This introductory event to NCSPP’s year-long Intensive Study Group (ISG), which will run from September-May, features the course’s five instructors—Kristian Kemtrup, David Gatta, Maiga Berzins, Mary Margaret McClure, and Alice Jones—in conversation on this year’s theme, Making Contact: Skin, Containment, and the Somatic in Psychic Life. Instructors will provide an introduction to the concept of “psychoanalytic skin,” highlight foundational underlying theory and thought-provoking perspectives on the topic, and invite discussion and associations from participants.

If you’re considering registering for the 2026-27 ISG, this is an opportunity to bring your questions and thoughts into conversation with the instructors.

To read more about our instructors and the themes of each section of the upcoming ISG, please visit the ISG webpage.

ISG Year-Long Course Description
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?

Faculty Bios

Kristian Kemtrup, LMFT, PhD, 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, PsyD, 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, PsyD, 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, MD, 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, DMH, is a psychoanalyst with a practice in Mill Valley. Most recently at SFCP, where she was trained, she has 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.