Summer Semester, 2025
Group Supervision (PT SU25)
What constitutes psychoanalysis in actual practice? At differing moments in any session or throughout an analysis, any number of concepts might be relevant and offer guideposts for listening, for understanding, and for intervention. Is there a unifying “position of the analyst” that can be construed, no matter from what school of psychoanalytic thought one is operating? How do we listen for the unconscious? What happens when we become invested in the patient’s conscious story? How might be think of the goals of a psychoanalysis and what constitutes “the end of analysis?” Might the dynamics among group participants in(form) us? Such bedrock questions and explorations permeate the work of group supervision.
Summer Semester: Begins Mondays, July 14, 2025 through end of August – 3 PM Mountain Time. Late registrations accepted
Meetings by Zoom.
Tuition: $165, payable to CCMPS
Supervisor: Joseph Scalia III, PsyaD, Clinical Director
TO REGISTER, please go to our registration page and complete the form, or click here>>
Fall Semester, 2025
Treatment in the Trenches:
Modern Psychoanalysis as a psychodynamic invitation for resistant patients. (PT29)
Course Description: Hyman Spotnitz, a neurologist and psychiatrist who came from the streets and became a psychoanalyst in the mid-20th-century, didn’t buy the psychoanalytic axiom that certain populations are “un-analyzable.” Synthesizing existent theories of mind and character development, he devised the “theory of practice” called Modern Psychoanalysis. This school of clinical thought emphasizes an understanding and utilization of transferences, to address resistances which had been cited by many analysts as evidence that some patients were impossible to treat psychoanalytically. In our current era, when huge swaths of our cultural citizenry would seem…to the detriment of individuals, relationships, and social fabric… to be “un-analyzable” or even “non-psychologically-oriented,” Spotnitz’s clinical legacy is of heightened significance and potential.
This course will familiarize the student with the fundamental practice-considerations of Modern Psychoanalysis. We will also survey the particular psychoanalytic precursors and contemporaries that influenced or complemented the development of Modern Psychoanalysis.
In keeping with Modern Psychoanalysis’s legacy of synthesizing in service of clinical efficacy, we will think together about ways in which current streams of thought and practice resonate with the understandings of Modern Psychoanalysis.
While we will emphasize clinical considerations, there is no requirement for students in this class to have had previous experience in psychoanalytic practice. A number of articles will be provided for reading and discussion by students.
Fall Semester: Begins Monday, September 15, 2025, 9:45-11:00 AM Mountain Time for 15 weeks
Meetings by Zoom.
Tuition: $500, payable to CCMPS
Instructor: Vic Stampley, LCSW, Faculty
TO REGISTER, please go to our registration page and complete the form, or click here>>
The Cure for Psychoanalysis (PT28)
Course Description: What constitutes psychoanalysis? What constitutes a psychoanalyst? What constitutes a psychically sophisticated group and school? These are the three guiding questions of CCMPS.
Adam Phillips’s papers, “The Cure for Psychoanalysis” and “Winnicott’s Magic: Playing and Reality and Reality” both found in his The Cure for Psychoanalysis (2021[2019]); Confer Books, will be one set of two springboards for our explorations of these questions in this seminar.
Our second set of two springboards for our explorations will be certain critical communications in The Spontaneous Gesture: Selected Letters of D. W. Winnicott. Rodman, F. Robert, (ed.,1987). Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England. In this provocative book, Winnicott, who is easily thought of as a gentle man, repeatedly challenges then current psychoanalytic theories and methods. More centrally, he forthrightly and unrelentingly takes on what he sees as disciples of key thinkers. It is in this latter function that he sees the cessation of creativity of psychoanalysts, and an obstruction of ongoing progress in our field.
Phillips asks the following, [and regarding CCMPS’s question of “what would constitute a psychically sophisticated group and school?]: “What would sociability be like among – to use Winnicott’s vocabulary – a group of true selves (or among a group of people who were not excessively false selves)? What would it be like to live in the world less compliantly, or to live in a less compliant world (page 23)?”
Winnicott’s use of the terms/concepts of true self and false self are elucidated, as these are often misunderstood by psychoanalysts, assuming as they do that the terms mean something more pedestrian and quotidian than Winnicott would ever have thought. Helping in that understanding will be Melanie Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position and depressive position, concepts which, like D. W.’s, often suffer oversimplification and distortion. Additionally, we will deploy yet another too easily simplified or merely unknown set of theoretical constructs, W. R. Bion’s work group and basic assumption groups.
The seminal quandaries we will explore will aim to challenge what has come to be expected of psychoanalytic treatment. The course will not only quash notions of relief from presenting problems, but will address unwitting enactments of dogmatism in competing schools of thought.
What do psychoanalysts defend against when we presume to know how the patient can best live their life, or what choices s/he should make? And if not-knowing is an alternative path, what exactly does that mean?
Optional readings:
Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in Groups. London and New York: Routledge.
Bornstein, M. (2004). The Problem of Narcissism in Psychoanalytic Organizations: The Insularity of Power. Psychoanalytic. Inquiry, (24)(1): 71-85.
Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 27: 99-110.
Ibid (1935). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 16:145-174.
Ibid (1940). Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 21:125-153.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self (1960). In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development.
Skolnikoff, A. (2004). The Quest for a Unified Psychoanalytic Theory: A Retreat from Uncertainty. Psychoanalytic Inquiry (24)(1): 86-105.
Spring Semester: Begins Tuesday, September 23, 2025, 12:50 – 1:55 Mountain Time for 15 weeks.
Meetings by Zoom.
Tuition: $500, payable to CCMPS
Instructor: Joseph Scalia III, PsyaD, Faculty
TO REGISTER, please go to our registration page and complete the form, or click here>>
Group Supervision (PT 111N)
What constitutes psychoanalysis in actual practice? At differing moments in any session or throughout an analysis, any number of concepts might be relevant and offer guideposts for listening, for understanding, and for intervention. Is there a unifying “position of the analyst” that can be construed, no matter from what school of psychoanalytic thought one is operating? How do we listen for the unconscious? What happens when we become invested in the patient’s conscious story? How might be think of the goals of a psychoanalysis and what constitutes “the end of analysis?” Might the dynamics among group participants in(form) us? Such bedrock questions and explorations permeate the work of group supervision.
Fall Semester: Begins Mondays, September 29, 2025, 3 PM Mountain Time.
Meetings by Zoom.
Tuition: $500, payable to CCMPS
Supervisor: Joseph Scalia III, PsyaD, Clinical Director
TO REGISTER, please go to our registration page and complete the form, or click here>>
Community Meetings
We strive for a democratic CCMPS where we go beyond psychoanalytic school conventions to include various schools of thought as well as have a multi-disciplinary community in which we participate. We strive to develop a community that doesn’t censor discussions and considerations.
We are changing the format for our Community Meetings to an explicit aim for a democratic psychoanalysis. Non-candidates may attend, but must first meet with Clinical Director Joseph Scalia (scaliaiii@gmail.com), as this is a by invitation only group at this time.
Psychoanalytic Candidates are required to attend a minimum of seven of ten Community Meetings per academic year.
Community meetings by Zoom will be held generally on the 2nd Friday of each month from 3:00 – 4:30 PM Mountain Time. Notices are sent out via newsletter if a meeting is rescheduled.
Get these dates on your calendars for 2025-2026 meetings:
September 5, 2025 (First Friday)
October 10, 2025
November 14, 2025
December 12, 2025
January 9, 2026
February 13, 2026
March 13, 2026
April 10, 2026
May 8, 2026
June 12, 2026
Forthcoming
Freud I
This is the first year-long Freud course of a two-year introduction to psychoanalysis. Freud’s foundational work evolved greatly over the nearly fifty years of his prolific writings, openly correcting himself as he went along in his clinical and theoretical work. His discoveries remain central to much of society’s thinking in the twenty-first century, even when its effects are unbeknownst to us. Concepts will be taught and discussed in an experience-near way, moving back and forth between esoteric theory and everyday living. We will bring to life what Freud meant by the adjective when he referred to the three “impossible” professions being psychoanalysis, teaching, and governance; and similarly, why psychoanalysis and philosophy are the foundations from which civilization has any chance of surviving in a livable manner. Key Freudian terms and concepts, often misused in general culture and in the mental health world, will be rigorously studied and discussed.
Meetings by Zoom.
Initial reading assignments will be provided to students upon registration. Readings along the way will be determined by the progression of students’ and the class’s needs.
Instructor: Joseph Scalia III, Psya.D., Clinical Director
—–Prior Offerings—–
April 11, 2025 Community Meeting
Must We Drown in the Wake?
Notes on Addressing Racism in Psychoanalytic Institutes
From the abstract: In response to the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis report that tells us that “action is needed at all levels,” a series of questions and concepts are explored to discern whether activism, and particularly activism addressing racism, is possible within the field of psychoanalysis.
About: Tracy Morgan is a psychoanalyst working with groups, individuals and couples in Brooklyn. She is on the faculty at the Center for Modern Psychoanalysis in NYC, has studied intensively with what was once called The Group Center and is now the Center for Group Studies, and was a founding member of Das Unbehagen in NYC. She is ABD in American History with a focus on African American history, the history of medicine and the history of sexuality. Her writings scan various fields—from movement theory to psychoanalysis. She is the founding editor of New Books in Psychoanalysis, founded over 15 years ago.
Please join us for the Friday, April 11 CCMPS Community Meeting 3 pm Mountain Time, 5 pm Eastern Time.
Tracy D. Morgan, Psychoanalyst, LCSW-R, M.Phil., has written a provocative and courageous piece published in Group and we are excited to have a conversation with her in April.
Invitation:
It’s fine if you haven’t attended a CCMPS Community Meeting before, guests are welcome.
There is no $charge$. There is no need to formally register, just make sure you’ve got the time, date, and Zoom link. You are encouraged to read the article before the meeting. You can do that by writing to staff.ccmps@gmail.com
Transference and Countertransference (PT17A)
The class focuses on one of two key concepts that define psychoanalysis as different and separate from all other forms of talk-based therapy. Freud’s discovery of transference, and its complement, countertransference, is central to the psychoanalytic understanding of mental processes. Managing and exploring transference is central to all schools of clinical technique.
The course will begin with readings of the evolution of the concept in classical analysis, and then will graduate to the more hands-on subject of how to observe and manage it in the setting of psychoanalytic therapy. This course will devote a good deal of its focus to the contributions from the Modern school of technique. Specifically, the narcissistic transference, countertransference resistance, and the utility of induced feeling states will be presented as tools for the practicing analyst.
Spring Semester: Begins Wednesday, January 15, 2024, 9:00 – 10:15 AM Mountain Standard Time, for 15 weeks. CEU’s will be given.
Meetings by Zoom.
Tuition: $500, payable to CCMPS
Instructor: Lynn Irwin, PsyaD, Faculty
TO REGISTER, please go to our registration page and complete the form, or click here>>
The Work of Christopher Bollas (PT26)
We will study Christopher Bollas’s thinking throughout his extensive oeuvre, from Freud through Winnicott, Bion, Klein, and Lacan, and into his later civilizational analyses and interventions.
Among possible other readings, we will look closely at chapters from Shadow of the Object, Hysteria, China on the Mind, Meaning and Melancholia, and his forthcoming two-volume Streams of Consciousness: Notebooks.
Spring Semester: Begins Tuesday, January 14, 2024, 12:50 – 1:55 PM Mountain Standard Time, for 15 weeks. Holidays to be announced as per the instructor’s evolving schedule. The instructor will be away two or three undetermined weeks through the semester, so the course will end at approximately late April to early May. CEU’s will be given.
Meetings by Zoom.
Tuition: $500, payable to CCMPS
Initial reading assignments will be provided to students upon registration. Readings along the way will be determined by the progression of students’ and the class’s needs.
Instructor: Joseph Scalia III, PsyaD, Clinical Director
TO REGISTER, please go to our registration page and complete the form, or click here>>
Community Meetings
We hope for a democratic CCMPS where we go beyond psychoanalytic school conventions to include various schools of thought as well as have a multi-disciplinary community in which we participate. We strive to develop a community that doesn’t censor discussions and considerations. You do not have to be enrolled at CCMPS to participate. There is no cost.
Community meetings by Zoom will be held generally on the 2nd Friday of each month from 3:00 – 4:30 PM Mountain Time. Get these dates on your calendars for upcoming meetings:
January 10, 2025*
February 14, 2025
March 14, 2025
April 11, 2025
May 9, 2025
Meetings are facilitated by Lynne & Joseph Scalia.
Group Supervision (PT 111M)
What constitutes psychoanalysis in actual practice? At differing moments in any session or throughout an analysis, any number of concepts might be relevant and offer guideposts for listening, for understanding, and for intervention. Is there a unifying “position of the analyst” that can be construed, no matter from what school of psychoanalytic thought one is operating? How do we listen for the unconscious? What happens when we become invested in the patient’s conscious story? How might be think of the goals of a psychoanalysis and what constitutes “the end of analysis?” Might the dynamics among group participants in(form) us? Such bedrock questions and explorations permeate the work of group supervision.
Spring Semester: Begins Mondays, January 13, 3 PM Mountain Time.
Meetings by Zoom.
Tuition: $500, payable to CCMPS
Supervisor: Joseph Scalia III, PsyaD, Clinical Director
TO REGISTER, please go to our registration page and complete the form, or click here>>
Fall Semester, 2024 (PT25)
Psychotic Savoir for the Clinic, for Civilization, and for Earth
The psychotic never experiences society’s story of itself as sensible, coherent, or mentally organizing. That is the case because the existence of mentally unrepresented senses of the world and of life are not accounted for by what the “paternal function” or the “masculine” tells us is reality. To not know that there is life beyond the social order, and to not live that knowledge in one’s bones, renders the psychoanalyst impotent. And our collective ignorance of the “feminine” – that which the paternal order cannot tell us – greatly imperils what might respectfully be called terra and demos. A knowing-beyond is what this course is calling “psychotic savoir.”
To live creatively as opposed to pathologically, the neurotic must overcome her/his tendency to believe the story, a story in which s/he takes refuge for the sake of belonging and social acceptance. In contrast, the psychotic must find a way to live generatively with the unmodulated verity of society’s false security, presumptuousness, and arrogance. It is in that undertaking that the psychotic might find a way beyond delusion, a way to a meaningful life contributing to society’s advancement. Is there not a psychotic core in all of us? Do we not all experience what Winnicott called the unthinkable anxieties of 1) going to pieces, 2) falling forever, 3) having no relationship to the body, 4) having no orientation?
What do these notions of neurosis and psychosis mean? Why savoir instead of knowledge? Why verity instead of truth? What is it to deeply grasp these meanings of the masculine, and the feminine? The course aims to bring these concepts into experience and wisdom. How do we recognize and then cure ourselves of the terror of the failure of society’s misrepresentations and illusions? In these regards, what is required of us as psychoanalysts and as contemporary world citizens to help move our patients and the human collective, respectively, into another subjectivity than feeble, unconscious capitulation?
It is crucial that we – as psychoanalysts and as contemporary world citizens, withstand violent projective identifications for the sake of the other’s transformation of emotional intensity, and for the sake of an ability to honor the otherness of our kindred. But it is furthermore necessary that we know that there is no full story, that there is always something left out. Additionally, we must come to find this knowledge emancipatory and then generative toward society and Earth. We must stand easily within the masses’ unconscious and apocalyptic refusals of verity. This course argues that, in the 21st century, this third mental space is the most important prerequisite of the psychoanalyst, the activist, and the world citizen.
Significantly, we will engage our topic both intellectually and psychodynamically. That is, firstly, we will attempt to grasp the concepts through the use of intellect. Secondly, we will take account of our individual and group capacities, dis-eases, and unconscious resistances. The latter will require a willingness to confront each other, and to be confronted by oneself and others, regarding blindspots occurring in our thinking and in our narratives of our relations to ourselves and each other.
Reading Assignments will be chosen extemporaneously as the course progresses , but they will center around the thinking of the Analysts of the Freudian School of Quebec, of Christopher Bollas of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, and of Felix Guattari, independent psychoanalyst, philosopher, and activist in the latter part of the 20th century.
Instructor: Joseph Scalia III, Psya.D., Clinical Director
Summer Seminar
Saturday, June 15, 2024, 10 AM to Noon MDT, for Course 2 CEs
Fee $50
to be followed by a group discussion 12:15 to 1:15 MDT
Course Description
Joseph Scalia III, Psya.D. and Vic Stampley, LCSW will engage in a wide-ranging conversation that will especially include a concatenation of object relations and Lacanian theories as they apply to both clinical concerns and contemporary civilization. How do the works of Christopher Bollas, Jacques Lacan, D. W. Winnicott, and W. R. Bion flesh out themes of attention in each of them? How does society, especially today’s global society, affect clinical concerns and our experiences of being human? What are their conscious and unconscious determinants?
Stampley and Scalia have known each other for decades and together engage in a freeform dialogue that covers a lot of ground in a hands-on, experience-near way.
– 12:15-1:15 PM MDT: Following the presentation there will be a CCMPS community meeting from 12:15-1:15 to address the future needs of interested parties, students, and the institute. If this is relevant for you, please plan on attending that meeting to help us gain an understanding of your interests and desires for CCMPS and how we may further assist you.
– Zoom link will be provided on June 14 and 12 AM MDT.