CCMPS is an institution of psychoanalytic education and formation, as well as a community of thinkers and activists seeking meaningful and oriented lives in a time of societal chaos and planetary degradation. How can we take account of the unconscious, of its effects on the individual and on society, and of society’s influence on unconscious life?
Most known for his exploration of unconscious impacts on the individual’s life, Freud parenthetically said in Civilization and Its Discontents, “One day someone will venture to embark upon a pathology of cultural communities.” Today’s “cultural community” is an era in which the unconscious is replaced by a teaching of rationality, and psychological and existential struggles are treated with a primacy of a psychopharmacological psychiatry. Indeed, we live in a time in which the mind itself is replaced by behavior, “mental” health by “behavioral” health. It is a time of proliferation of isolated and empty lives, in the absence of real contact with one another.
Nonetheless, psychoanalysis endures, in its wading into the unconscious effects on us of our familial, oedipal, and preoedipal lives, while simultaneously interpreting symptoms as encoded experiences of the destructivity and vacuity of collective life. In the words of Franco Berardi, “Interpreting depression is a philosophical, psychoanalytic, and political task. In my opinion, it is the main task that we have to face today.”
At CCMPS, we engage with numerous psychoanalytic schools of thought in our efforts to embrace life. These are exemplified by Modern Psychoanalytic, object relations, Lacanian, Freudian, relational, Jungian, whatever speaks to each of us. And, at the same time, we embrace a multi-disciplinary reflectivity about and interaction with such fields as international studies, education, environmental studies, sociology, anthropology, engineering, law, philosophy, economics, neuroscience, and political studies. In contemporary life, psychoanalysis needs them as much as they need psychoanalysis.
In order to move well into our current century, we look at where clinic meets culture today. At this point in time, our orienting questions are:
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CCMPS is an innovative distance learning training institute that has been in existence for over 45 years.
Classes are held via Zoom.
At CCMPS, we continually struggle to remain open to self- and group-discovery and evolution. In brief, our search for wisdom never ceases, since humility is at the foundation of ethics. Ethics is not about moral imperatives, which are always contingent on the social order in which Codes are declared. Ethics addresses that contingency and how we might live creatively and generatively with it.
Slip of the Pen is the community newsletter. Candidates, alumni, students, and CCMPS community members are encouraged to share updates about their psychoanalytic work, for example, recent papers, speaking events, and other psychoanalytic applications of your work.
Community meetings are held monthly, most months of the year. See Current Offerings for dates and Zoom link.