Converging Themes: Engineering, Ethics, and the Unconscious | Upcoming Talks

“We all know people…who are at loggerheads with existence; unhappy people who never get what they want; are baffled, complaining, who stand at an uncomfortable angle when they see everything askew. There are others again who, though they appear perfectly content, seem to have lost all touch with reality. They lavish all their affections upon little dogs and old china. They take interest in nothing but the vicissitudes of their own health and the ups and downs of social snobbery. There are, however, others who strike us, why precisely it would be difficult to say, as being by nature or circumstances in a position where they can use their faculties to the full upon things that are of importance. They are not necessarily happy or successful, but there is a zest in their presence, an interest in their doings. They seem to be alive all over. This may be partly the result of circumstances — they have been born into surroundings that suit them — but much more is the result of some happy balance of qualities in themselves so that they see things not at an awkward angle, all askew; nor distorted through a mist; but four square, in proportion; they grasp something hard; when they come into action they cut real ice.” 

—Virginia Woolf, “The Narrow Bridge of Art”

On April 12, 2026, in Fort Collins, IDP psychoanalyst Joseph Scalia III and Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering Tom Sale will lead a discussion with community members on the confluence of their streams of inquiry, research, and writing.

Joseph and Tom will concurrently describe motivations for and key themes in their recent books. The books are founded in the domains of psychoanalysis, environmental engineering, environmentalism generally, and education. The modern world is fraught with ever-mounting great worries. Miraculously, converging paths forward for solving problems in disparate fields are found.  In the end, intellectual honesty, openness, and hope are our ethical paths to salvation.  

As the impasses and struggles of our epoch call for collaboration across seemingly disparate disciplines, Joseph and Tom enact here one of the ways we might come together in service and concern for both terra and demos, the site and substance of life, as well as a mode of sociocultural being necessary for the evolution of the collective human adventure.

We look forward to the talk and a lively conversation.

Dr. Tom Sale is Emeritus Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering/ Colorado State University. CSU STRATA 2024 Innovator of the Year. His book, Modern Subsurface Contaminant Hydrology, is co-authored with Joseph Scalia IV.

Modern Subsurface Contaminant Hydrology

Joseph Scalia III, Psya.D. is a psychoanalyst and a social and environmental activist, and writer. He is Co-Director of the Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis, and past president of both Montana Wilderness Association and the Gallatin Yellowstone Wilderness Alliance. Dr. Scalia has a keen commitment to looking beyond narratives to what unconsciously motivates the human. His book, Critical Consciousness: Beyond Impasses in Environmentalism, Psychoanalysis, and Education, is co-authored with Lynne S. Scalia.

Critical Consciousness: Beyond Impasses in Environmentalism, Psychoanalysis, and Education

Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis

This event will take place on Sunday, April 12, 2026 at:

Wolverine Farm Publick House
4 – 6 PM Mountain Time
316 Willow Street, Fort Collins, Colorado 80524

Featuring art by Jocelyn Catterson, “Making the Visible Invisible: Groundwater in the San Luis Valley”

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Day at a Time in the End Times

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You can find David’s creative work, apart from though not exclusive of his work as a psychoanalyst, by searching David Exley Music. Here are the links to his Spotify and Apple Music profiles.

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New Books in Psychoanalysis: Critical Consciousness

A new interview with Joseph Scalia III and Ben Greenberg available through the New Books Network.

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From the Lithosphere to the Atmosphere… and Back

A poem from IDP member Alex O. Dolabi.

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Fighting Like Cats and Dogs

Cathie Bird

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The Insufficiency of “Wolf Management”

Militant Humility – Streams of (Un)consciousness

The Insufficiency of Wolf “Management”

We trophy hunt and trap the phenomenally evocative subject that we call canis lupus. Throughout history, the grey wolf – like the wilderness itself – has stirred diverse human imaginings, from a figure of terror, nightmare, and disdain, to one of great awe and respect.

Organized collectives of “wolf advocates,” both academics and activists, typically argue for more ecologically defensible policies than those grossly insensitive and often sadistic and even genocidal practices that have recently resurged in governmental sanctioning and hunter-trapper values and practice.

But practitioners of “ecologically defensible policies,” advocating within the Establishment as they do, still use the discourse of the haters and exploiters. That is, they argue for better numbers of “take,” of “harvest,” and of improved “resource management” – THRoM. They seek to make peace with the insensitive contingent, the insensate political wing. They want to convince them of the intelligence of better “management.” Yes, their advocacy and their research are valuable and help to hold the line for survival of canis lupus. We cannot responsibly undervalue it.

And yet, crucially missing is a concomitant calling out of the immorality of all “sport” hunting and trapping of the wolf, of any calling it what it is: ignorance of desubjectifying the wolf, anthropocentric ignorance of THRoM. Like those philanthropic foundation-dependent wildlands advocates who defend as “practical and realistic” their collaborating and compromising about wildlands-destructive legislative designations, the wolf advocates I’m critiquing here paradoxically and ironically give credence to societal resistance to creating a profound respect for the wolf.

It is an oddity, although not surprising in contemporary culture, that both “wolf and wilderness advocates” – yes, both uncompromising wilderness advocates and their compromising contingent – do not openly and politically contextualize their work in terms of the human’s unprecedented point of inevitable and inherently continuous transformation. That is, we are at a point of far-reaching collective destruction or collective advancement hitherto impossible. We will transform one way or the other. Our increased ability to improve life concomitantly contains potential, technical destruction of the earth and of ourselves.

We positively transform our individual and civilizational worldviews and values – who we are and what we are, or we die.

The act of leadership often does, actually, require calling things by their real names. True human evolution, collective and individual, does not happen by passively going along with the immorality of the human subject and of civilization. For activists to work solely within the Establishment while eschewing an unrelenting call for the kind of transformation I am enunciating here, is – in brief – philosophically short-sighted and both ethically and aesthetically irresponsible.

by Joseph Scalia III

January 1, 2026

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Join us Thursday, Jan. 8 – Book Talk

Join us for a Book Talk

By: Therapists of New York                   

Thursday, January 8, 2026 

Critical Consciousness — Unconscious & Ideological Determinants in Institutional Rigidity

Introducing Joseph & Lynne Scalia’s Critical Consciousness: Beyond Impasses in Environmentalism, Psychoanalysis, and Education
Thursday, January 8, 2026 • 1:00–2:00 PM EST • Virtual (Zoom)

Read about the authors and register below.

Critical Consciousness Book Talk — Eventbrite

Drawing on their experiences in environmental leadership, psychoanalytic training, and education, Joseph and Lynne Scalia illuminate how unseen group dynamics impede creative self-discovery and meaningful change. This talk explores how unconscious resistances shape stagnation in institutions, social movements, and group life.

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Thoughts on Yang essay, America’s Children Are Unwell. Are Schools Part of the Problem?

Lynne Scalia, Ed.D.

Last week the New York Times published an alarming, but not surprising piece on the uptick of psychiatric diagnoses in youth. The essay is by Jia Lynn Yang, America’s Children Are Unwell. Are Schools Part of the Problem?  Some of the stats the author lays out are:

  • Nearly 1 in 4 boys aged 17-years bear an ADHD diagnosis. This is 1 million more in 2022 than in 2016.
  • In the early 80’s 1 in 2500 children had an autism diagnosis. It is now one in 31.
  • Nearly 32% of teens have been diagnosed at some point with anxiety; the median age of “onset” is 6 years old.

Even preschool tends to look more like early elementary as children are expected to sit and focus on academic material for longer periods. The essay understandably points to the need to fix schools, not necessarily kids. Today, even real estate listings rate schools, with “test scores as proxies for profits.”

Yang does a creditable job of describing untenable choices for parents. If a child has a psychiatric diagnosis, a school is “forced” to attempt to make adaptations.  In some states, as many as 21% of students qualify for a plethora of accommodations so that they might “fit in.”  For anyone who has spent much time in a classroom in an underfunded and understaffed public school, one knows the madness of this exercise.

As an educator and educational leader, and I would challenge, as a psychoanalyst activist, while we are willing to take up the work that is needed to assist the individual child or family, it is also necessary to see that which is not easily seen or solved. This is the unconscious of the institution, which is enveloped and protected by a culture that would decry the unknowing violence it inflicts or perpetuates.

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Can we Create and Sustain an Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis?

IDP blog

Joseph Scalia III

Can we Create and Sustain an Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis?[1]

Psychoanalysis has always been plagued by disruptions within its politics. In contrast to its popular or currently imaginary meaning, by politics, I mean the collectively creative practice that can only occur in an autonomous society, a society that is necessarily composed of autonomous individuals. Autonomy inheres a reflectivity in which the norms, values, prohibitions, etc. of a given society are recognized as social imaginaries, as always being only one possible set of guideposts for a society and the individuals who compose it. Although we live as though that which is interpellated in us constitutes an immutable or matter-of-fact truth, autonomy means that one is capable of, and indeed practices, reflecting upon that and creatively imagining alternatives. Inextricable here is a will to live by a critical and creative path.

Attendant to the above is the point that one creates a meaning for one’s life. Then, we must add that point that a psychoanalyst, ipso facto, is someone who, amongst other characteristics, has – in the above fashion – developed a meaning for his or her own life. Otherwise, they cannot provide a dyadic – or a group – space in which the analysand or group members can recognize their own capture in social imaginaries, and create their own autonomously determined meaning for their own life.

Now, of course, an immediate set of question arises at this juncture. That is, although it is clearer to claim the existence of such individuals, is it possible to accomplish or build a society composed of such individuals, or a society or group that generates them?

An experiment in democracy would be, in the instance aimed at by the Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis, can its members come together in such a way?

From that multifaceted starting point, IDP asks several orienting questions. What constitutes a psychoanalyst? What constitutes psychoanalysis itself? What constitutes individual and collective educational spaces in which the above questions can be explored as, in fact, a collective?

Crucial considerations must serve as starting points in a group living within potential answers to the above orienting questions.

First, a democratic psychoanalytic institute must recognize the pervasive controlling or censorship practices of the historical psychoanalytic Establishment and its ruling caste. Then appears another prerequisite, the critical acceptance of the obvious sequela that it would be extremely difficult to create such a school, and that, in accompaniment to that reflection, it would always be the case that such an accomplishment, or, rather the practical answers to the above “orienting questions” would never constitute final answers, any more than is the accomplishment of an end of analysis.

Next, we might, or must, accept the premise that the traditional path to qualification as an analyst is always open to alteration, or even transformation. And yet, another question then arises. If a hierarchical approach to all of the answering of these questions is itself inherently non-democratic, what would a responsible alternative, an autonomous alternative, possibly look like? More the point here would be, what is to be done with the problem of leadership, with the nagging question of, if leaders are to be democratic, how might they avoid the opposite deadly outcomes of either authoritarianism, on the one hand, and a laissez-faire approach on the other?

Lastly, who decides whether anyone in such an institution, one which practices an inherent institutional analysis, is capable of community?

Thus begins our experiment.

[1] The ideas presented here deploy the thinking of, among others, Sigmund Freud, Felix Guattari, Cornelius Castoriadis, D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Christopher Bollas, and Adam Phillips.

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