NCSPP Corner
by Sullivan Oakley, Psy.D.
2026 - 2027 YEARLONG INTENSIVE STUDY GROUP: MAKING CONTACT: SKIN, CONTAINMENT, AND THE SOMATIC IN PSYCHIC LIFE
Fridays, September 18th, 2026 - May 21st, 2027 | 10:00 am - 12:00 pm | In-person
St. Clement’s Episcopal Church
2837 Claremont Blvd, Berkeley, CA 94705
Faculty: Kristian Kemtrup, LMFT, Ph.D.; David T. Gatta, Psy.D.; Maiga Berzins, Psy.D.; Alice Jones, M.D.; Mary Margaret McClure, D.M.H.
Skin is the threshold of contact–where internal and external realities meet and are continually re-negotiated. It embodies the possibility of reaching out and being touched and 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 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 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 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, and explore ways in which psychic skin might be restored so that greater cohesion, continuity, and vitality emerge.