CRITICA

A year ago, COVID cases and deaths were mounting, most of us were transitioning our practices to ZOOM, and George Floyd was murdered. A year later, we voted a despot-President out of office, half the population has already received at least one dose of the COVID vaccine, and a Minneapolis jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of three charges in the murder of George Floyd. Change is happening. Look at how much has happened in just a year’s time.

A year ago, PINC began its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work with VISIONS, Inc. Over the course of the year, VISIONS, Inc. completed a Critical Incident Review of the circumstances surrounding our loss of a candidate of color, as well as a broad-based investigation into PINC’s lack of preparedness to welcome members from diverse backgrounds. That eight month investigation required 30 focus groups and involved nearly 100 members. The VISIONS, Inc. work culminated in a two day Community Meeting attended by 85 people, in which the consultants engaged our membership with information about the structural issues at PINC that make our institute unwelcoming or inaccessible to many.

This project may be the most extensive DEI effort initiated by any psychoanalytic institute. I’m willing to bet on it. I’m quite proud of our membership and our willingness to look at ways in which elitism and exclusivity have been baked into the way we operate, producing a type of monoculture.

In the last segment of the 2-day Community Meeting, four small groups individually reflected on PINC’s greatest DEI challenges and generated ideas for change. The overlap of ideas among these groups was telling. Nearly every group touched on the same basic challenges: a financial requirement that makes training unaffordable for many people; an inflexible, time-intensive training model that makes it untenable for many people to consider; an outdated curriculum missing many underrepresented voices and perspectives; and a lack of BIPOC representation among faculty, PA/SAs and administrators.

These groups also independently proposed an overlapping set of creative solutions, such as an agreed upon standard lower fee for all personal analyses and supervisions; the development of a scholarship fund; a training program reimagined so that candidates could move through it at their own pace (i.e., as time and money allow); a broader curriculum that is more relevant to diverse groups and might even offer a variety of training tracks (i.e., no one size fits all); and outreach and partnerships with other community organizations, in which greater diversity is present.

In the coming academic year, I would like us to take the next step in the process of transformation: the creation of a DEI Vision for PINC. A DEI Vision might establish goals for what PINC would ideally be like in the future. It might further define the terms diversity, equity, and inclusion and set out as an aspiration that, in some number of years, a certain percentage of our faculty, PA/SA and candidates would come from “diverse backgrounds.” Diverse backgrounds would recognize obvious underrepresented populations, such as non-white and more socio-economically diverse people. They might also identify a variety of less obvious characteristics that are not currently present at PINC in large quantities, such as practitioners from non-private practice settings. The PINC of the future might look quite different than the typical psychoanalytic institute does today.

The work of creating a vision is aspirational. It is a wish for what we want our future as an institute to be. It is also a destination towards which we can journey.  Change is coming to our world. The question is whether or not we are to be its advocates and architects.