News from the Candidates Committee

By Hilary Offman (Canada) and Kim Bernstein (USA), Outgoing Co-chairs, and
Gadit Orian (Israel) and Sandra Toribio Caballero (Spain), Incoming Co-chairs

Led by Margaret Black Mitchell (USA), our group consists of candidates from all over the world who come together to create a place where the focus is specifically on and for candidates and early career psychoanalysts.

Our next events will take place during the international conference in New York (June 14-17, 2018). On the first day of the conference (Thursday, June 14, at 3:30pm), right before the conference welcome and first plenary session, our committee will be holding the Candidates Reception (Hudson Room, Mezzanine Level). Please join us so that all the IARPP candidates can meet at the outset of the conference. There is nothing like putting a face to a name when it comes to starting lifelong friendships. It is also an opportunity for candidate members to meet some of IARPP’s best-known writers and speakers who will all be there.

At the reception, Hilary Offman and Kim Bernstein, our current co-chairs (Kim recently stepped in when María José Mezzera departed this position), will be passing the leadership baton to Gadit Orian and Sandra Toribio Caballero. Gadit is a social worker from Tel Aviv and Sandra is a psychologist from Madrid. Both have served on our committee for a number of years and both are more than ready to embrace this new level of responsibility. They also both fun and smart—another reason to attend our reception and meet them in person.

The second event the Candidates Committee will be organizing during the conference is the Candidates Panel (Saturday, June 16, at 3:45 pm). The theme of our panel will be “Hope and Dread: Becoming a Therapist in an Uncertain World.” Relational psychoanalysis has encouraged us to embrace uncertainty in the clinical realm. But what happens when uncertainty in the world at large feels more destructive than constructive, or threatens to overwhelm us from without? For this panel, we asked for papers that offer a clinical perspective on what it’s like to be a candidate in training at a time of such widespread insecurity and accelerating geopolitical, technological, and ecological upheaval.

We received proposals from candidates all over the world and had the difficult task of choosing only four to present: Fabio Bianchi of Italy–“Hope and Dread Within a First Therapeutic Experience”; Lissa Schaupp of the United States–“Room With a View: Grappling with Ubiquitous Uncertainty from Within and Without”; Gilly Katz ben Sheffer from Israel–“To Have and Have Not”; and Andrea Iturriaga Medrano from Spain–“Are We Alone Out there?”. We are honored that Francesca Colzani (Chile) will be our discussant for these papers. Come see what candidate-only panels are all about so you can submit your paper for our next conference.

Supervisors, please let your students know about these special events just for them.

We can’t wait to meet as many candidates as possible in New York!

Hilary Offman, MD, FRCPC
Email Hilary Offman