated open, meaningful conversation amongst the participants.

The February workshop featured a Friday evening public lecture by Dr. Aguayo titled, "Winnicott and Bion: Irreconcilable Differences?" On Saturday a panel comprised of Joseph Aguayo, Caron Harrang, and Maxine Nelson explored the topic, "Bion's Italian Seminars: Facilitating and Learning from the Group Experience." In the afternoon Dr. Aguayo facilitated a clinical seminar attended by thirty analysts and psychotherapists with material presented by Matt Brooks, LICSW, a senior candidate at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (SPSI). During the seminar, a lively discussion included "speculative imagination" (Bion) on how the clinical material could be thought about from a Winnicottian or a Bionian perspective.

All of these activities and the caliber of conversation evident at our scientific meetings, our workshops, and at EBOR should be a source of pride for everyone involved in the organization. When I talk with colleagues in other larger IPA component societies, they are continually amazed at what we as a small organization can do. Sometimes I tell them it's like Seattle in the 1980s and early 1990s when bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Mother Love Bone gained international recognition in part due to the lack of performance venues at home. Bands had to tour to have a place to play. Seattleites were proud of our music scene but not all was well in the personal lives and group dynamics of these bands. Kurt Cobain committed suicide, Andrew Wood (lead singer for Mother Love Bone) died of a drug overdose, and other less well-known members suffered too from addiction and emotional problems. Now none of this is news, but the parallel I want to draw is this: Whereas NPSI is a creative band of individuals who have produced some "hits" with our newsletter, with our scientific meetings, with EBOR, and with graduating candidates able to contribute through their publications to the ongoing debate of ideas in the profession of psychoanalysis, we are not paying enough attention to the leadership needs of our organization. For example, in the recent election of officers and directors to the Board there were no nominees for President Elect. This means that succession of the leadership of the organization is in jeopardy. Yes, as President I can be nominated for a second term, but it is unsound to count on current leadership to continue our work into perpetuity. There were also no nominations from the community for directors to serve on the Board (the one exception being David Jachim who accepted my nomination to serve as a Director after completing his term as Past President). As another example, we currently have no one interested in chairing the Scientific Meetings Committee, a position left open since the end of June 2015. Fortunately, the gap has been temporarily filled by the pre-Aguayo workshop seminars that will be followed by monthly pre-EBOR 2016 seminars. Additionally, Maxine Nelson has announced that she will be stepping down as editor of this newsletter in the Fall and as yet has been unable to find anyone interested in being mentored into taking over her role. If ignored, these gaps in leadership will over the next few years obstruct the healthy growth and development of our organization and exhaust the talents of those who are currently working to sustain our membership society and training institute.

I wish to close by asking every member to consider whether you want to see NPSI survive and, more than that, to thrive? If the answer is yes, then ask yourself if you can imagine yourself lending a few hours a month of your time and talent to join with those of us, described above, who believe that through working together we can maintain a culture that nurtures us all. If you have an idea (even a wild thought) about something you'd like to see develop at NPSI, I invite you to contact anyone of us on the Board of Directors to share your ideas. Even if you have no idea of how you might contribute, but share my concern about the health of our organization, I invite you to speak up. If we each value our own good ideas and take appropriate action, we can realize the motto I coined at the beginning of my Presidency for NPSI to become an organization "Fueled by relationships, sustaining us to do the work we love."

Caron Harrang, LICSW FIPA

President, NPSI

Letter from the Director of Training

NPSI has been offering outstanding psychoanalytic training to mental health professionals, supporting its members, engaging in outreach and educating the general public about psychoanalysis since 1999. To help cultivate and maintain these aims, t he NPSI Education Committee (EC) was established to oversee all aspects of its psychoanalytic training and other educational programs, functioning as a bi-directional communication hub to coordinate its many activities and thereby touching everyone involved in the life of the Institute - faculty, students, candidates, training and supervising analysts. As such, EC is comprised of the Director of Training, Chairs of each of the Institute's standing committees (Admissions, Progression, Curriculum/Faculty Development, Training and Supervising Analysts), and the Candidate President. To further this coordination, the Director of Training also serves on the NPSI Board of Directors, and some or all members of the EC meet periodically with the candidate group.

Following are some recent EC developments we're pleased to report:

Maxine Nelson has joined EC, filling the position of chair for Admissions. Welcome, Maxine!

Connie Sais , a NPSI community member, has volunteered to act as our Recording Secretary at EC meetings. Thank you, Connie!

NPSI is preparing to admit a new class to begin training in September 2016. Our application process is one of "rolling admissions," although spring is traditionally the best time for admissions events and activities. Therefore, we will be hosting two Clinical Open House events at Maxine Nelson's home on Mercer Island on the following dates:

Sunday, February 28, 1:00 - 2:30 pm

Saturday, April 2, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm

Light refreshments will be served. The events are free for participants, though pre-registration is required. NPSI training analysts will be on hand to facilitate clinical thinking in response to case material from a member of the group. Please help us spread the word and promote enrollment for a new group. RSVP to [email protected] .

Our Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis certificate program will be repeated next year. According to the leadership team of Adriana Prengler, Dana Blue and Maxine Anderson, participants in the current course are learning and enjoying their experience and there are already inquiries for next year's class.

Work continues on our distance learning goals of making NPSI events available beyond our geographical region by using technology. However, the question of remote analysis for candidates living at a distance has been settled by a recent statement made by IPA President Stefano Bolognini. Thus, in compliance with IPA standards, NPSI will not allow remote analysis for candidates enrolled in our psychoanalytic training program.

All community members are welcome to use the PEP-Web access portal on our computer at the NPSI office. Stop by on Fridays from noon to 4 pm when Administrator Hollee Sweet will be glad to assist you.

As Caron notes in her letter (above), NPSI is suffering a dearth of volunteers stepping forward to serve important roles within the organization. While we are delighted that Maxine Nelson has joined us, we continue to feel the absence of a chair for the TA group and a Dean of Students. Further, when I was elected to the position of Director of Training, it was to complete the term Maxine Anderson began in 2014. The position will be up for election again this spring. While I may step forward for a second term, a critical element in my decision will be whether there is a plan for succession to guarantee our evolution in the years to come. Please ask yourself what of your talent, skill, and time you can engage in the ongoing provision of the excellent training for psychoanalysts available at NPSI.

Dana Blue, LICSW FIPA

Director of Training

Letter from the Candidate President

An analytic training is a long and arduous process. I don't know what the average length of training is in other institutes, but I imagine that, as is true at NPSI, it has grown longer as a result of various factors. In order to remain committed to the task, the candidate needs to have internal and external supports that will carry him/her through. I suppose one could list these factors, these supports, not unlike how we consider various factors when considering the feasibility of a potential analytic patient. We can conceive of concentric circles of increasingly larger size, with the candidate (and his internal resources) at the center. Moving from the innermost circle out, we could list the candidate's analyst, his spouse or partner, his fellow candidates, the larger institute, the local analytic community and so on. We can also look at supports of varied modalities: emotional/psychological, financial, academic, etc.

In my years as a candidate, I have seen candidates enter the program, graduate from the program, quit the program, transfer to another institute, take a leave of absence, and transition to an academic-only track. And, in some substantial ways, those who are in the later years of their training feel supports fall away: the academic stimulation and camaraderie of didactic classes ends; one's personal analysis may be completed before graduation; senior candidates graduate. As well, there may be significant periods without a control case, during which time the candidate is not in active analytic supervision. As a result, one's fortitude and passion may be sorely tested.

Despite the obstacles, many do persevere and join the ranks of FIPA. And some important changes have occurred within NPSI that will help candidates in their progression to graduation. The Institute recently changed its policy in regards to the frequency of sessions for control cases, allowing one case to be at a minimum frequency of three times a week (from the earlier four). This is a substantial change, one that should shorten the time needed to graduate and help sustain candidates' determination. The Institute's recent accreditation, by ACPEinc, serves to strengthen the Institute's standing in the community and will hopefully lead to candidates having access to student loans through the US government in the future.

I've also had two recent experiences, with new patients entering my practice, which suggest a shift in the larger society's perception of psychoanalysis. Both patients reported, during their initial assessment interviews, that they had searched the internet for information about the efficacy of psychoanalysis. One noted having found that there is recent evidence from the field of neurology supporting the usefulness of psychoanalysis. (I refrained from asking her if she had seen something from Mark Solms, the neuropsychoanalyst who will be the keynote speaker at NPSI's upcoming EBOR conference, and whose fascinating paper, The Unconscious Id, can be found on our website.) The other patient said he'd read that psychoanalysis was experiencing a resurgence as a result of recent evidence showing that CBT is not effective in maintaining long-term change. Together these experiences give me renewed hope for the future of our field.

Finally, in considering that which sustains candidates in their training, I leave you with a word that I find fitting and in contrast to the word 'arduous' (which I used in the first sentence of this letter): Ardor: an especially strong feeling of enthusiasm or desire. Fervor, devotion, passion, zeal, love.

David Parnes, LICSW

Candidate President

Regional and International News

Eleventh International Evolving British Object Relations Conference

Sponsored by Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute

The Feeling Mind and Lived Experience

October 28-30, 2016

Seattle, Washington (USA)

The main message for this edition of Selected Facts in terms of EBOR 2016 and the work of our amazing organizing committee is "STAY TUNED"!!

Within the next month there will be various posts coming forward from the EBOR committee in regard to the upcoming Eleventh International Evolving British Object Relations Conference, including but not limited to: "Meet the Plenary Presenters" - interviews with both Maxine Anderson and Mark Solms; a teaser regarding the Friday evening of the conference, which promises to be an evening of entertainment as well as mind/sense enhancing experiences; and lastly, a launch of the registration.

We want to encourage those interested in this conference to register sooner rather than later as there will be a cap on the number of attendees and we expect quite a large turnout. There will also be discounted room rates at the Pan Pacific Hotel, which is once again hosting the conference.

By now you will have received an announcement of our first pre-conference seminar on March 16 - a facilitated discussion of a paper that Mark Solms has shared with us called "The Unconscious in Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience." Stay tuned for future announcements of subsequent pre-conference seminars to be held at NPSI on April 20, May 18, and September 21. Socializing begins at 7:00 pm, with presentations from 7:30-9:00 pm.

I encourage those toying with the idea to submit their paper abstract for the individual paper section of the conference soon as the deadline for those submissions is March 1.

We will be needing help with the conference as it gets closer and also during the conference; this is a fun one to work on - just ask the committee - so please consider volunteering.

Any questions, please let me know: Rikki Ricard, MA FIPA at [email protected].

EBOR 2016 Committee Members

Gina Balli, Margaret Bergmann-Ness, C laudette Cummings, Ken Cunningham, Lynn Cunningham, Charlotte Dean, Anna Delacroix, Tony Hacker, Bruce Hall, Julie Hendrickson, Rikki Ricard (Chair), Barb Sewell & C hristian Swenson

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The Confederation of Independent Psychoanalytic Societies (CIPS) and North American Psychoanalytic Confederation (NAPsaC) will present their second joint clinical conference in Los Angeles, May 13-15, 2016. For many years, CIPS held a clinical conference open to members from all the CIPS Societies (IPA Societies in the USA not part of APsaA) that focused on the small group experience of presenting and discussing clinical material in a format that included all members (including the facilitator) as presenters and discussants. This unique format, where candidates, analysts and training analysts work together, puts everyone on a level playing field and establishes a sense of equality and respect for differences among the participants. Beginning in 2014, in an additional effort for inclusiveness, the conference was co-sponsored with NAPsaC, which meant all members of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) and the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society (CPS) were invited to participate as well.

The theme of this year's conference is "Empathy, Creativity and the Shared Transitional Space." Honored guests Stefano Bolognini, IPA President, and Alexandra Billinghurst, IPA Vice-President, will attend. Dr. Bolognini will participate as part of a Friday evening panel and Dr. Billinghurst will facilitate one of the small groups. The conference will be held at the Ritz-Carleton in Marina Del Rey.

NPSI Institute News

Joan Fiset Donates Her New Book to NPSI Library

Joan Fiset, LMHC has generously donated a copy of her recently published book, Namesake (Blue Begonia Press, 2015) to the NPSI Library. Endorsements for Joan's books include the following:

"The suspense of childhood, the hypnotized waiting for an exit from it and its moody gods the parents, the indenture of it, along with its bliss: Joan Fiset fits marvels of doubt and ecstasy into a paragraph. The mother's story here, blurred in the eye of a child already a poet, is a masterpiece. Namesake is one of the most vivid and moving memoirs I have ever read." - Valerie Trueblood, author of Search Party

" Namesake feels like a fine-tuned watch, as time flows through this rewarding, tempered narrative. The prose poems - the pieces - are like lyrical snapshots of a larger world held together by silences. This memoir also shows how less is more. An example is the poem "Wonder Bread": "Soft in white plastic. Red, blue, yellow balloons. White bread. Brown crust. Fresh/but not like food. Fresh as a lie you swallow." The twenty-three words expand. And the photographs in Namesake underscore how small moments, through language and images, can grow into an engaging register of feelings." - Yusef Komunyakaa

"This moving chronicle portrays a daughter's profound 're-collections' of her mother in staccato-like scenes, each building upon the next. Poetic phrases erupt without warning from descriptive prose, where her mother is just beneath the surface, never far from the text. The child's mind's-eye is keen and curious. Moments of warmth between mother and daughter intersperse with the first hints of danger, fracture, and loss. The adolescent watches helplessly as her mother slides into terrors and inner torments skillfully rendered by the narrator. Subtle use of the spoken, unspoken, and ambiguous evoke feelings words often fail to express. Yet here the poet has found a way." - Kenneth Kimmel, Jungian Psychoanalyst, author of Eros and the Shattering Gaze: Transcending Narcissism

NPSI Members and Candidates in Action

Dave Parnes, Reporter

Robert Oelsner, MD FIPA has accepted the invitation from the CIPS Liaison Committee (Caron Harrang, LICSW, FIPA and Maxine Nelson, LICSW, FIPA) to represent NPSI and serve on the newly formed CIPS Board of Examiners. This board, consisting of a representative from each CIPS Member Society, will oversee the processing of applications for board certification in psychoanalysis from qualifying members. Board certification establishes an important national standard of excellence for training and supervising psychoanalysts and is a requirement for maintaining our accreditation obtained this past July from the Accreditation Council for Psychoanalytic Education (ACPEinc).

Shierry Nicholsen, PhD FIPA has been invited to expand on her talk on free association as a template for the activity of listening to music, which she gave last spring at the Music and Consciousness Conference in Oxford, England, into a paper for an anthology stemming from that conference. Last summer, she presented her paper, "The French and the Sacred Cow: Free Association Reconsidered Across Psychoanalytic Cultures" at the IPA Congress in Boston and will present it at a SPSI Scientific Meeting on March 15. Last October, Shierry gave a talk on "Listening as Co-Composing" at the Tracking the Creative Process in Music Conference in Paris and has expanded that into a paper she hopes will appear in the German journal Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie . Her paper "Adorno Kafka Psychoanalysis," which appeared in Dutch translation in an anthology on Adorno last spring, has been translated into German and will appear in an edited volume on Adorno and aesthetics later this year.

Caron Harrang, LICSW FIPA's interview with Lisa Halotek, LICSW FIPA, first published in the last CIPS News Brief (Fall 2015), is now posted on the NPSI website under News and Media > Associations . Her invited essay on the late Harold Searles, MD FIPA was published in CORRelations (January 2016). Titled "Remembering Harold Searles, it too is posted on the NPSI website under News and Media > Associations.

Candidate Carolyn Steinberg, MSC MD FRCPC presented her paper, "Psychodynamic Play Therapy for Autistic Spectrum Children: Case Example and Review of Theory" at Richmond Hospital (British Columbia) Grand Rounds in September 2015. On January 30, 2016, she co-presented a multimedia offering entitled "Facilitating Change One Family at a Time" at the Early Years Conference in British Columbia.

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Community Members in Action

Eric Huffman, Reporter

Community Member Sigrid Asmus, MLS was presented with the fourth annual Outstanding Community Member Service Award for her editorial assistance to book editors Dana Blue and Caron Harrang whose forthcoming book, From Reverie to Interpretation: Transforming thought into the action of psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2016), represents the collected papers from the 2014 International Evolving British Object Relations Conference.

Joan Fiset, LMHC is a new NPSI Community Member but is well known to many of us as a psychotherapist interested in British Object Relations as well as a very fine poet. Blue Begonia Press recently published her memoir, Namesake, about growing up with a psychotic mother. In addition, Joan gave a reading from the book at Elliott Bay Books on January 10. (See article above for some of the endorsements that have been offered about her work.)

Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington. Jeffrey's essay, "The Staten Island September 11 Memorial: Creativity, Mourning and the Experience of Loss," is included in the book Grief and Its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, Creativity, edited by Adele Tutter and Léon Wurmser. This book was published by Routledge in October 2015.

Connie Sais, MA LMHC is a mental health professional for the WA State Department of Corrections whose work is direct service, recommendation and referral oriented for criminal offenders under the Department's jurisdiction. What Connie finds especially interesting is the opportunity to presuppose a psychoanalytic sensibility while engaging a cognitive behavioral perspective.

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A number of well-known and respected members of our psychoanalytic community facilitated four pre-event seminars for the February 5-6, 2016 workshop called "Reconsidering the Contributions of Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion: Then and Now." The workshop, featuring Joseph Aguayo, PhD FIPA (Psychoanalytic Center of California in LA), was jointly sponsored by NPSI and The Northwest Alliance for Psychoanalytic Study.

Morry Tolmach, MSW LICSW facilitated the October 21, 2015 discussion of D W Winnicott's 1953 paper, "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-Me Possession."

Ann Glasser, PhD presented her reflections and facilitated a discussion of D W Winnicott's 1947 paper, "Hate in the Countertransference on November 18, 2015. After providing some historical context focused on how countertransference was thought of in the mid-twentieth century, Ann invited participants to share their thoughts and questions related to this landmark psychoanalytic paper.

On December 16, 2015, Jeffrey Eaton, MA FIPA offered his reflections and led a discussion of D W Winnicott's 1962 paper, "A Personal View of the Kleinian Development," which was published in Maturational Processes (1965). Jeff articulated what Winnicott learned from Klein's model and offered distinctions between Winnicott's work, the work of Anna Freud, and that of Klein.

Caron Harrang, LICSW FIPA and Maxine Nelson, LICSW FIPA facilitated the final seminar on January 20, 2016, "A Binocular View of Bion's Italian Seminars," in which they presented a close reading and discussion of the first of nine seminars Bion gave in Rome in July 1977. Caron and Maxine also participated in the daylong February 6 workshop on a panel entitled "Bion's Italian Seminars: Facilitating and Learning from the Group Experience" that was chaired by Joe Aguayo.

Thinking About Thinking ...

What's Under a Comb Over?

by Lynn H. Cunningham, PhD LICSW

Man is an ingenious creature,

making much social capital of

small physical features.

-Raymond Firth

Recently, in the midst of chatting with a friend, I found myself tripping over the words: cover up, cover over, comb over. In a culture such as ours, which is overly preoccupied with physical appearance and a reverence for youth, hair or its absence is an important part of body-image. We manipulate our hair not only to express our personality but also to alter or nuance that expression whenever we wish. It's fascinating how hair carries this s ymbolic currency as an erotic, aesthetic object of separation and loss, mostly without our knowing it. Despite an urge to create ourselves as distinct and without relation to our ancient predecessors, we remain intimately and stubbornly connected to our vanished past through this stable conduit - the symbolic use of hair to mourn separation and loss.

In contrast to other body parts, we can only speculate why hair emerged as a social instrument with the ability to transform an existing emotional state, alter status, and regulate social process. Admittedly, hair is an unusual body part: it's partially internal and partially external to the body; it can be changed without disrupting life too much; and, while already dead, it has the potential for re-growth. If we look closely, the social significance we attribute to hair symbolism classifies the fundamental oppositions found in nature such as: nature/culture, male/female, beauty/ugliness, health/disease, power/impotency, and life/death. Certainly in his work, Sigmund Freud thought it remarkable that the dreamer made use of cultural symbols without consciously knowing about symbolism. This kind of knowledge, he concluded, belongs to unconscious mental life and is independent of conscious thought and social convention.

Historically, w hen hair is absent, it has been seen in terms of a person's failure to meet social norms, a visible sign of deterioration, a by-product of decline and, even, a reproductive bad bet. For example, in the first century, the hirsute male was considered not only beautiful and virile, but also thought to possess a healthy mind. The satirist Juvenal espoused this common view in Satires II when he said, "Thy rough limbs indeed, and stiff bristles on thy arms, seem to promise a vigorous mind within." (Juvenal, trans. Lewis Evans, 1901) Although Juvenal is being facetious here, he nonetheless presented the generally accepted attitude - an observable, concrete attribute suggests the presence of one that is not visible. Male hairiness implies robust cognitive and physical faculties that associate to male identity. By contrast, the loss or lack of hair by cutting, shaving, tearing, illness or age insinuated a reduced status resembling the infantile state. The notion of the head as a locus of control and power over others gives it the preeminent place in the human body. Because hair loss traditionally symbolized diminution, many illnesses or handicaps are more socially acceptable than baldness and, so, the fear of losing hair may be based in the reality of consequences

Click here to read the full essay.

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Teaching Bion

by Dana Blue, LICSW FIPA

In response to the Thinking about Thinking column, I'd like to share an example that arose in the Institute. Jim Gooch and I are teaching Bion I this term, an introduction to the major contributions of Wilfred Bion. In addition to our junior candidates, four members of the senior group are auditing the course, as it is a rare opportunity to have instruction from one of Bion's analysands. The class was struggling with the maddeningly complex reading, and we proposed some research in the form of a mid-term to see what the class was gaining. Here were the instructions:

NPSI Mid-term Exam for Bion I

In a few sentences, and without consulting your notes or readings, please define the following terms:

1. Alpha Function and Beta Elements

2. The Theory of Thinking

3. Container and Contained

The class took the challenge, and everyone generated credible renderings, in their own words, of what Bion meant. One of the senior group, David Parnes, elected to express his response in graphic form. It is reprinted here, with his permission.

Selected Facts Next Issue Deadline

The next issue of Selected Facts will be published in late June. The deadline for submissions is May 31, 2016.

Please feel free to contact Maxine Nelson with general questions or either of our reporters with news items or ideas for stories.

Maxine Nelson Managing Editor [email protected]	Anna Delacroix Copy Editor [email protected]
David Parnes Reporter [email protected]	Eric Huffmann Reporter [email protected]