Making Contact: Skin, Containment, and the Somatic in Psychic Life

This yearlong study group meets Fridays at St. Clement's Episcopal Church in Berkeley from September 18, 2026, to May 21, 2027, 10AM to 12PM
About this Event

This yearlong study group meets Fridays at St. Clement's Episcopal Church in Berkeley from September 18, 2026, to May 21, 2027, 10 AM to 12 PM.

Course Overview:

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? 

Tuition:

• General Public: $2880 ($500 deposit with registration)
• NCSPP Member Discount: $2240 ($500 deposit with registration)
• NCSPP CMH Member Discount: $2048 ($300 deposit with registration)
• Students: $960 ($300 deposit with registration)

For more details about each section of this event, CE, and general information, please visit https://www.ncspp.org/events/isg-making-contact-skin-containment-and-somatic-psychic-life