Inhabiting the systems we create,
creating the symptoms we treat
2.0 CE Credit, *pending approval* for SPPP Members
***This session will be recorded***
Date: March 30, 12:00 PM Eastern Time
Charla and JJ aim to co-create a space in which community can think together about the ways that the “clinic” necessarily must and does expand into the “outer” (outside of the clinic boundaries) conditions/contingencies/worlds; that is, they will address the ways in which socio-historico-political material realities are inseparable from the work we do clinically and also from dynamic engagement across various domains in our lives. In doing this, they will share their process not only as clinicians, but as human beings engaged in psychodynamic ways across friendships, as patients in therapy, in work settings, in community, and in family. Both Charla and JJ will dedicate this platform to inviting participants to think about the psychodynamics of organizing (specifically around Palestinian liberation), the relationship between organizing and clinical work, and the relationship between subjectivity, symptoms, clinical work, and political positionality.
Learning Objectives:
At the end of this program, participants will be able to:
- Participants will be able to think with more ease and complexity about the relationship between socio-historico-political conditions and clinical work.
- Participants will be able to apply their own lived experience (their positionality) to their clinical work.
- Participants will be able to reflect on the kinds of relational / interpersonal work and therapeutics done within the context of political organizing.
Presenters:
Charla Ruby Malamed is a white, queer, non-Zionist Jewish, Buddhist clinician working and living on Abenaki land in New Hampshire. They graduated from the School for Social Work at Smith College and the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School, and they were an APsaA Fellow for the year 2020-21. They currently work as a clinician at a boarding high school, as well as holding a small private practice for adults and couples. Their professional interests include queer and trans-feminist theory; the inseparability of “politics” from intra-psychic and relational dynamics; and the co-facilitation of spaces for community-building and solidarity. They have published three peer-reviewed articles related to the above; one about white-white clinical dyads, one about gender play in clinical work, and the third about the issue of anti-racism in psychoanalytic institutions. They were recently re-elected to the Board of Section 9, Psychoanalysis for Social Justice, Division 39. They are committed to participating in the co-creation of community dedicated to psychoanalytic social justice and socially just psychoanalytic discourses and practices.
J.J. Mull is a writer, poet, and clinical social worker currently based in Brooklyn, NY (Lenape land). He is a graduate of Smith College School for Social and the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance / Harvard Medical School. He is a recently elected member-at-large of Section 9, Psychoanalysis for Social Justice, Division 39.
