March, 2025 Clinical Director Report

Joseph Scalia III, Psya.D.

Clinical Director

In the CCMPS Board Meeting of March 2, 2025, the Board formally adopted the multiple-schools-of-psychoanalytic-thought approach that we have been undertaking. We are avowedly declaring that our only “umbrella” theory of psychoanalysis is solely psychoanalysis itself. The Modern Psychoanalytic approach will continue to be a part of who we are, while now including such theories and techniques as classical, object relations, self psychology, and Lacanian. Crucially, we see ourselves as contributing to advances in each of these approaches and to our vital questions of “What constitutes psychoanalysis?” and “What constitutes a psychoanalyst?”

And as we move forward, we are explicitly facing the question of what place might psychoanalytic institutes occupy in today’s apocalyptic anxieties about any continuing civilization, any global justice and any Earth that might sustain humanity. This has been a debated question within our discipline’s organizations, and it is a question we see as worthy of uncensored consideration.

Relatedly, we maintain a vigilance regarding the ubiquitous oppressive practices of psychoanalytic schools. We strive to enact the notion of Cornelius Castoriadis that democracy requires the enigmatic dialectical practice 1) of being populated by a wealth of individuals capable of independent thought, and 2) of being a togetherness that generates such individuals.

Parenthetically but quite noteworthily for us, Castoriadis became a psychoanalyst in the Lacanian tradition, but broke with Lacan over the latter’s privileging of certain fundaments to the exclusion of, or non-integration with, other schools of thought.

Can we be democratic and not its laissez-faire facsimile?

In the spirit of democracy and free speech versus ostracism and censorship in psychoanalytic institutes, our April Community Meeting will see a presentation by Tracy Morgan, LCSW-R, M.Phil., LP on this topic.