CCP has become a vital hub for the broader psychoanalytic community in Chicago,
sponsoring public lecture series, study groups, and a thriving fellowship program offered to clinicians and graduate students.
Our Organization |
The Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis is a free-standing, non-profit institute dedicated to the education of psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, and others interested in learning more about the practice of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic therapy, and psychoanalytic theory.
CCP provides a course of study leading to certification in psychoanalysis and a two-year certificate program in psychoanalytic psychotherapy for working professionals. We also offer an ongoing fellowship program for clinicians and graduate students.
In addition to the different training programs, CCP provides affordable clinical consultation services for seasoned clinicians, newly emerging professionals, and students. We also sponsor study groups and offer an annual public lecture series.
CCP’s psychoanalytic training program is incorporated under the laws of the State of Illinois and adheres to Federal and State guidelines regarding nondiscrimination by race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation.
CCP’s training programs provide a broad and deep psychoanalytic education, reflecting diverse clinical, technical, theoretical, and historical points of view. Courses are taught by outstanding educators, many of whom have published and presented extensively in their areas of interest and were chosen to reflect the multiplicity of current theoretical perspectives and models of thought. The curriculum of the different programs offered by CCP is designed to explore the fundamentals of psychoanalytic thought — from the classical to the newest developments in theory and technique.
Our psychoanalytic training program has two tracks, a clinical track for those intending to practice psychoanalysis, and an academic track for serious academic theorists from non-clinical disciplines who seek an immersive program of psychoanalytic study. Individuals who qualify for our clinical track but are not yet able to assume responsibility for a personal analysis and/or formal training cases are also welcome to apply for our academic track. Clinical Candidates in the analytic training program are experienced clinicians prior to beginning their psychoanalytic training, with licensure as psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists or other mental health professionals. Candidates participate fully in all of CCP’s training programs and services. Candidates also serve on the CCP Board and all committees.
Participants in the two-year certificate program in psychoanalytic psychotherapy are usually professionals who provide services to the community, either in private practice or in agency settings. Accommodation can be made, however, for individuals who wish to participate as academics in our Two-Year Program.
Fellows are clinicians, graduate students, and other individuals who are interested in beginning and furthering their psychoanalytic experience in a one-year or ongoing fellowship program. The fellowship program is a non-formal supportive setting, which includes individual mentoring, small-group monthly discussions, and public lectures.
Our affordable clinical consultation services are offered on a sliding scale basis to provide opportunities for learning to seasoned clinicians, newly emerging professionals, and students.
CCP’s annual public lectures consist of five Friday evening presentations (Fridays@CCP), given by national and international faculty, and one or more Sunday mid-day presentations (Sundays@CCP: The Free Forum) given by members of the CCP community and invited guests.
The History of CCP
The Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis was incorporated in 1984 as a nonprofit, certificate-awarding psychoanalytic institute, making it one of the first psychologist-established programs outside of New York City and Los Angeles. As an innovative and independent training institution, its creation represented the culmination of a wide range of social, intellectual, and organizational forces.
The Early Pre-history of CCP
In the late 1950’s, a small group of practicing clinical psychologists established a study group for the purpose of deepening their understanding of psychoanalysis. Although at the time formal psychoanalytic training was barred to psychologists, a number of outstanding psychoanalytic educators, including Heinz Kohut and Bruno Bettelheim, agreed to lead these psychologists in independent seminars outside the confines of their respective formal institutions. While some of these seminars were short-lived, Bruno Bettelheim’s case conference became a sort of de-facto institution within the psychology community in Chicago, meeting monthly for twenty years, from 1952-1972. The members of this seminar, including Maurice Burke, Oliver Kerner, the late Irving Leiden, Joanne Powers, and the late Johanna Tabin, were among the founders of CCP.
Division 39 and the Establishment of Psychologist-Psychoanalytic Institutes
The same clinicians who were instrumental in creating a place for local psychologists to receive psychoanalytic training were also active on the national scene, working within the American Psychological Association to develop a more influential voice for psychoanalytic practitioners, researchers, and theorists. When Division 39, the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association, was created in the late 1970’s, Chicago psychologists Oliver Kerner, Kenneth Isaacs and Bertram Cohler, all of whom were later active in the formation of CCP, were asked to serve on its National Steering Committee.
One of the first orders of business at the initial Division 39 committee meeting in New York City was to focus on meeting the organizational and educational needs of psychologists outside of New York City, Los Angeles, and Topeka, Kansas (where the Menninger Clinic gave psychoanalytic training to psychologists). Kerner, Isaacs and Cohler, who attended this historic meeting, were inspired to establish a formal center for the development of psychoanalytic education and practice in Chicago. Upon their return, they and other interested Chicago-area psychologists started a local chapter of Division 39, known now as the Chicago Association for Psychoanalytic Psychology (CAPP).
The Chicago Association for Psychoanalytic Psychology and its Role in the Founding of CCP
The establishment of CAPP quickly engaged the energies and interests of a large number of clinical psychologists in the Chicago area, and none more actively than the members of the original Bettelheim group, most of whom served as president or board member of CAPP during its early years. These psychologists inaugurated a yearly CAPP symposium, which brought psychoanalytic educators and clinicians such as Roy Schafer, Sidney Blatt, Martin Mayman, Rudolf Ekstein, Bruno Bettelheim, Hedda Bolgar, Sydney Smith, and others to Chicago for all-day presentations and workshops. These events drew large audiences and sparked the interest of the broader mental health community in receiving further psychoanalytic training.
The Establishment of CCP
By 1982, it was apparent that a more comprehensive, structured format was required for the psychoanalytic education of psychologists in Chicago. With the advice and consultation of noted psychoanalysts from other psychologist-institutes, including the Los Angeles Center for Psychoanalytic Studies, the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at Adelphi University, and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, a committee of CAPP members took the first steps toward establishing a psychoanalytic institute, initially known as the Chicago Center for Psychoanalytic Psychology (CCPP).
This committee selected a small group of CAPP members, including Nell Logan, Dale Moyer, Lucy Freund and Lorraine Goldberg, to participate in a series of seminars focused on classical readings in psychoanalysis and, subsequently, on more recent developments in psychoanalysis. These intensive weekend seminars were led by Roy Schafer and Bertram Cohler, among others. In 1984, the center was officially incorporated, a curriculum and administration were set in place, and the idea of a non-profit institute for the psychoanalytic training of psychologists in Chicago became a reality. The original name, CCPP, was changed in 1990 to the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, or CCP, a title that more accurately reflects its mission.
CCP Now
In the years since its formation as an independent center for psychoanalytic training, CCP has grown to welcome professionals from many disciplines. CCP strives to promote the study, practice and dissemination of psychoanalytic thought and practice in an environment that embraces openness, curiosity, and intellectual depth. To this end, we are committed to inviting leaders with a range of psychoanalytic approaches to engage with us and enrich our community. CCP aims to offer the community opportunities to advance psychoanalytic thought and practice regardless of level of experience or professional background. As a result, we have adopted a philosophy of providing programs that reflect our diversity and commitment to social justice and personal freedom.
40 Years of CCP Nancy Burke spoke at our 40th Anniversary celebration on June 21st, 2025, discussing the history and future of both psychoanalysis and CCP. Below is a transcript. Sometimes in a social situation I’ve been asked where I received my training, or where I teach, and without thinking, I’ll answer, “CCP.” Of course that leads to the obvious question: what does “C.C.P.” stand for? I’m usually not quick-witted enough to formulate an answer on the spot, but I’d like at least to engage the question at this celebratory occasion, the 40th birthday of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, and I’d ask you to do the same. What does CCP stand for, for you and for us? What I could have said is that CCP stands for the principle, digitally inscribed on each page of our website, that “Nothing human is alien to me.” I could have said, “CCP stands for the recognition that there is more to each of us than we thought, that we are all more alike than different, and more different than we can ever know. It stands for nurturing a broad vocabulary of ideas and theories sufficient to allow us to be unafraid enough to hear the unsayable, to understand and allow what can’t be spoken the space to become a source of creative life. It stands for an embrace of an orthodoxy that entails, indeed demands, questioning orthodoxy. CCP stands for a school as a growing organism, a flexible and yet foundational structure that can offer meaningful possibility to young and old clinicians, as we say, “cradle to grave.” In short, CCP stands for an effort to embrace the promise of psychoanalysis – its rigor and its transformative capacity -- as a true liberation psychology, as a harbor for possibility, growth, and the belief that psyche and meaning matter against a world that seems increasingly to find itself under the boot of a mind-crushing techno-authoritarian machine. But then, psychoanalysis has always been an evolving effort to stand outside so that we can better see what’s inside, as well as vice-versa, and CCP from the very beginning has embraced its position as an outsider, professionally, culturally, structurally. It was a renegade group from the outset, formed at a time when doors were closed to non-psychiatrists who were interested in analytic training. In reaction to ApsaA’s policy at the time that non-MDs could neither train nor teach psychoanalysis, a small band of not-analyst-analysts, including Oliver JB Kerner, Irv Leiden, Joanne Powers, Maury Burke, and Johanna Tabin, created their own training group, at first supervised by Bruno Bettelheim – a severe personality but an inspiring teacher – and then by others who were willing to serve as guides, Heinz Kohut, Roy Schafer, Hedda Bolgar, Rudy Ekstein, Sid Blatt and Don Kaplan, among others. Supported by the growth of Division 39 and its push to develop local chapters, as spearheaded by Ollie Kerner, the inaugural chair of Division 39’s Local Chapters Committee, this group created CAPP, the Chicago Association for Psychoanalytic Psychology, from which CCP was born as one of the first independent institutes. By the time APsaA’s exclusionary stance had been successfully challenged in the courts by Bryant Welch and others on the basis of restraint of trade, it was too late to get the genie back in the bottle. The Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis had become a thriving space for clinicians invested in taking psychoanalysis further, in both honoring and questioning – indeed, honoring through questioning – its core tenets and modes of practice. Also since its inception, CCP has been an inherently collective effort, in which its students and leadership alike have been asked to embrace responsibility for its culture and values. Many of its current leaders have come up through its training programs, and our board has consistently if imperfectly striven throughout to respond to the needs and wishes of all its members. Every one of our participants has left their mark on our organization, and its influence has spread far and wide, as attested to by the fact that we will be welcoming – get this – over a hundred young clinicians-in-training just to our Fellowship program next year, let alone to our thriving candidate, two-year, explorations programs, study groups and lecture series. Yet I do want to take just a moment to recognize some of our most dedicated contributors, include our presidents, Oliver Kerner, Maurice Burke, Lorraine Goldberg, Dale Moyer, Adina Keesom, Nancy Burke, Carol Ganzer, Alan Levy, and our current president Zak Mucha, whose able leadership has nurtured the development of both long-standing and new programs, including our newest, a community psychoanalysis training track. There are our Fellowship leaders, including Sandra Ullmann, who served in so many roles throughout the decades and was a loved fundamental contributor to CCP, as well as Julia Brown, Nancy Peltzman and the members of their committees, too numerous to name. (There are our two-year program founders, including Adina Keesom and Nancy Burke, and our Explorations and study group chairs, including Peter Reiner, Paul Sanders and Derek Hassert, and John Garver, our Sundays@CCP coordinator.) Allan Scholom has been a guiding force and foundational leader since CCP’s inception, keeping us active as a political force to defend our profession and its values, and remains to this day the official Sommelier to the Board of Directors of CCP, although his role has changed some since we’ve begun meeting on zoom. Needless to say, our institute would simply not run – that is, not BE – without the contributions of Toula Kourliouros-Kalvin, whose able administration has allowed us to function at all. If your name is left out, this is due to a lack of time rather than of appreciation. Freud said, “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” We’re so pleased that you’re here to celebrate our beautiful struggle with us, and hope that the community you find here at CCP can accompany you forward towards the development of a rich clinical life of benefit and beauty. Enjoy! |
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