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, 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, May 10, 2025
Psychoanalytic Education Division
Graduation Ceremony and Reception 2025
Charles Fisher, MD (graduation speaker)
Sunday, June 1, 2025
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Education Division
Graduation Ceremony
Gary Grossman, PhD (graduation speaker)
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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