Doctor of Clinical Psychology

Our Approach

As a program steeped in depth-oriented psychology, we prize complex thinking, respect for the unconscious, and a welcoming of multiple perspectives. Our unique clinical psychology program is built on three foundational pillars, centering contemporary psychodynamic theory; humanistic, existential, and transpersonal perspectives; and a strong social justice orientation. We emphasize deepening development, expanding worldviews, and ongoing spiritual awakenings that create an integral vehicle for therapeutic presence, care, responsiveness, and change.

Contemporary Psychodynamics

Our program is grounded in the philosophical foundations of psychoanalytic thought. We emphasize multiple depth psychological perspectives, the personal and social dimensions of the unconscious, radical and critical approaches to psychodynamic psychotherapy, and the importance of the therapeutic relationship in bringing about meaningful change and transformation.   

Humanistic, Existential, and Transpersonal Perspectives

Our program recognizes and teaches transpersonal, postconventional levels of practice, personal and social development, being in the world and engaging with the world, with the understanding that we are not only mind and body, but also soul and spirit.

Social Justice

Our program takes a social justice stance, recognizing, critiquing, and deconstructing systems of power and oppression both through the exploration of race, class, gender, sexuality, culture, and the unconscious roots of oppression and by centering dialectics of cultural attunement and cultural humility, rupture and repair, beyond repetition. Students are taught to engage through meaningful connection, thoughtful curiosity, assessment of intersectionalities (within the patient, the clinician, and between the two), receptive openness to lived experiences, and the values of sameness and differences.  

Unique Within the Field

In a field dominated by short-term manualized treatment, a dogmatic adherence to behavioral approaches, and a view of psychology as outside of social, cultural, and political factors, our program stands out from the rest. We believe in the importance and efficacy of a depth-oriented approach to psychotherapy. As a non-APA program, we are not limited by the American Psychological Association’s constricting and narrow view of what makes a good psychologist, and the pressure in the field to take up a behavioral medicine approach. Our unique postconventional program provides a pathway to licensure as a clinical psychologist while maintaining our commitment to our integral embrace of body, psyche, soul, spirit, culture, and society, based in a depth psychological perspective that integrates the conscious and the unconscious for healing, growth, and wholeness.

Career Paths

The mission of the Clinical Psychology program is to train students to become resourceful and integrative clinicians, skilled in the application of psychological theories and their specific interventions, capable in client assessment and diagnosis, and researchers able to produce scholarship that contributes to the psychological profession. With an understanding of human differences, and the deconstruction of the dynamics of power, privilege, and oppression. We provide extensive theoretical and practical experience so that our students graduate ready to make the most of any opportunities, which includes: 

• Comprehensive preparation to sit for CA licensing exams.
• Training and experience in clinical intervention modalities.
• Expertise in all current assessment and diagnostic techniques.
• Advanced skills in designing and conducting primary research in a range of clinical topics.
• Skillset and mindset to lead at the forefront of evolving clinical practice.
• Practical knowledge directed toward building a private practice.
• Cultural sensitivity and experience to work successfully with diverse populations.

Curriculum

The Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology is an in-person program taught by experienced faculty who are experts in their fields. Students take three years of coursework in addition to two years of practicum starting in their second year. Upon completion of the core courses and the practicums, students will complete an oral examination for approval to begin the required 2000 hour pre-doctoral internship. Students are also required to complete and defend a dissertation before completion of the degree. Students begin writing the proposal in their second year, allowing ample time for topic development and research.

Clinical Training

Clinical training in our program is fully integrated with the academic work. Each student gains two years of practicum experience in community agencies, requiring about 20 hours a week at the training site. A minimum of one hour per week of individual supervision by a licensed psychologist, group supervision, and didactic trainings are offered at these off-campus sites.

At the same time, students complete professional seminar courses at CIIS with a core faculty member; "prosems" support integration of theory, research, and clinical materials from classroom learning with the real world experience of psychotherapy in clinical settings. Prosem is the heart of clinical training in the Psy.D. program. Read about the Contemporary Psychodynamic Training Model this program employs.

When all required coursework and practica have been completed, students may begin the clinical internship at an approved training site. Specific sites are listed on the California Psychology Internship Council website.

The internship may be one year of full-time or two years of half-time work and must be completed within two and a half years from the beginning date. In their internship, students deepen their skills in offering a variety of psychological services including treatment planning and psychotherapy, psychological assessment, case consultation, and supervision, often working in multidisciplinary teams, across the spectrum of psychopathologies.

Support for the process of selecting, applying for, and completing practicum and internship experiences is offered by the Psy.D. Director of Clinical Training and Field Placement Specialist.

Research and Training

The mission of the Clinical Psychology program is to train psychology practitioners rather than researchers. However, all Psy.D. graduates will have mastered research skills sufficient to produce a clinical dissertation and prepare them to be proficient consumers of psychological science.

Research training is conducted in the context of psychological science as the cornerstone of effective clinical practice. Students are also expected to gain a scientific understanding of how individuals interact with others, behave in groups, and relate to the broader contexts in which they live their lives.

Our Psy.D. program is notable in the breadth of research methodologies and topics chosen by students, for example: treatment outcome studies, applied program evaluation studies, studies of underserved populations, and studies of psychospiritual issues.

Curriculum Highlights

PSY 5502 Theory and Practice of Psychotherapy: Psychodynamics (3 units) This course examines psychodynamic ideas and concepts central to psychology or “soul work.”  It provides students with a working knowledge of basic theoretical and clinical models, among them concepts of the self and its development, fundamental issues such as the exploring the unconscious, working with dreams, healing anxiety and depression, understanding personality disorders, and working with trauma. 
The material explores Freud’s psychoanalysis, ego psychology, internal object relations, Jung’s journey into wholeness, developmental psychology, interpersonal therapies, and relational perspectives.

PSY 6144‐01 Gender and Sexuality in Clinical Practice (2 units) This course will begin with an understanding of our own learning about (socialization), identifications with and experiences regarding gender and sexuality.  We will explore the intersection of our beliefs about our gender and sexual identities and presentations and how they are expressed and engaged in the world.  We will simultaneously work to deconstruct these more static ideas and move towards expansion and flexibility in the way we are able to hold the concepts of gender and sexuality.  Similarly, we will continuously attempt to understand our developing clinical selves and reflect on how these concepts impact the relational space we make with clients. We will read both foundational psychodynamic texts and critiques and revisions of theory regarding gender and sexuality gaining an understanding of the developmental trajectory of how these concepts have been understood within the psychological literature.   Finally, we will use depictions in the media and our own experiences in the community as both individuals and clinicians to reflect on contemporary beliefs and practices regarding gender and sexuality in psychology.

PSY 6935‐01 Advanced Depth Psychology Seminar IV: The Transpersonal (3 units) This course integrates essential insights of spirituality, mysticism, intersubjectivity, relationship, dreaming, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, integral psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis. Applied theory, clinical reflections, and experiential learning will be advanced through engagement with the three principal texts. Transcendent and postconventional ways of knowing, ego development, spiritual development, and various views regarding the deconstruction, transcendence, and embrace of the personal, conventional self will be examined in detail. Students will be introduced to skills that facilitate transpersonal and integral direct experiencing, creating an opportunity to deepen both their ontological and epistemological understandings in tandem and to regard those twin disclosures as co-emergent. Course content will vary to take advantage of the instructor’s experience and specialization with dreaming, meditation, death and dying, creativity, integral relational psychoanalytic psychotherapy, poetics, aesthetics, mysticism, non-duality, voice, singing, and music.