The Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis adopts its “for a” rather than “of” in recognition of the fact that democracy, like psychic integrity, is never achieved once and for all. Cornelius Castoriadis’s work on what constitutes and generates democracy, and Sigmund Freud’s on what constitutes sublimation as well as what its accomplishment entails, are at the core of IDP. Thus, our three orienting questions are, what constitutes a psychoanalyst, psychoanalysis itself, and a democratic togetherness.

There is no final answer to how a psychoanalyst is formed, thus any ruling-caste inhibition of psychoanalysis must give way to both a receptivity and a generativity beyond oppressor-oppressed divisions.

IDP addresses the young people of today, as they take stock of the rapid and uncertain changes in civilization, and as they demand a voice that faces up to ossification in our field, calls it out, and asks questions on whose responses the very existence of any actual psychoanalysis rests.

Psychoanalysis invites us to radically embrace the unknown, the unknowable and not yet known to come into being as lacking human subjects.

This is a lifelong challenge, requiring that we also recognize subjectivity in others, human and non-human, whether we happen to love them or hate them. But perhaps even worse is when we are completely indifferent to an other and their existence does not seem to matter at all.

We conceptualize that we shape and are shaped by our environments, but we often stop at the level of the nuclear family or the school, perhaps only recently trying as a discipline to include “the social” and “the cultural.” At the IDP, we go even further to broaden the borders of what we call “the sociocultural” to incorporate dominant and oppressed (or suppressed) eco-cultural systems. If marginalized races and cultures in our society are justifiable given significance, can we thereby deem the cultures of dolphins or chimpanzees as threatened as well, and worthy of our attention? Thinking about democracy as the “good of the all,” at the IDP we strive to adopt an inclusive vision of the common good and holistic understanding of the reciprocal spheres of influence upon our psyches.

Our embodiment as human mortals means that we must contend with the elements, what we take in and what we give out. Why should toxicity be limited to alienating projective identifications in our human interpersonal lives? Pollution is both material and spiritual. In wars, we often acknowledge that the underlying motivation is ideological and material, i.e., the desire to dominate or extinguish a rival group’s religio-cultural system of thought and praxis, to take their cultural-natural resources for our own selfish gains. Alongside the ravaging effects on people’s psyche-soma, there are those on the earth, its flora and fauna, which belong to no-one. To be a psychoanalyst is to think and speak about what harms are being perpetrated from all sides, to bring the dark side from within and from without into the light.

Perhaps it is the disruption of the psyche by the spirit (our unconscious core), which Willy Apollon describes as the trauma of being human or real castration, that constitutes the wildest dimension that we dare to explore in psychoanalysis. In doing so, part of the risk is not knowing which parts of us (inside and outside) will live and which ones will die.

Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm

We strive to continuously and democratically create evolving ways of Being. Codes of Ethics are always the necessary but necessarily ephemeral productions of society’s instituted values, while we emphasize the human collective’s instituting capacity. It is that latter, our libido formandi, our desire for eternal (re)formation of democracy, which animates us.


Newsletters & Community Meetings

Membership

Being truthful to IDP’s foundational conceptualizations, the “formation” of an analyst is the prime concern.

We do NOT require a mental health degree in order to study with us.

Star Star I’m interested, please contact me.

Be(com)ing an Analyst

All categories below are Members

Psychoanalytic Candidate Training

Although we see coursework, personal analysis, and supervision as essential to development at IDP, we do not insist upon acquisition of certain hours or frequencies.

Address Address icon

Candidate Scholar Analyst

Candidate Scholar Analysts aim to acquire a way of being and a psychoanalytic theoretical rigor that they apply to their disciplines other than the clinical.

Bookmarks Bookmarks

Affiliate

Affiliates are engaged with the present and future condition of individual and civilizational life, and their unconscious determinants.

Users Users

Analyst

Our Analyst Members have found their own ways to live truly in answer to the school’s orienting questions.

Scholar Analyst

Scholar Analysts incorporate an analytic wisdom of being and a psychoanalytic theoretical rigor which they apply to their disciplines other than the clinical.