Critical Consciousness Beyond Impasses in Environmentalism, Psychoanalysis, and Education

Preface

Introduction: Resistance to (R)evolution

1 Interlude: From Whence I Came: Wilderness and Psychoanalysis: A Journey of Aesthetics, Desire, and Ethics

2 Environmentalism: The Fight Both Within and Without 3 Interlude: From Whence I Came: Backbone of the World: On the Inherent Value of Wilderness

4 Terra and Demos: A Unified Ethics for Conservation and the Human Quest

5 Must Environmental Leaders Conform? Or Dare We Actually Lead?

6 Grief and Hope in the Face of the Failing Human Project

7 Critical Consciousness on the Rocks in Psychoanalytic Dogma and Orthodoxy: Training Institutes and the Questions of Practice and Social Activism

8 Deads

9 Interlude: From Whence I Came – New Teacher

Lynne S. Scalia

10 Critical Consciousness in Public Education: Toward Dignity and Hope in a Rural Community

Conclusion

Biography

Joseph Scalia III, PsyD, is a practicing psychoanalyst, and a social and environmental critic and activist based in Colorado, USA.

Lynne S. Scalia, EdD, is an educator from Montana. She has served as a teacher, school district superintendent, and a high school, middle school, and elementary principal, all in public schools. Her work is informed by psychoanalysis and institutional ethnography. Scalia’s focus is on rurality, critical pedagogy, leadership, and school reform.

“In his chapter on the environment, Joseph Scalia III addresses how initial liberatory impulses become oppressive once institutionally operationalized as he’s experienced in environmental and psychoanalytic organizations; moreover, we’re shown how the gadfly function in the midst of such ossified structures can be deeply isolating for the citizen-psychoanalyst-social critic. But Joseph doesn’t just offer the reader vision. Visions are cheap. The author addresses how they're to be actualized; this is where the rubber meets the road.” Risa Mandell, LCSW, founding member of DysUnited

“Joseph Scalia begins Critical Consciousness by emphasizing the limits of our understanding in everything we do.  He illustrates this claim in his discussion of his work with the environmental movement in Montana.  From there, he shows how the same issues plague the psychoanalytic world.  This struck me as one of the most meaningful and useful stories of how psychoanalysis and environmental activism can be brought together.  We all need to read what he has to say.” J. Todd Dean, MD, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in St. Louis, MO, has been on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and Division/Review, and also a member of DysUnited, a psychoanalytically informed activist group

“Scalia invites us all to join together in becoming unsettled, uncomfortable, and unconformist enough to do better as humans. And for us psychoanalysts, this book meets the moment in which the field grapples with the growing pains of post-modernity. Scalia’s work compels us to rethink maturity – so often overtly or covertly misconstrued as respectability – orienting us instead toward a radical individual and collective mode of being in the world by transcending it through secular spirituality.” Rana Sioufi, PhD, supervising psychologist in New York City, member of DysUnited

“In a moment where solidarity is hard to find, among psychoanalysts and among activists, the Scalias’ book takes a close and quite personal look at the psychic mechanisms that lead us to dissemble, fracture, and turn against our own best interests.  When negative hallucinations threaten to ensnare us all, this book wonders if there is a way to not only not join in the madness, but to actually lessen its impact.” Tracy D. Morgan, LCSW-R, M.Phil., psychoanalyst and founding editor of New Books in Psychoanalysis