The Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis (CCP) is pleased to announce a new series of opportunities for growth, learning, and connection in the 2026 – 2027 Psychoanalytic Explorations program.

Each of the Psychoanalytic Explorations courses is open to all and allows participants to learn from seasoned psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically-oriented practitioners who have selected topics based on their particular interests and expertise.

Six different 12-hour courses will be offered in the upcoming academic year. Most will meet virtually (please check the information for each course), for two hours on six weekly dates. Class size is highly limited in order to facilitate each individual’s learning and participation. There is a separate registration process for each class; you may register for one or more classes, depending on your own interests and needs.

Twelve (12) Illinois CE credits are available for each course. All CCP programs and course offerings qualify for (Illinois) Continuing Education (CE) credits for LCSW, LCPC, PhD, PsyD, and LMFT licensed clinicians. The cost of each course is $500.00. If you would like more information, please contact Derrick Hassert, PhD, Chair of the Psychoanalytic Explorations Program at: DerrickHassertPhD@outlook.com.

(Please note:  Refunds for registrations cancelled at least 3 weeks before a course begins are issued as credit for CCP memberships, courses, and programs.  There are no refunds for registrations cancelled within 3 weeks of a course’s start date.)

 

Course Title: Trauma, Shame, and Mourning (12 CE Credits, IL)

Instructor: Peter Shabad, Ph.D

Meeting dates (2026): Oct 27, Nov 3, 10, 17, Dec 1, Dec 8

Meeting Time: Tuesdays; 7:00 PM–9:00 PM CST

Location: via Zoom

In this course, we will explore how traumatic and chronically disillusioning experiences have profoundly inhibiting effects on the passion necessary to grow and change throughout life. We will devote special attention to how human beings transform their traumatic experiences outside of their control into shameful failures, in which they “blame the victim” in themselves for being a victim. After describing how the “intimate creation” of one’s unique constellation of symptoms is a means of both communicating and memorializing such traumatic experiences, we will examine how shame leads to character passivity and interrelated dynamics such as self-pity, resentment, entitlement, envy, perverse spite, and regret. In the clinical section of the course, we will explore how the patient’s passivity and ambivalence towards therapeutic change is closely intertwined with his/her chronic struggle between the freedom to desire and obeying a tyranny of shoulds. In this regard, we will also highlight important clinical tensions between developmental determinism and freedom of will, and corresponding countertransference tensions of love versus respect in the analyst’s attitude toward the patient. Finally, we will discuss how the mourning process of accepting and reintegrating one’s shamed desires paradoxically facilitates the generosity of relinquishing the necessity that those desires be fulfilled. In addition to analytic readings, we will also read Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych.

Biographical information:

Peter Shabad is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at Northwestern University Medical School. He is also on the Faculty of the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago and the Teaching and Supervisory Faculty of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. He is a also a Training Analyst at the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. He is an Associate Editor for Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Dr. Shabad is co-editor of The Problem of Loss and Mourning: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (IUP,1989) and is the author of Despair and the Return of Hope: Echoes of Mourning in Psychotherapy (Aronson, 2001). Dr. Shabad new book entitled “Passion, Shame, and The Freedom To Become was published by Routledge (2024). He is also the author of numerous papers and book chapters in psychoanalysis on diverse topics such as loss and mourning, shame, resentment, and regret. Dr. Shabad has a private practice in Chicago in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy.

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Course Title: Psychoanalysis and Philosophy: How Reading Philosophy Can Deepen Your Understanding of Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice 

Instructor: Philip Bestrom, MA, LCSW 

Meeting dates (2027): January 2027: 5, 12, 19, 26; February 2 & 9  

Meeting Time: Tuesdays 7:00 PM –9:00 PM Central Time 

Location: via Zoom

Description: Many contemporary psychoanalytic theoreticians have been influenced by philosophical works.  Often when reading psychoanalytic articles, we come across names we recognize but have never read directly.  These original philosophical works can often be unfamiliar to many clinicians who have had limited exposure to reading philosophy.  In this seminar I will introduce you to some of these philosophical works.  In the first half of each meeting, we will focus on a specific philosopher and read passages from their work.  I will also provide some overview and background of these philosophers.  For this seminar we will mostly focus on existential philosophers.  In the second half of each meeting we will turn to the work of a psychoanalyst who has been influenced by that philosopher.  This will include Peter Shabad, Robert Stolorow, and Frank Summers among others.  By reading the philosopher’s original work I hope you may be inspired and gain the confidence to continue exploring their work and its connection with contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice.  I will also suggest secondary resources that provide more accessibility.   Additionally, reading philosophy also helps us understand our own personal ideals, clinical values, and organizing principles which will be explored in this seminar.  All readings will be provided by pdf.   

Tentative Outline: 

Week 1.  Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or and The Present Age 

Week 2.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra 

Week 3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time 

Week 4.  Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness and “No Exit” 

Week 5. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ambiguity of Ethics 

Week 6.  Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel 

Biographical Information: 

Philip Bestrom is a licensed clinical social worker and psychoanalytic psychotherapist.  He is a graduate of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis training program.  He worked for ten years as a community psychiatric social worker and is now in private practice.  He is licensed in Illinois and Michigan.

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Course Title: What Holds the Clinical Encounter: Frames, Settings, Encuadres (12 CE Credits, IL)

Instructor: Edurne Chopeitia, MBA, CMHC

Meeting dates (2027): January 23, 30; February 6, 13, 20, 27,

Meeting Time: Saturdays; 9:00 AM–11:00 AM CST

Location: via Zoom

Course Description:

A decision is made about phone versus video. A fee has to be raised. A vacation interrupts a difficult stretch of treatment. A first email arrives before we have ever heard the person's voice. A supervisor suggests the patient would benefit from higher frequency. One patient notices our new hair color; another, punctual to every session, is inexplicably late. Moments like these are usually treated as logistics, administrative details to be managed so that the "real" therapeutic work can proceed. This course proposes instead that they are crucial to our work: they reveal the work of the unconscious. Every treatment rests on quiet constants: the room and its furniture, the frequency of sessions, the fees, the theories we hold dear, our psychoanalytic heroes, even our accents and the languages we speak; from the material arrangement of the office to the societal structures that make treatment possible. Thinking analytically about these decisions, and about their shifts and turns, provides clinicians with a powerful instrument for understanding their patients and themselves.

Working from the clinic toward theory, we will take up questions every practitioner face: What do we agree to when we begin a treatment, and how do we unveil what remains unspoken? Why do some patients (and some therapists) experience a schedule change as catastrophic while others barely register it? What travels with us when the office becomes a shared screen? What are our own implicit constants, and when do they become our blind spots? Our guide will be the Argentinian psychoanalyst José Bleger, whose classic paper on the encuadre (translated as both "frame" and "setting") proposed that what stays constant in a treatment quietly houses the earliest, most undifferentiated layers of the personality. Building on this insight, the course treats the frame as a source of invaluable clues about who the patient is, their relational patterns, and possibilities for growth. Reading Bleger's pioneering paper closely, in conversation with analysts from other traditions and with vignettes brought by the instructor and participants, we will build a shared vocabulary for the frames at play in every treatment and for the clinical decisions they demand. All clinical material will consist of composites or fully de-identified vignettes. We will learn to recognize when the frame is silently doing its work, to read the meanings that surface when it shifts or breaks, and to put those meanings to clinical use.

Biographical Information:

Edurne Chopeitia, MBA, CMHC is Visiting Faculty at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, where she previously taught the Psychoanalytic Explorations course "Our Therapeutic Frames and Settings" (2025). A clinical psychologist trained in Uruguay who has lived in the United States for over 25 years, she is a candidate in the graduation phase of the Adult Psychoanalytic Program at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute, where she recently presented the case conference "What Holds the Work: A Clinical Translation of the Psychoanalytic Setting," following a completed analysis from first contact to termination. Her teaching focuses on the encuadre (the psychoanalytic frame in the tradition of José Bleger and the Río de la Plata school) and its translation into contemporary North American practice, including teletherapy and hybrid settings. She was previously Adjunct Faculty at the Universidad Católica del Uruguay (UCUDAL), teaching Psychodynamic Assessment and Psychodiagnosis, Psychodynamic Organizational Psychology, and Psychoanalytic Psychopathology. She maintains a private practice in Georgia, offering brief and long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy, mother-baby and perinatal therapies, and consultation to adults and couples, in person and teletherapy, in English and Spanish.

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Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis: The Anxiety of Not-Knowing (12 CE credits, IL)

Instructor: Zak Mucha, LCSW

Meeting dates (2027): March 13, 20, 27, April 3, 10, 17

Meeting Time: Saturday 10 AM-12 PM

Location: TBA

Course Description:

In this course we will explore how the philosophy of Zen Buddhism parallels the practice of psychoanalysis. While Zen Buddhism declares “life is suffering” and Freud announced the goal of psychoanalysis was to transform “hysterical misery into common unhappiness,” both practices can change how we relate to our own pain and anxiety.

Zen is not about achieving a blissful state without desire, nor is it a nihilistic stance toward the inequities of the world and the anxieties provoked by the cultural demands to know everything – from daily caloric and protein intakes to the matrices supporting alleged global conspiracies.

We will discuss the writings of Wilfred Bion, Karen Horney, and Eric Fromm to see where their work supports the terrible freedom of “not-knowing” as a solution to our anxieties. We will also consider the writings of Shunryu Suzuki and Charlotte Joko Beck to develop a basic understanding of how Zen principles can deepen our clinical practices, reduce our suffering, and allow us to take part in the world.

Biographical Information:

Zak Mucha, LCSW, is a psychoanalyst and recent board president of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. He spent seven years working as the supervisor of an Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) program, providing 24/7 services to persons suffering from severe psychosis, substance abuse issues, and homelessness. He is also the author of Emotional Abuse: A Manual for Self-Defense as well as Swimming to the Horizon: Crack, Psychosis, and Street-Corner Social Work and two collections of poetry.

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