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)
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.
https://dempsya.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/IMG_2382-scaled.jpeg25601920470948pwpadminhttps://dempsya.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/IDP_Final_logo_color-300x290.png470948pwpadmin2026-01-01 15:56:412026-01-01 16:09:36Join us Thursday, Jan. 8 – Book Talk
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.
https://dempsya.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/IMG_8122-e1764682568537.jpeg500500470948pwpadminhttps://dempsya.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/IDP_Final_logo_color-300x290.png470948pwpadmin2025-12-02 02:01:142026-01-23 21:11:19Thoughts on Yang essay, America’s Children Are Unwell. Are Schools Part of the Problem?
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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