About SFCP

San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis (SFCP)
Vision & Mission

At SFCP, we aspire to cultivate a diverse community dedicated to the teaching, practice, and ongoing evolution of a pluralistic and socially-relevant psychoanalysis that aims to reduce suffering and promote psychological growth.

We are a non-profit, volunteer-driven organization, working together to:

  • Offer increasingly accessible and inclusive psychoanalytic training, psychotherapy training, and lifelong psychoanalytic education to students and clinicians who work in a variety of settings and disciplines.
  • Extend the availability of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and exposure to psychoanalytic thinking in the wider community.
  • Generate evolving psychoanalytic theories of psychic functioning, human interaction, and lifespan development that integrate individual unconscious, social unconscious, and interpersonal lived experiences. 
  • Recognize the complex unconscious influence of the ever-present past within ourselves, our society, and our institutions as we work to address the legacy of discrimination and systemic bias embedded in our generative and vital psychoanalytic history.
  • Foster collaborative interdisciplinary endeavors in research, academic, and community settings to enrich the breadth, depth, and applicability of the field.
  • Cultivate and sustain an open, supportive, and self-reflective community of volunteers that works to embrace contradiction, value difference, and repair harms.
  • Embody the potential of psychoanalysis to transform understanding of ourselves, our effect on one another, and our interconnectedness within a complex, multicultural world.

Upcoming Events

Saturday, April 19, 2025
Special Programs
W.R. Bion’s Reading of C.G. Jung’s Memories, Dreams and Reflections
Joseph Aguayo, PhD (presenter); Peter Goldberg, PhD and Mark Winborn, PhD (discussants)
Thursday, April 24, 2025
Visiting Professor Weekend
Introduction to the work of Nicola Abel-Hirsch, FIPA
Peter Goldberg, PhD
Saturday, April 26, 2025, to Sunday, April 27, 2025
Committee on Groups
SFCP's Annual Group Relations Weekend
Alan Ruiz, MFA; and Janice K. Wagner, LCSW (facilitators)
Saturday, May 3, 2025
Visiting Professor Weekend
A morning with Nicola Abel-Hirsch, FIPA - Bion's Technique
Nicola Abel-Hirsch, FIPA (presenter); Laurie Goldsmith, PhD (moderator)
Sunday, May 4, 2025
Visiting Professor Weekend
Professor's Choice: On "Container/contained Transformed"
Wednesday, May 7, 2025
Coalition for Clinical Social Work
Unwound and Unwound-ing: A Poetic Psychoanalytic Exploration of Whiteness
Hazel White; Jyoti Rao, MFT; and Forrest Hamer, PhD (panelists)
Saturday, June 14, 2025
Dialogues in Contemporary Psychoanalysis
Listening Into Being: An Actor’s Invitation
Robin Weigert in Conversation with Kristin Fiorella
Mondays, September 29 to October 20, 2025
Coalition for Clinical Social Work
CCSW mini-Module: Working with Parents: A Complex and Essential Component of Child Psychotherapy
Lea Brown, LCSW, and Amy Wallerstein Friedman, LCSW (instructors)
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