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Community Connections

Academic Outreach Committee

The Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis has worked to cultivate relationships with the broader academic community in recent years. The Academic Outreach Committee is tasked with developing points of contact and growing relationships between analysts and the broad world of academia (e.g., politics, philosophy, literature, linguistics, etc.). We offer study groups, courses, and programs designed to bring analysts and academics together to learn from each other and to stimulate interdisciplinary thinking.

Sample recent or current Academic Outreach Programs include the following:

  • Program on race and racism in clinic and culture, co-sponsored with Simmons College and with the Psychosocial Work Group of the Psychology and the Other Institute
  • 3 interdisciplinary study groups devoted to examining the topic of shame
  • 3 workshops on poetry and psychoanalysis, co-led by Anna Ornstein (analyst) and Dawn Skorczewski (English professor)
  • Program with Donald Antrim, MacArthur Fellow and novelist
  • Post-play discussion by MIP’s Lisa Slater for Company One’s most recent play, Dry Land

International Connections Committee

The International Connections Committee (ICC) was formed at MIP to provide the membership with opportunities for lively contact and ongoing exchange with members of the international psychoanalytic community. Two to four times a year the ICC hosts international visitors and invites them to present to the membership in an informal format dedicated to open discussion. The ICC provides the MIP community with information to attend and present at international conferences. In recent years, The International Connections Committee invited people from local international communities to speak on immigration and cultural experience.

Examples of past ICC events:

  • Constructing Social Identities: A case study of Latino Jewish immigrants in the United States with Laura Limonic PhD, New York
  • Gregory Jules, a community health worker at the Justice Resource Institute, Jamaica Plain, MA and a leader in the Haitian community will share his experiences in community mental health.
  • Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran, Triumphs and Laments with Dr. Gohar Homayounpour, Tehran
  • Immigration, race, and the complexity of cultural identity with Usha Tummala-Narra, Ph.D.
  • Effect of Dictatorial Regimes on the psychoanalytic movement in Hungary before and after the Second World War. Judit Mészáros, Ph.D., Budapest
  • Psychoanalysis and the new public culture of childbirth with Dr. Lisa Barrister, London
  • Identity themes in psychotherapy with an adopted mixed-race adolescent: case presentation from the Tavistock Clinic with Margaret Rustin, London