From Joseph Scalia III

As we approach our first Community Meeting under the banner of the Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis, as Co-Director I’d like to share something with you about IDP’s logo. It should be seen in two ways. One is a sketch of an analysand lying on the eponymic couch. But the other vision it presents is two bear claws, which form the image of that analysand.

The bear claws evoke my experiences of four-plus decades living around and in the wilderness of Montana, and its iconic wildlife that have been an inextricable part of my formation as a human and as a psychoanalyst.

They also represent the interface between wildlife and homo sapiens, a relationship that has always been too dominated by Manifest Destiny and its insensitive and sometimes genocidal ways of being.

As IDP moves further into the twenty-first century, and takes account of the above context and our need to be(come) critically conscious, we aim for a democratic sensibility and capacity, in both the clinic and in the much larger world. The ruling-caste nature of the psychoanalytic Establishment, in its multifarious siloings and censoring must give way to an emancipation that can never rest on its laurels.

As IDP, we hope to meet the ever-emerging challenges of an evolution that is all too precarious in its future. Can we be(come) “capable of community,” in Freud’s sense of the term by which he indicated that we can only hope for it in “a distant, distant future.”

Our mandate is to attempt such community in the here-and-now, and thereby contribute to that future.