Robert S. Wallerstein (January 28, 1921 – December 21, 2014) was a prominent German born American psychoanalyst. He trained at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, rising to become the foundation’s director of research and conducting a pioneering study called the Psychotherapy Research Project. He moved to the Bay Area in 1966 as the chief of psychiatry at Mount Zion Hospital, then joined the faculty of the UCSF Department of Psychiatry as a professor. Wallerstein served as department chair and director of the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute from 1975-1985, as well as a training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, and president of both the American and International Psychoanalytic Associations.
In addition, he was a prodigious and influential author who penned 20 books and more than 400 scholarly articles. His books included Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis: Theory, Practice, Research (1975), Becoming a Psychoanalyst (1981), Forty-Two Lives in Treatment (1986), The Talking Cures: The Psychoanalyses and the Psychotherapies (1995), Lay Analysis: Life Inside the Controversy (1998), Psychoanalysis: Clinical and Theoretical (1999), and Psychoanalysis: Education, Research, Science, and Profession (2003). In recognition of his outstanding contributions to the field of psychoanalysis, he received the prestigious Sigourney Award in 1991.
Shelley Nathans, PhD, (filmmaker) is a clinical psychologist and has 30 years of experience as an individual and couple psychotherapist, She is a member of the teaching faculty at the California Pacific Medical Center in the Department of Psychiatry. She has completed the Tavistock Center for Couple Relations Advanced Training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with Couples, is a faculty member of the Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy Group study program, is on the International Advisory Board for the Journal, Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, and is on the Board of Section VIII, Division 39 (the section for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Couples and Families of the American Psychological Association).