Hello to all in the PINC community. This is my first communication to you as President (although as I’m writing, this I’m still President-elect). This is an inspiring and challenging time for PINC. Exciting because we are actively working to democratize psychoanalysis and challenging for the same reason. The struggles that we face echo the struggles in our larger community, country, and world. The atrocities in Ukraine, COVID, our barely functioning democracy, and overt racism are on my mind daily. In the smaller world of psychoanalysis I live in, I wonder what difference we can make. A more accessible and relevant psychoanalysis seems like a good start.
At PINC, the Board of Directors, and many committees and individuals, have spent the past two years working on making PINC a more welcoming, inclusive community. We continue to confront the conscious and unconscious ways we have protected and maintained PINC as a monoculture. We hope that by doing that we can better serve the needs of people of color who have felt excluded and marginalized by our traditional structures.
For those of you who have taken up this project in a personal and heartfelt way, thank you so much. To others who feel unnerved by this work, I welcome you to join us and tolerate the difficulties with us. One of the things that psychoanalysis offers is the idea that we grow by bearing discomfort while in the presence of accepting others. This is what I hope PINC can be for all of us.
In the time we’ve worked with our Visions, Inc. Consultants, Jim Turner and Sarah Stearns, I’ve been repeatedly impressed by the way they have internalized the tools they’ve brought to us. The first of these are the cross-cultural communication guidelines, which you would think would be second nature to a community of mental health professionals, but which get lost in heated situations. I want to keep these guidelines front and center as we move through the changes that are coming up at PINC. They are:
Guidelines for Effective Cross-Cultural Dialogue
- “Try on”
- It’s okay to disagree
- It is not okay to blame, shame, or attack, self or others
- Practice “self-focus”
- Practice “both/and” thinking
- Notice both process and content
- Be aware of intent and impact
- Confidentiality
We have made progress in our ability to articulate where we need to go, as represented by our Vision Statement, which has been under discussion by the Board and the community. When this is passed in its final form by the Board, we will have a statement of our direction going into the future. In the face of this difficult work, and after two years of being physically separated, we need each other more than ever in an open, inclusive community of shared values, love of psychoanalysis, and intellectual excitement. I hope you feel welcome to come along with us on the winding path in that direction.
