Clinical Director Report of Our Fifth Community Meeting

On March 14, 2025, we held our fifth Community Meeting. The organizing questions around which we are operating are threefold: 1) What constitutes psychoanalysis? 2) What constitutes a psychoanalyst? And 3) What constitutes a sophisticated psychoanalytic community?

CCMPS seeks to embrace multiple psychoanalytic schools of thought. Yet, history shows that even when an institute engages but one theoretical conception of our three questions, one finds intragroup dynamics terribly challenging and often failed. Of course, just like in politics, one party might claim success when quite another state of affairs prevails. A common actuality are conditions of censorship, orthodoxy, implicit or explicit denigration and threats of expulsion of those who rebel.

So far, we have managed to behave as a democratic group (see previous Community Meeting reports) that is neither authoritarian nor laissez-faire. Can there be leadership without obfuscated oppression? Can members speak openly, debate without persecution? We have only begun this experiment.

In his (1952) Prescription for Rebellion, Robert Lindner asks whether communities – indeed, even civilization – succeed at a radical and far-reaching rebellion against destructive adjustment to hegemonic discourses? Can we brave full speech, receptivity, and openness, aiming at something unforeseeable but generative, and – as Lindner ends his book – toward ” … What?”

Joseph Scalia III, Psya.D.