Book Talk: Unconscious & Ideological Determinants in Institutional Rigidity

Join us to celebrate the publication of Joseph and Lynne Scalia’s book: Critical Consciousness: Beyond Impasses in Environmentalism, Psychoanalysis, and Education.

Acknowledging the fact of unconscious resistances, those which are causing presenting problems, is a prerequisite and quintessential action for groups that are caught in stagnations of various sorts. Moving beyond policy or programmatic debates and arguments, across all disciplines and across society writ large, is the most urgent, and the most avoided, task of our day.

Location, Date, & Time: Virtual via Zoom, Thursday January 8th 2026 from 1:00-2:00PM EST

About the book: Critical Consciousness was born from the authors’ experiences as leaders of environmental groups, of psychoanalytic institutes, and of K-12 school districts. The authors bring resistances to those institutions’ creative self-discovery into experience-near conceptualizations. The pervasiveness of unconscious ossification of cherished but destructive ways of being is brought to life here. Personal interludes of the authors’ subjectivity-forming lifestyle in the wilds of Montana are also shared here, as is an essay on the play analysis of a childhood schizophrenic who found a new and alive active societal life.

About the author: Joseph Scalia III, Psya.D. is a psychoanalyst and a Co-Director of the Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis. He is also a psychoanalytic activist, as well as an environmental one, aiming his interventions at repudiated but outcome-determinative societal, institutional, group, and individual pathologies. Dr. Scalia is highly published in the critique of the environmental movement and, within psychoanalysis, is the author of Intimate Violence: Attacks Upon Psychic Interiority and the editor of The Vitality of Objects: Exploring the Work of Christopher Bollas, and the co-author of Critical Consciousness: Beyond Impasses in Environmentalism, Psychoanalysis and Education. See dempsya.org and scaliapsychoanalysis.com for more information.

Lynne Scalia, Ed.D. is a recently retired educator from Montana. Her undergraduate work in Elementary Education was completed at University of Montana. Her master’s and doctorate in Educational Leadership was at Montana State University. She has served as a school district superintendent and as a high school, middle school, and elementary school principal. Her work in education and research has been psychoanalytically informed and she has participated in classes at the Ecole freudienne du Quebec and the Northern Rockies Psychoanalytic Institute. She is the author, with Joseph Scalia III, of Critical Consciousness: Beyond Impasses in Environmentalism, Psychoanalysis, and Education, by Routledge, 2026.