Spring Semester, 2026
Study Group:
What Psychoanalysis Can Offer Pre-K through 12th Grade Education
Study Group Description: Those who work with youth in schools attempt to form relationships with students that will lead to intellectual, social, developmental, and academic growth. Educating with and for critical consciousness is to act in ways that those with whom we work are equipped to go after their hopes and dreams in order to make their own unique way in the world.
Yet, inside a classroom, a school, and a school system, educators are dealing with a wide array of complicated situations. The rate of attrition of educators leaving the field is high. While schools attempt to “manage” or programmatically ameliorate difficult behaviors, moods, symptoms, and acting-out, these can and should be understood as derivatives of unconscious conflicts or developmental deficits, or both. When worked with as derivative, when recognizing the child’s hidden but authentic efforts at integrity, the educator’s experience of the child themselves, and of education of the child, has the potential to be transformed, empowered.
As well, the economic, psychological, biological, social, and political conditions that exist in our world today inextricably shape life at the level of the individual. A compliantly adjusted individual is typically unrecognized as such and this has unfortunate consequences, as we know from educators like Paula Freire. The is also the rigid structure of Pre-K-12th grade education to be examined, where developmental expectations for children are not in sync with some children.
An educator and educational leader in public schools for over three decades, Co-Director Lynne Scalia hopes to start an updated exploration of how psychoanalysis and certain psychoanalytic concepts could be useful to Pre-K through 12th grade education, as well as for analysts who work with children and/or educators. An interdisciplinary mix of folks – educators interested in psychoanalysis, analysts/analyst candidates, etc., are welcome.
This Study Group may go beyond a semester for those interested. Products might be in the form of writings or seminars we might put together. This will not qualify for CEU’s, as it will be a co-created endeavor with no set syllabus, but does qualify for IDP credit.
Spring Semester: Begins Tuesday, January, 6, 2026 4:15 – 5:15 pm Mountain Time for 10 weeks.
Meetings by Zoom.
Pre-requisite: The Study Group size is limited. A discussion with Lynne is needed before registering: Contact: director.dempsya@gmail.org
Tuition: No cost, except for readings that may need to be purchased, and your active participation.
Facilitator: Lynne Scalia, Ed.D., Co-Director
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Spring Semester, 2026
The End and Aims of Psychoanalysis
Of the several guiding questions of our Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis, that of “the end of analysis,” and its place in groups and in society, will be our focus.
What is a psychoanalyst at the end of analysis, and how do the varying answers to this question affect our working grasps of that psychoanalysis itself is, and of what might be a true and potentially sustainable democracy? How might IDP be(come) democratic and, relatedly, what does it mean to be “capable of community,” as Freud said it late in his life?
Not meant as actual reading requirements, the following offers an indication of what we will be addressing in this course. Selected readings will be assigned as the semester proceeds
- Sigmund Freud “Constructions in Analysis” – on the rarity of those to whom sublimation is possible and of those who are “capable of community” and
- The Future of an Illusion
- “Some Elementary Lessons in Psycho-Analysis”
- D.W. Winnicott
- “Some Thoughts on the Meaning of the Word ‘Democracy'”
- Adam Phillips
- “Winnicott’s Magic: Playing and Reality and Reality” in A Cure for Psychoanalysis
- W. R. Bion
- The Dictionary of the Work of W.R.Bion on be(com)ing O
- Christopher Bollas
- China on the Mind
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- “Psychoanalysis and Politics”
- “The State of the Subject Today”
- In Dylan Evans’s An Introductory Dictionary of Psychoanalysis
- The entries on “act,” “end of analysis
- In Lacan’s Ecrits
- ‘ “On Freud’s “Trieb” and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire’
- “On the Subject Who is Finally in Question
- Willy Apollon – conveyed by Dr. Scalia as per GIFRIC’s Training and Clinical Seminars
- Joseph Scalia III and Lynne Scalia. Critical Consciousness: Beyond Impasses in Environmentalism, Psychoanalysis, and Education
Spring Semester: Begins Tuesday, January, 6, 2026 12:50 to 1:55 PM Mountain Time for 10 meetings.
Zoom will be our meeting “venue.”
Tuition: $500
Instructor: Joseph Scalia III, Ed.D., Psya.D.
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Fall, 2025
The Cure for Psychoanalysis
What constitutes psychoanalysis? What constitutes a psychoanalyst? What constitutes a psychically sophisticated group and school? These are the three guiding questions of IDP.
Adam Phillips’s papers, “The Cure for Psychoanalysis” and “Winnicott’s Magic: Playing and Reality and Reality” both found in his The Cure for Psychoanalysis (2021[2019]): Confer Books, will be one set of two springboards for our explorations of these questions in this seminar.
Our second set of springboards for our explorations will be certain critical communications in The Spontaneous Gesture: Selected Letters of D. W. Winnicott. Rodman, F. Robert, (ed.,1987). Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England. In this provocative book, Winnicott, who is easily thought of as a gentle man, repeatedly challenges then current psychoanalytic theories and methods.
Spring Semester: Begins Tuesday, September 23, 2025, 12:50 – 1:55 Mountain Time for 15 weeks.
Meetings by Zoom.
Tuition: $500, payable to IDP
Instructor: Joseph Scalia III, PsyaD