The Storm Has Arrived: Psychoanalysis Faces a Human Emergency Can the Social Dreaming Matrix Provide a Generative, Creative Path Forward?

2 CE Credits for Psychoanalysts, Psychologists, and Social Workers

As global crises of dehumanization and meta-dehumanization—political, ecological, and moral—intensify, psychoanalysis faces an ethical reckoning and a paradigmatic opportunity.  While traditional training continues to emphasize the individual psyche and the clinical dyad, these are no longer sufficient containers for the social toxins and complexities of contemporary life: the denial of our climate crisis, the resurgence of misogyny, authoritarianism, assaults on democracy, and the re-emergence of racism and white supremacy.  How might we creatively explore and discover new forms of psychoanalytic inquiry, theory, and practice?  This workshop will explore the Social Dreaming Matrix, influenced by Bion’s view that dreaming is an essential human ability for generating knowledge derived from experience, as an approach to accessing the “social unconscious” (Hopper, 1996) to facilitate “transformative thinking” and its application to resolving problematic experience in our social systems (organizational, community, society, global community).

George Bermúdez, a psychologist-psychoanalyst, is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at The Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles.  His pioneering scholarship and practice in “socio-centric psychoanalysis” has explored the “social unconscious” through “social dreaming.”  The author of “The Social Dreaming Matrix as a Container for the Processing of Implicit Racial Bias and Collective Racial Trauma”  (International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 2018) and “Community Psychoanalysis: A Contribution to an Emerging Paradigm” (Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2019), he has focused on contemporary socio-political concerns such as American xenophobia, whiteness and psychoanalysis, Black reparations, the LGBTQ unconscious in the Trump era, and the global unconscious in the time of pandemic.  His most recent work focuses on the application of social dreaming to the discovery of potential solutions to the climate crisis, the development of “deliberative democracy,” and the transformation of psychoanalytic institutes into laboratories of rehumanization that interrupt socio-political cycles of dehumanization. 

Practitioners and General Public: $50
Students: Free

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