Spring Semester, 2025
Finding the Words for Trauma (PT7A)
With the term trauma being invoked so cavalierly of late, the word has become flimsy and subject to misappropriation and cultural ridicule. Yet we know the reality of it when we feel it in ourselves and in our patients. So how can we define it? Can the words be found to name this unnameable? We need a definition that includes PTSD but goes beyond, informed by psychoanalytic and neuroscientific perspectives.
As if defining trauma were not a sufficiently impossible task, how then does psychoanalysis and all psychotherapy – the talking cure –foster our patients’ capacity to verbalize their trauma, given that trauma manifests in human experience outside of language-based conceptualization, in the register Lacan calls the Real?
Prerequisites: Given the course description, the first prerequisite is the capacity to sustain (possibly even enjoy?) involvement in an impossible endeavor. Ideally this class will include students of diverse clinical, theoretical, and personal backgrounds, so the capacity to learn from each other is a class requirement.
Spring Semester: Begins Monday, January 13, 2024, 9:30 – 10:45 AM Mountain Standard Time, for 15 weeks. CEU’s will be given.
Meetings by Zoom.
Tuition: $500, payable to CCMPS
Instructor: Victor Stampley, MSW, Faculty
TO REGISTER, please go to our registration page and complete the form, or click here>>
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>>
Prior Offerings:
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
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.