Our
Society
LAISPS provides its members and candidates with a warm, collegial professional home. It is a place for intellectual stimulation, professional networking, and deep personal friendships. From the first year of training, candidates are invited to participate in the daily operation of the organization. Upon graduation, they become full members of the Society with voting privileges and are encouraged to contribute to its development and vitality by assuming positions of leadership.
In addition to fostering the growth of its members and candidates, LAISPS is committed to providing psychoanalytic education to the mental health community through the following programs:
The Extension Division offers one-year courses in Eating Disorders, Trauma Studies, and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy as well as briefer topical seminars in psychoanalytic theory, technique, and applied psychoanalysis.
Scientific Programs and Workshops provide an opportunity for members and candidates, as well as local, national, and international psychoanalysts to present original psychoanalytic papers. Weekend workshops allow for more extensive study of special topics.
LAISPS is also dedicated to providing community outreach programs that apply psychoanalytic thinking to social problems and to the needs of the community at large.
The Ernest S. Lawrence Trauma Center brings psychoanalytic understanding to underserved groups in the community. The Center’s projects are run by volunteer licensed clinicians who provide free psychoanalytically-informed psychological services to “at-risk” populations as well as educational presentations to the community at large.
Professionals Affiliated with LAISPS (PALS) offers psychotherapists and other interested professionals an opportunity to deepen their understanding of psychoanalysis in an informal setting and to participate in special events and activities at LAISPS.
The LAISPS Student Society offers graduate students and interns an opportunity to explore psychoanalytic thinking in friendly, informal gatherings and and be mentored by clinicians experienced in the field of psychoanalysis.
The LAISPS Referral Service offers affordable psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis to individuals in the community.
The LAISPS Affiliate Society Membership offers an opportunity to licensed clinicians to learn from members of LAISPS and like-minded colleagues, share clinical issues, and engage in professional networking.
Diversity at LaiSps
Statement on the ‘Black Lives Matter’ Movement, Anti-Racism, and the Role of LAISPS in this Historic Moment
Since the beginning of 2020, the global community has been wracked with the COVID-19 world-wide viral pandemic, as well as associated economic and social upheavals. In the US, unemployment rates have been unprecedented, on par only with numbers and suffering seen during the Great Depression. In a testament to deep-seated, refractory societal inequities, these calamitous developments have disproportionally affected people of colour; working- and lower-class peoples; and those of the growing under-class, such as the large homeless population across the US, including a significant and growing number in Los Angeles.
Significantly, long-standing issues of serious social injustice have yet again burst into the mainstream with the high- profile killings of African-Americans, including George Floyd, Ahamud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade. These murders have mobilised the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, prompting protests not only across the US, but world-wide.
The LAISPS community unequivocally condemns the historical and systematic injustices suffered by marginalised groups and individuals, as well as the manifestations of white supremacy and the oppression of others in all of its expressions.
At this historic moment, LAISPS renews its commitment to foster a genuinely searching, inclusive, diverse, anti-racist society.
By extension, this includes LAISPS dedicating itself, as an organization, to these goals, including greater inclusivity and diversity within its membership. We commit to a rigorous examination of our own institutional practices with a willingness to identify and address any racism in our teaching, supervision, and clinical praxis.
Cornerstones of the psychoanalytical project include recognising how profoundly the past informs the present, remembering what we wish to forget, and facing the truth. As our nation reckons with its inheritance, so too does our Institute. Addressing racism and inequality will be difficult, sensitive, and long-term projects. At times, it also involves a disciplined introspection into our own conscious and unconscious racial biases. As inheritors of the psychoanalytical movement, we are mindful of, and sensitive to, those groups which have experienced exclusion by and even oppression from the psychoanalytical project. As psychoanalysts, our values are based on a deep respect and curiosity for individual and group differences. Through our commitment to listening, to empathy, and to seek emotional and psychological truths, we value diversity and affirm human equality. LAISPS remains committed not only to sustaining and promoting such values and ethics, but also to establish policies and procedures that promote the awareness of racism and inequality. Overcoming internalised and institutionalised racism requires constant vigilance and openness to discovery – of self and of other – through dialogue.
We believe psychoanalysis has an important role to play in fighting for a more just, equal, and free world.
Our
Affiliations

IPA is the world’s primary accrediting and regulatory body for the profession of psychoanalysis. Founded in 1910, it is the oldest, largest, and most respected organization of psychoanalysts. Its mission is to advance psychoanalysis by ensuring the highest standards of training and practice. LAISPS became a full component of IPA in 1995.
http://www.ipa.org.uk
The Confederation of Independent Psychoanalytic Society
CIPS is an organization of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic societies, founded in 1992 to represent the interests of psychoanalysts belonging to independent component societies of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in the United States. Membership in CIPS is open to all IPA-accredited societies in the United States, and to all members of the IPA who are not affiliated with CIPS through membership in a CIPS component society.
http://www.cipsusa.org


The Accreditation Council for Psychoanalytic Education (ACPEinc.) is an autonomous not for profit accrediting agency that was established in 2001 by The Psychoanalytic Consortium to implements its Standards for Psychoanalytic Education. The ACPEinc accredits psychoanalytic education institutions. It assesses how well each psychoanalytic institute or training program implements the Standards of Psychoanalytic Education in light of its distinctive theory and training tradition. External accreditation of an institute or training program provides parity with colleagues in other academic and health care disciplines. It supports common educational standards and guidelines; and it encourages conversation among diverse schools, and cooperative scientific investigation.
http://www.acpeinc.org