Ethics Conference via Zoom – Dreaming Into Being: Community Psychoanalysis and War with Gaea Logan, LPC-S

Gordon Lawrence’s Social Dreaming Matrix suggests that our dreams are communal, rather than personal. Arising from the social unconscious and belonging to the community, dreams can offer guidance, healing, and problem solving for a community of dreamers. I had such a dream. It included many symbols, some incomprehensible to me, yet the dream revealed a pathway for communal healing. The dream inspired the co-creation of the International Institute for Trauma Studies (IITS), an online immersive trauma training and certification program for graduate students and clinicians in war time Ukraine. IITS is a scalable contemporary psychoanalytic group approach to communal trauma for the treatment and prevention of war related depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and transgenerational trauma. This is a story of “Dreaming into Being”: ordinary citizens working together to create the extraordinary, an international training center and outpatient clinic for Ukrainian families, children and combatants. The paper also cites scholarly contributors in the current resurgence of community psychoanalysis and thinkers in social and phenomenological psychoanalysis.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After attending the program in its entirety, attendees will be able to:

1. Describe how an understanding of the social unconscious can be useful to the development of community psychoanalysis interventions in regions impacted by war.
2. Give an example of “shared trauma”.
3. Define Robert Stolorow’s concept, ” loss of absolutisms’ and its relevance in trauma treatment.

PRESENTER
Gaea Logan, LPC-S, CGP, is a British-American contemporary psychoanalyst, clinical consultant, and writer. She serves as Executive Director of the International Institute for Trauma Studies at the State Pedagogical University in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, where she was recently awarded Doctor Honoris Causa and named Professor Emeritus in recognition of her outstanding leadership and academic contributions. A Fellow of the American Group Psychotherapy Association, Gaea is also an alumna of the Harvard Global Mental Health/Refugee Trauma Program, the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) in the Stanford University School of Medicine, and the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. She is currently completing the training and supervising analyst track at the same institute. Her work integrates psychoanalytic insight with social justice and trauma- informed care in conflict and post-conflict settings. In recognition of her clinical excellence and global humanitarian outreach, she received the 2023 Yaakov Naor Award for Peace and Dialogue from the International Association for Group Psychotherapy and the 2015 Social Responsibility Award from the American Group Psychotherapy Association. She currently serves on the IAGP Board of Directors. Her paper, Dreaming into Being: Community Psychoanalysis and War, explores the clinical foundations of community healing in wartime. It will appear as a chapter in the forthcoming 2025 IAGP volume, Cultural Diversity, Groups and Social Challenges, edited by Cristina Martinez-Taboada and Marcia Honig.

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REFERENCES
Benjamin, J. (2018). Beyond doer and done to: Recognition theory, intersubjectivity and the third. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.

Bollas, C. (2023). Essential aloneness: Rome lectures on D. W. Winnicott. Oxford Academic.

Layton, L. (2020). Toward a social psychoanalysis: culture, character and normative unconscious processes. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.

Levy, B. S. (2022). From horror to hope: Recognizing and preventing the health impacts of war. Oxford Academic. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197558645.001.0001

Mucci, C. (2017). Psychoanalysis for a new humanism: Embodied testimony, connectedness, memory and forgiveness for a “persistence of the human”. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 27(3), 176-187. https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2017.1362502

Nelson, A. (2022). The Public Health Impacts of the War in Ukraine. Retrieved from https://now.tufts.edu/2022/05/12/public-health-impacts-war-ukraine

DISCLOSURES
Division 39 is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Division 39 maintains responsibility for this program and its content.  Austin Psychoanalytic is approved by the Texas State Board of Social Workers Examiners (Provider # 5501) to provide continuing education for social workers and the Texas State Board of Examiners of Marriage and Family Therapists (Provider #1138). We also meet the requirements to provide continuing education for the Texas State Board of Examiners of Professional Counselors. This program, when attended in its entirety, is available for 3 continuing education credits. Division 39 is committed to accessibility and non-discrimination in its continuing education activities. Division 39 is also committed to conducting all activities in conformity with the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles for Psychologists. Participants are asked to be aware of the need for privacy and confidentiality throughout the program. If program content becomes stressful, participants are encouraged to process these feelings during discussion periods. If participants have special needs, we will attempt to accommodate them. Please address questions, concerns and any complaints to info@austinpsychoanalytic.org. There is no commercial support for this program nor are there any relationships between the CE Sponsor, presenting organization, presenter, program content, research, grants, or other funding that could reasonably be construed as conflicts of interest. Participants will be informed of the utility/validity of the content/approach discussed (including the basis for the statements about validity/utility), as well as the limitations of the approach and most common (and severe) risks, if any, associated with the program’s content.