Thank you to those who participated in the CCMPS April 11 Community Meeting. Your contributions led to rich discussion. Attempting a discussion of intensity with those who do not know each other has its own kind of awkwardness, but you made it work.
If you missed the Friday, April 11 CCMPS Community Meeting, here’s the link to the video of the conversation. While we usually do not record CCMPS Community Meetings, we heard from several of you who could not attend, so here it is.
Video – Must We Drown in the Wake?/Tracy D. Morgan/CCMPS
In her courageous and provocative paper Tracy D. Morgan writes:
Will we, as a profession that cleaves to speech, truly and actually act on these findings? Will we confront power, which often takes the form of institute leadership, to clear away that which corrodes, that which has effectively kept people of color from entering the field? Or will we take what Ta-Nahesi Coates (2015)* has called a “a hall pass through history” (p. 33) and manage to do nothing? Can we, as psychoanalysts, actually organize for change? Is activism even germane to this passive profession? Or is it not? And if not, why?
*Coates, T.-N. (2015). Between the world and me. Oneworld.
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This passage is relevant to what we have been discussing in CCMPS Community Meetings. We hope you can join us on May 9th.
The organizing questions around which we are operating are threefold:
1) What constitutes psychoanalysis?
2) What constitutes a psychoanalyst?
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?”
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If you haven’t read the essay yet, it is in GROUP, Vol. 48, No. 1.2-3, Summer-Fall 2024. GROUP has given permission to distribute, for more information, contact tracedoris@gmail.com or staff.ccmps@gmail.com. Link to PDF below.
From the abstract:
In response to the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis report that tells us that “action is needed at all levels,” a series of questions and concepts are explored to discern whether activism, and particularly activism addressing racism, is possible within the field of psychoanalysis.