2025 - 2026 East Bay Yearlong Program
Graeme Daniels, LMFT and Elizabeth Stuart, MD, Co-Chairs
Tuning into the Unspoken: Navigating the Landmarks of Unconscious Experience
This yearlong course offers a space for therapists to slow down and listen differently — to bodily sensations, emotional currents, and the quiet reveries that open doors to unconscious life. These experiences become vital tools for tracking unconscious communication and giving shape to the patient’s inner life.
Over the year, we’ll explore themes such as mutuality in the therapeutic encounter, Winnicott’s reflections on coming into being, creativity in the formation of self, the impact of early development on adult experience, and how trauma and compulsivity — especially in the context of substance use — can signal deeper unconscious struggles. The course also includes time for participants to present and reflect on their own clinical work.
By deepening our capacity to listen and respond to what is unspoken, this course invites participants to foster greater relational depth and cultivate a deeper understanding of their patients.
*Note: This course is designed for psychotherapists actively seeing patients who have a basic foundation in psychodynamic concepts and are looking to deepen their psychoanalytic thinking and clinical skills in a small group seminar format.
| Dates: | Fridays, September 5, 2025 to May 29, 2026 |
| Time: | 12:00pm – 01:30pm |
| Sessions: | 35 Sessions |
| Location: | Online via Zoom |
| Program Fee: | $ 1,560.00 General Admission *If you are a university student, in a pre-licensure clinical training program, or in a residency program, Readers are not included in the program fee. For details, please refer to the Readers Fee information below. |
Mutuality in Therapy: Authentic Engagement the Unconscious Communication in the Therapeutic Couple
The effort to hold a therapeutic stance has evolved from patient-under-glass to a co-created experience with both patient and therapist. We will explore the history of this theoretical shift from Freud’s classical psychoanalytic approach to modern challenges of acknowledging and remaining active in the intersubjective space. Early developers of these more contemporary approaches begin with Ferenczi and have worked around the world to South America Link theory and European Field theory. Clinical case reflections are encouraged as we explore the difficulty and richness of authentic engagement.
Eric Miller, PhD
Fridays, September 5, 12, 19, 26; October 3, 10, 2025
Case Conference
In this six-week course, two or three participants will have the opportunity to present clinical material to the group. Together, we’ll enter the hour as if we’ve been in the room—listening, associating, imagining. We’ll tune in to what the work stirs in us and notice what begins to take shape when we stay with what feels just out of reach, yet palpable in the room. As we share our associations and reflections, we’ll bring in psychoanalytic ideas to deepen our thinking, weaving together the threads to help us formulate and make sense of the patient’s deeper unconscious experience. This course is a space to develop your analytic listening, sit with the unknown, and practice finding meaning together.
Elizabeth Stuart, MD
Fridays, October 17, 24, 31; November 7, 14, 21, 2025
(no class on November 28, 2025)
Finding the Unconscious Within Addictions
This class explores the marginalized role of psychoanalysis in the treatment of substance use disorders and other behavioral addictions. Via Freudian and Kleinian perspectives, plus those of contemporary analysts, the class will discuss concepts of repetition compulsion, substitution of habitual action for sexual and aggressive instincts or bonding needs, guilt and shame, seeking to understand the unconscious underpinnings of compulsivity.
Graeme Daniels, LMFT
Fridays, December 5, 12, 19, 2025; January 9, 16, 23, 2026
(no class on December 26, 2025 and January 2, 2026)
Feeling Real: Silent Communion with the Incommunicable
Our patients so often come to us with a feeling of alienation. When the internal world feels empty or depleted, it is hard to imbue the external world with personal meaning. Consequently, life can feel like an endless performance of falseness stripped of the spontaneous impulse of vitality. How do we as therapists meet these states of deadened despair? What do we hope happens in the therapeutic dyad that might breathe life into the room and help the patient’s more authentic core find expression? How do we help our patients feel real?
DW Winnicott, in his quietly and subtly radical manner, lays out a unique developmental perspective on what it takes to become a self that is able interact with external reality in a meaningful way while maintaining a very private relationship with our “incommunicado” core. He also offers us ideas about the way early environmental failures lead to the need to merely accommodate to external demands rather than living creatively. His paradoxical view of the importance of both communicating and not communicating with external reality offers us fresh ideas on what happens in the therapeutic dyad and how we might better focus on the creation of a facilitating environment for our patient’s quieter work of finding themselves within.
In this 6-week course, we will track the evolution of Winnicott’s thought while exploring the role of the therapist – not as the maker of words and meaning – but as an attentive and responsive holding environment.
Marty Mulkey, LMFT
Fridays, January 30; February 6, 13, 20, 27; March 6, 2026
Creativity and the Unconscious
Creative individuals often have a heightened sensitivity to their own unconscious processes and are able to tap into the depths of the unconscious to generate new ideas and insights. It is through creative playing that the fundamental aspect of the human experience of reality comes to life. We will examine creativity not as an artistic talent but as the use of the mind in the search for the self. We will explore how creativity is central to listening to the unconscious- like for instance, sometimes it is not just the presence of an overbearing object that affects us but also the deadening silence of an absent object that reverberates in an analytic session.
Our key focus will be on the crucial role of the analyst in facilitating the creative process for patients to express and process their unconscious thoughts and emotions. This role is not just supportive but integral, as the analyst becomes the co-participant with the patient
in developing their own capacity for creativity. We will explore how psychoanalytic
thinkers like Freud, Winnicott, and others emphasized the importance of play in fostering creativity and development. We will delve into Winnicott’s idea that – it is in playing and only in playing that one is able to be creative and use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.
Chandra Rai, LMFT
Fridays, March 13, 27; April 3, 10, 17, 2026
Echoes of the First Years: Culture, Care, and the Developing Self
Why does understanding child development matter when working with adults? This course explores how early relational experiences shape adult inner life—affecting how we love, work, and struggle. Through a psychodynamic lens, we’ll look at attachment, affect regulation, and identity formation, and how these early patterns show up in the consulting room.
By connecting developmental theory to clinical practice, therapists can deepen their understanding of symptoms, defenses, and transference. Whether you’re early in your career or looking to refresh your perspective, this course offers tools to engage the “child within” your adult clients with curiosity, empathy, and nuance.
Luciane De Mello, LCSW
Fridays, April 24; May 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, 2026
Readers Fee
Charges for reading material required for the seminars are not included in tuition. Your readers will be prepared by CopyCentral, and costs are based upon copyright laws and charge based on the content of the readers. The SFCP Office will inform you when your readers are available to be purchased from CopyCentral’s website. Please note that CopyCentral may take 2 weeks to print and mail the readers to you, so we recommend you to purchase them as soon as they become available.
Refund Policy
- A full refund will be issued if the drop request is received on or before August 29, 2025.
- A 20% cancellation fee will apply to drop requests received between August 29, 2025 and September 19, 2025.
- No refunds will be issued on or after September 20, 2025.