Our Mission
Exploring psychology, in depth, inside and outside the consulting room.
Our story
Stillpoint Spaces was founded by psychotherapists who are passionate about re-imagining psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for the 21st century. We are committed to creating the conditions to reflect, think, and engage psychologically within our complex and changing world.
Through our spaces in Berlin, London, Paris, and Zurich, and internationally online, we offer a community for psychologically curious members of the public through our events, workshops, online content, and access to our professional members who are coaches and counsellors around the world.
Creating community for counsellors, coaches, and psychologically curious members of the public across the world.
While not a panacea, we recognise that insights from depth psychology can help us reflect and engage with life’s complexities, contradictions, and challenges.
Welcoming of multiplicity of identities, ideas, disciplines, and points of view and addressing the perspective of the individual as well as that of groups, cultures, and diverse communities. We stand stand against racism in all its forms and endeavour to be an anti-racist organisation.
Creating opportunities to explore ourselves, each other, culture, and politics through the lens of depth psychology.
While honouring the roots of our discipline which emerged at the end of the 19th century, we also recognise that it needs to change and adapt to the modern world with integrity and authenticity.
Pushing the limits of psychological engagement beyond the consulting room and making it more widely available to the public through education, events, content, and other creative applications.
We stand in solidarity against racism and oppression
Stillpoint Spaces is founded upon the principles of creating reflective spaces for difficult conversations. In a context of such grave social injustice, organisations like ours have to work even harder to ensure that we are actively anti-racist in the spaces we provide
We put together a list of organisations and learning material you can start with.
The Lab
While today we are fortunate enough to meet in our beautiful City Spaces, our early days had a more humble start in the bars and cafes of Berlin, London, and Zurich where we ran a series of “happenings” called Psychoanalysis on the Streets. We invited psychologically curious members of the public to join us in exploring psychoanalytic ideas as applied to today’s concerns like politics, sex, money, and technology.
From those experiences we developed a committed community who were interested in experimenting with exploring psychology “outside the consulting room”. We began to refer to this conceptual space as “The Lab” – a term we continue to use to describe our international community’s activities in its spaces and online.
Who we are
Stillpoint Spaces is made of its members, from our professional members in our City Spaces across the world via our online directory, to our coworkers and others who attend our events across four cities and online. Stillpoint Spaces’s vision is led by its three partners:
Aaron Balick
Aaron Balick is a psychotherapist, supervisor, university lecturer, and author. Aaron’s passion for sharing ideas from depth psychology to modernity in innovative ways is evident from his work on TV and radio, and through his book The Psychodynamics of Social Networking. Aaron is Stillpoint Spaces’ International Director and he oversees our city spaces in Berlin, London, and Paris.
Alessandra di Montezemolo
Alessandra di Montezemolo is a clinical psychologist and jungian analyst based in Paris. Alessandra had a double career as a psychoanalyst on one side, with extensive experience in business, in management positions for international companies, on the other. As a psychoanalyst actively engaged in today's multicultural world, she is interested in building bridges between humanities, social sciences and the different psychological approaches for a deeper understanding of contemporary society's complexity. Alessandra joined the founders of Stillpoint Spaces (Zurich, Berlin, London) in December 2016 as their partner for Paris where she opened the spaces in September 2017.
Stephen Setterberg
Stephen Setterberg, a founder of Stillpoint Spaces International, is a psychiatric physician, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, supervisor, and entrepreneur. In addition to creating, developing, or directing multiple psychiatric hospitals and clinics – the PrairieCare network in Minnesota and the Bay Area Clinical Associates in California – he advocates utilizing depth psychological insights to impact problematic biopolitical conditions, in his case through social enterprises such as Confer, Stillpoint Engage, and Stillpoint Spaces International.
Our research
Stillpoint Spaces originally set up its online platform, MyStillpoint, to connect its members who were geographically distributed across the world. Supporting online counselling was not an uncontroversial decision for us at the time, but we recognised it was a crucial tool in our globalised world. Sharing a mix of excitement and reservation about working therapeutically online, we ran a pilot research project to enable us to critically think through the challenges working online responsibly and ethically.
Through this research we learned that therapists working online can support the integrity of their practice by maintaining an open dialogue with others about the process. Today, all of our members can freely access our innovative online facilitated “intervision” sessions, facilitated online peer supervision, when supports and enhances online therapeutic practice.
Our partners
Stillpoint Spaces is part of a larger family of organisations founded around principles of psychology, global engagement, and mental health.
PrairieCare PLC
Stillpoint Spaces could not exist without the generosity of PrairieCare, a provider of psychiatric services in the Greater Minneapolis area in Minnesota, USA. PrairieCare and its founder (and ours), Stephen Setterberg, provided both seed funding and continued support and expertise for us to create the opportunity to explore psychoanalysis and related disciplines in innovative and exciting ways.
Stillpoint Engage
Stillpoint Engage is a non-profit organisation utilising multidimensional approaches, grounded in depth psychology, with the aim to alleviate human suffering in post-conflict and underserved communities around the world. Based in Minneapolis, USA, Stillpoint Engage works collaboratively with PrairieCare and Stillpoint Spaces International in its humanitarian projects based in both the USA and in Europe.
Stillpoint Magazine
Stillpoint Magazine, supported by PraireCare Institute’s Centre for Applied Psychoanalysis, is an independent quarterly digital magazine committed to creating cutting-edge, psychologically grounded content, dedicated to expanding widespread public engagement with complex ideas, topics, and artwork.
Confer
CONFER is an independent organisation established by psychotherapists in 1998 to provide innovative, challenging and inspiring continuing educational events for psychotherapists, psychologists and other mental health workers. Its seminar leaders and panels are chosen from the most experienced practitioners and contemporary theorists to present the latest research findings and theoretical developments.
Karnac
Karnac Books is dedicated to psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and related subjects such as organisations, family, child, and adolescent studies.