To the Dallas Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology and All of those Interested:

The Self, the Horde, and the Analytic Therapies: Bundling Crooked Timber. Thus goes our theme for the 2024-2025 season; here is why.

I follow exhausted precedent by stating clearly: We live in unprecedented times. And perhaps not since the last century's middle has Western society so ached for a robust psychology of people relations. Institutions, be they social services, spiritual communities, political parties, or professional organizations, find themselves in the grips of that eternal struggle fought between individuals, their groups, and the abstract masses. The vicissitudes of those triadic tensions form our theories, give shape to our clinical postures, and pervade our private hours waking and sleeping.

Long before Freud was a glint in anyone's eye, Immanuel Kant penned these words: Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. And we continue to try and bundle ourselves, bunching wiry and quirky beings together in pursuit of productivity, welfare, and communion. But the work is equal parts joyous and treacherous; Freud recognized as much in his later sociological writings. And from there sprung forth a line of socio-clinical thought through Reich, Erikson, Fromm, Fanon, and Horney. It later mingled with the continental philosophies by way of Chodorow and Benjamin. In all this, too, the hermeneuticists contributed with folks like Orange, Altman, and Cushman. All of them, and many others to be featured as part of DSPP's 2024–2025 program year, nobly steeped themselves in psychoanalysis for the sake of a larger human project: Bundling crooked timber.

And we will aim to the do same. Blending clinical and applied psychoanalysis, the year's programming will unfold against the rippling backdrop of an American election and the many divisions documented across the globe. All of them—all of them—implicate the individual self, its gatherings, and the hordes. DSPP's workshops and monthly meetings will feature voices that speak to the social dimensions of clinical work and the cultural salve that even a single psychoanalytic relationship might offer a lacerated communicative world.

Dr. Noelle McAfee of Emory University bridges the clinic and the polis with reflections on psychoanalysis in the democratic public sphere. The fabled Dr. Salman Akhtar brings clinical insights to the immigrant experience and identifies the othered analysand as a “neighbor.” International group psychologist, Dr. Haim Weinberg submits a psychoanalytic lens for an understanding of digital social-unconscious. And the once perennial nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize and author of such works as Enemies on the Couch, Dr. Vamik Volkan, joins us for a special virtual workshop.

There will be case studies, dramatic readings, documentaries, and plenty of libations all to generate what political scientist Robert Putnam famously calls social capital. We gather for rigorous—perhaps even rousing—discussions about the clinical tensions facing professionals today. And we do so while forging relationships in a real-life, flesh-and-blood, gathering of people buttressed by affection and shared admiration.

Do join us.

Nathaniel R. Strenger, Psy.D.

President to the Dallas Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology