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.
CCMPS is an innovative distance learning training institute that has been in existence for over 45 years.