Christopher Walling Fipa

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT CHRISTOPHER WALLING FIPA

I am a board-certified psychoanalyst, somatic psychologist, and academic leader whose work bridges embodiment, trauma, and contemporary psychoanalysis. For more than two decades, my career has integrated clinical practice, research innovation, organizational leadership, and the training of clinician-scholars. I serve as Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Research Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), where I advance embodied approaches to psychological inquiry by integrating psychoanalysis, affective neuroscience, and somatic psychologies. I mentor doctoral researchers working in trauma studies, sexuality, contemplative science, ecopsychology, and the phenomenology of embodied experience, and I remain deeply engaged in faculty governance, curriculum development, and academic leadership. My professional service includes national leadership roles within the American Psychoanalytic Association, the United States Association for Body Psychotherapy, and the Alzheimer’s Research & Prevention Foundation. I have chaired national research committees, led multidisciplinary teams, secured competitive funding, and helped raise millions in philanthropic support of academic research, integrative health initiatives, and trauma prevention.In my private practice in Brentwood, Los Angeles, I offer depth-oriented psychoanalytic psychological services informed by relational psychotherapies, somatic psychology, neurobiology, and evidence-based trauma modalities.My clinical work focuses on sexuality and intimacy, affect regulation, dissociation, and the restoration of embodied presence, drawing from extensive training in somatic experiencing and contemporary relational psychoanalysis. My research centers on embodied intersubjectivity, mutual recognition, vitality, and the neurophysiology of therapeutic change. I am a Clinical Research Fellow with the Kinsey Institute’s Traumatic Stress Research Consortium and serve on Kinsey’s International Advisory Board. Across my work as a clinician, researcher, educator, and institutional leader, my aim is to advance embodied wisdom, scientific rigor, and meaningful social impact. I welcome connections related to collaborative research, innovative pedagogy, and embodied approaches to mental health.