George Bermudez, PhD, PsyD, October 3, 2020

Social Dreaming, Multiplicity, Reflective Citizenship, and the “Other”

Saturday, October 3, 2020, 10 AM to 1 PM

3 continuing education hours

on Zoom

Contemporary psychoanalysis, like all American institutions, as well as the global community, is living through a precarious moral moment. Psychoanalysts everywhere are asking how psychoanalysis can contribute to productively addressing our many and complex socio-political challenges: racism; sexism; violent militarism; poverty; predatory capitalism; climate crisis. This presentation will suggest a path forward as psychoanalysis engages with the emergent psycho-social challenges of the 21^st Century American and global context. In addition to participants experiencing a social dreaming matrix, the   presentation will outline the author’s emerging synthesis of social dreaming, community psychoanalysis, and reflective citizenship—adumbrating a vision of an integrative psychoanalytic  contribution toward  a  “deliberative democracy”.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

1. Describe the core differences between the conventional approach to working with dreams and the social dreaming (SDM) paradigm.
2. Define what community psychoanalysis means by the concept of a “psychoanalysis of the community”.
3. Summarize the value of social dreaming in accessing the        social unconscious for optimal citizenship and democracy.

Dr. George Bermudez, Psychologist-Psychoanalyst,  Training & Supervising Psychoanalyst at The Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis Los Angeles,  and 2020-21 Visiting Scholar at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC)  has developed pioneering scholarship and practice –an expansion toward a social psychoanalysis–exploring 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 numerous contemporary socio-political concerns:  American Xenophobia;  Whiteness and Psychoanalysis; Black Reparations; The LGBTQ Unconscious in the Trumpian Era; and The Global Unconscious in the Time of  Pandemic.