About Chelsea
Hi! I’m Chelsea Wagner—a psychoanalyst, on faculty at the Oregon Psychoanalytic Institute (OPI) and Associate Clinical Faculty at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis (CCP). I completed the Certificate in Psychoanalysis at CCP, the two-year Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program at the Minnesota Psychoanalytic Society & Institute (MPSI), and earned my MSW at the University of Minnesota. I'm licensed in Oregon (LCSW) and Minnesota (LICSW).
How I work
I practice contemporary psychoanalysis—relational and Bionian.
Relational means I pay close attention to what happens between us in sessions. The analytic relationship becomes the place where patterns show up and can finally change.
Bionian means I help you think feelings that have been hard to think—using curiosity, reverie, and attention to dreams, slips, and symbols so experience can be digested rather than acted out.
My clinical expertise lies in psychoanalysis and trauma: how early experience lives on in the present, often as perfectionism, people-pleasing, shame, or the private loneliness beneath competence. I work with these patterns through the depth and steadiness of the analytic relationship, growing reflective capacity, choice, and freedom.
Writing & the creative lens
I'm also a writer at work on a memoir. My graduation paper from the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, Writing as Psychoanalysis: Memoir as a Process of Working Through, explores how writing can do some of the same work as analysis: holding experience long enough for it to be known, felt, and transformed. I bring this interest to my teaching in Writing Analytically: The Story Is Never the Story, and to my work with writers and creatives.
Teaching & professional work
I teach and mentor at several psychoanalytic institutions:
Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: year-long continuing education course, Oregon Psychoanalytic Center (2026–2027)
Development 2: Adolescent and Adult Development: co-taught with Deborah Kass, LCSW, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program, Oregon Psychoanalytic Center (fall 2026)
Writing Analytically: The Story Is Never the Story: for candidates at the Oregon Psychoanalytic Institute, and offered to the community in spring 2027
Early Career Case Conference, Presence in Uncertainty: Tolerating Fear and Not-Knowing in Trauma Work: Oregon Psychoanalytic Center (2027)
Mentor: Fellowship Program, Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis (2025–2027)