Making Contact: Skin, Containment, and the Somatic in Psychic Life
From September 18, 2026 – May 21, 2027
Skin is the threshold of contact – the site where internal and external realities meet and are continually re-negotiated. It is both what holds experience together and exposes us. Skin embodies the possibility of reaching out and being touched as well as the inherent vulnerability this entails. At this sensory threshold, experience is not only represented in thought or language, but registered in states of the body–dissociation, disconnection, overwhelm, enactment–which resist easy interpretation. This year-long intensive invites clinicians to think more closely about the edge of experience, where psychic life is most fragile and most alive, and how skin becomes a site of transformation.
The course will examine how the skin-ego constitutes psychic life and what is at stake when this organizing membrane is strained or fails. We will explore clinical states ranging from fragmentation and disintegration in trauma and psychosis to defensive characterological organizations, including authoritarian structures and false-self formations that substitute containment for aliveness. We will also consider the literal skin as a surface of inscription and projection, where personal and cultural anxieties play out and processes ranging from meaningful contact to dehumanization are enacted.
The course will ask how psychic skin might be supported and rebuilt – through touch, sound, rhythm, and relational presence. It will draw on psychoanalytic concepts such as adhesive identification, psychic retreats, and pseudo-vitality to think about the ways containment is structured, defended, and lost. Taken together, these frameworks raise a critical question for clinical practice: how might psychic skin be restored so that greater cohesion, continuity, and vitality emerge?
For details about this year's ISG Introductory Event and to register, please click here.
Course Segments
I. On Skin: The Development of Psychological Skin and the Psychopathology of Being Flayed
Instructor: Kristian Kemtrup, LMFT, Ph.D., 8 weeks
II. Psychic Skin-Psychic Space: Barriers to Contact at the Interface Between Mind, Body, and World
Instructor: David Gatta, Psy.D., 8 weeks
III. Touch and the Skin-Ego: Containment and Disintegration
Instructor: Maiga Berzins, Psy.D., 8 weeks
IV. Listening
Instructor: Alice Jones, M.D., 4 weeks
V. Skin: Connections and Boundaries of Mind and Body in the Clinical Encounter
Instructor: Mary Margaret McClure, D.M.H., 4 weeks
Click here for individual course descriptions and more detailed information about ISG segments.
Instructor Bios
Kristian Kemtrup, LMFT, Ph.D., is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist working in the Berkeley, Albany area, seeing adults, teens, and couples. He has a PhD in philosophy and taught at San Francisco State University for 20 years.
David T. Gatta, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Oakland. He teaches on the topics of primitive mental states, oneiric field theory, and both Italian and Greenian psychoanalysis. He is faculty at SFCP and Access Institute.
Maiga Berzins, Psy.D., is a clinical and supervising psychologist who specializes in treating patients in state hospitals and community mental health settings. Her work in these settings is primarily focused on psychosis, trauma, and aggression. She also has a small private practice treating adults from a relational perspective. She is passionate about applying analytic and relational theory to inpatient and forensic treatment.
Alice Jones, M.D., is a personal and consulting analyst at SFCP. She is the author of several collections of poems and most recently of a memoir, "Cadence of Vanishing." A collection of essays on poetry and psychoanalysis is forthcoming in 2026.
Mary Margaret McClure, D.M.H., is a psychoanalyst with a practice in Mill Valley. Most recently at SFCP, where she was trained, she taught the class “Early Childhood Development with Culture in Mind”. She also works as a consultant to Canal Alliance, a non-profit in San Rafael, serving the Latino immigrant population.
NCSPP is aware that historically psychoanalysis has either excluded or pathologized groups outside of the dominant population in terms of age, race, ethnicity, nationality, language, gender, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, disability, and size. As an organization, we are committed to bringing awareness to matters of anti-oppression, inequity, inequality, diversity, and inclusion as they pertain to our educational offerings, our theoretical orientation, our community, and the broader world we all inhabit.
Presenter’s Responses:
Kristian Kemtrup: This course pays special attention to the nature of dehumanization, objectification and projections onto skin as a major source of racial oppression. We will also discuss the ways in which fascistic personality organization fuel and are fueled by various forms of inequality and oppression. The goal is to learn about these topics so as to be better to do more meaningful, understanding, effective clinical work with a wider variety of patients from oppressed groups that experience dehumanization.
David Gatta: Inequality and inequity are ugly consequences of our tendency toward tribalism and although this is an ineluctable reality of human nature it must be constantly interrogated. As Riccardo Lombardi via Matte Blanco teaches us—the unconscious tends toward symmetry and generalization. This functional truth of the unconscious and the mentation created by it leads to the reductive categorization of people and experiences thus giving rise to racism, stereotyping, and tribalism. Psychoanalysis when it is working encourages asymmetry so that psychic change becomes possible. Exploring differences in thoughts, feelings and histories is healthy and necessary for the experience of a ‘vital life’. Every patient no matter the pathology or trauma finds themselves stuck in the confines of repetition, but when the core of one person speaks to the core of another it brings about a connection that can only be made possible because of both similarities and differences. Unfortunately, the polarization of our times has relegated all sides to extremism—out of which—nothing other than violence is possible. The ability to access both/and thinking indicative of the depressive position requires the relinquishment of moral narcissism as well a tolerance for loss and the capacity to experience guilt. This is of course quite difficult if no one is wrong and everyone is right.
We will be focusing heavily on the dialectic between the surface and the interior of experience which has everything to do with the problematics of similarities and differences (symmetry and asymmetry). Identities like experience are never just ‘skin-deep’ so we will explore how self-other dynamics are always in an interplay between what is inside and outside. The unconscious is mute and yet it says things that words cannot capture and words, like any other symbol, always represent more than one thing. The same can be said for identities. However, the tendency to privilege what can be seen and named collapses interpersonal complexity which harms societies and institutions as much as it does individuals.
Maiga Berzins: The topic of skin and touch are closely related to themes of power and inequity, as are the experience of most inpatient populations. It is vital to explore these topics with sensitivity and understanding of the lived experience of the individuals we treat. These topics may also illicit thoughts and feelings in us, specific to our culture, identity and personal history. I strive for the group to welcome all perspectives and engage in curious and open conversation.
Alice Jones: In discussions we are committed to equity and inclusion of all.
Mary Margaret: In discussions we are committed to equity and inclusion of all.
LCSW/MFTs: Courses meet the requirements for 64 hours of continuing education credit for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs, as required by the CA Board of Behavioral Sciences. NCSPP is approved by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (Provider Number 57020), to sponsor continuing education for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs. NCSPP maintains responsibility for this program/course and its content.
Psychologists: Psychologists receive credit through Division 39 upon completion of this course. Division 39 is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Division 39 maintains responsibility for this program and its content.