Join us for an important lecture from the Sue Fairbanks Psychoanalytic Academy featuring Elise Geltman, LCSW.

In this presentation, Who is Free to Free Associate: Psychoanalysis and Social Ethics, Elise Geltman, LCSW, considers the impacts of institutionalization on mental health broadly, and psychoanalysis specifically, from multiple angles-including from a clinical, personal, and social work lens.

Elise will discuss the social ethics of Institutional Psychoanalysis (and social work and mental health) as an entity, force, and participant in the larger social world, paying close attention to the related historical, political, and economic impacts. This discussion will introduce the idea of "trickle-down psychic economics" and challenge us to think about the social ethics of our group reality (those of us who comprise Institutional Psychoanalysis, social work, and/or  mental health) as we consider whiteness, racial enactments, the unconscious process, the group life of psychoanalysis, and systemic and structural violence.  

From such material, timely ethical questions emerge. For example, what is socially ethical psychoanalytic care? How is implication a part of our ethics? What can we do with our implicated positions? How do we work with ourselves and others as individuals inevitably embedded in and influenced by ongoing social, historical, and political forces? Moreover, how can we lean towards a radically relational accountability in service to individual and collective ethical care? 


At the conclusion of this lecture, participants will be able to:

1. Discuss the concept of "social ethics" and its application to mental health. 
2. Consider how "trickle-down psychic economies" may apply to their work, the settings they work within, and their training. 
3. Discuss the concepts of "habitus," "institutionalization," and "implicated subject" while considering their application to an understanding of Institutionalized Mental Health and/or Psychoanalysis.
4. Discuss and explore if/how Institutional Psychoanalysis has any ethical imperative to the social life (or group life) outside the consulting rooms and institutes.
5. Provide at least one example of how the "habitus" may have kept them from speaking up around some enactment of social power/harm/structure (aka "ism").