Iaap newsletter 28 - The new Israeli Jungian society

The PNSJA web site (www.pnsja.com) continues into its second year, and it contains
our mission statement, biographies (including pictures) of our analysts, and a
summary of our ongoing educational events. Please refer to it for all general
information about PNSJA.
Our society elected new officers in October 2008 during our fall meeting at the
beautiful Oregon coast. Our terms of office run for a period of two years. Anna Lyons-
Roost was elected President, as Mark Girard had finished his second term as President
and according to our society’s bylaws, was required to step down as President. Robert
Stuckey was elected Vice President, as Bonnie McLean, after serving in a distinguished
way for the past four years, was stepping down as Vice President. (Our society thanks
Bonnie for all the hard and diligent work she has done these last years.) Jim Soliday
was again elected as Treasurer, and Jenny Gordon will continue as Secretary.
PNSJA is now in our second year of our “Jung in Depth” seminar series, which began
in September of 2007. The class is again meeting once a month, beginning in
September 2008, for nine months of a seminar-style program. Each seminar session is
run by one of our analyst members, and each covers one fundamental topic in Jungian
psychology. Similar to the first year, our second year program generated an overflow
of interest, requiring us to run two seminar sections on consecutive days of each
month. The seminar participants are mostly seasoned psychotherapists, all of whom
have a long-term interest in developing better knowledge and skills related to Jungian
psychology and depth psychology in general.
PNSJA continues to explore the various models of analytic candidate training that are
appropriate for our small group. We sometimes refer to this investigative group
process as our “Journey to the Center” group, which has been meeting for about
three years. We have been examining various training models along the continuum
from a mentorship model of training to a more structured and traditional training
model. At the last meeting of our “Journey to the Center” group, most of our group
members tentatively arrived at a mid-point model between the two poles – a model in
which a trainee would have both a mentor for individualized training and also a more
structured series of mandatory seminars and/or practica.
The overall question that PNSJA has been posing to itself, which includes the question
of whether to train analytic candidates or not, is “What is our relationship to the
larger Jungian community, and to the general psychotherapeutic and lay
communities?” Over the past few years, we have begun to emerge from our selfimposed
introverted group process (which we referred to as as “inside-out”
approach), which was very rich and fruitful for most of our members. We have now
embarked on a more extraverted orientation (which we call our “outside-in”
approach) in relation to the larger community. From both perspectives, we have
rigorously pondered the question of what our role should be, both as a society of
Jungian analysts and as a Jungian training institute. We feel we have made some good
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