Join us for the next CCMPS Community Meeting, Friday, January 10, 2025, 3:00 – 4:30 PM Mountain Time. Zoom link here:
Zoom Link for Friday, January 10, 2025
From Clinical Director Joseph Scalia III:
After the December 13, 2024 Community Meeting, let me make a couple of salient points which exemplify and embody crucial elements of CCMPS’s current incarnation and its place within the larger institution of psychoanalysis itself.
One of the problems facing psychoanalytic institutes has always been the influence of censorship and orthodoxy. A current CCMPS aim is to develop beyond that, identifying intragroup conflicts and then working through them. Unconscious or otherwise disavowed enactments of unanalyzed group dynamics easily surface within psychoanalytic schools, and as easily are buried, just as can occur within each of us. One example of this juncture already appeared in our second Community Meeting.
We aim to grapple with multiple theories of the mind, being faithful to their differences and similarities, as well as to how each theory might inform and strengthen each other. At the same time, a pitfall inherently exists here, that of unrecognized or censored rectitude which any of us can at least momentarily fall into.
The way this obstacle, but simultaneous opportunity, surfaced was not in the meeting of theories of the mind, but rather in what methodologies follow from them. There are some of us who have long deployed an openness to and enrichment in seeking competence in said theories, while seeing Modern Psychoanalysis as the only or else the preferred theory of intervention. Contrastingly, there are others of us who identify uniqueness of each school’s methodology accompanying those theories of the mind.
Each view might be strongly held by its opposing proponents and practitioners. And that is exactly where our obstacle and our opportunity arise. Can we allow and receptively speak as a community about this – the opportunity, or will this example of difference meet disavowed silence of some opinions – the pitfall? Meeting this choice as an opportunity, rather than as a threat, is no small task.