President's Letter
As the new board president, I’m proud (and a bit nervous) to be in this role. I hope to prove myself a decent choice. I’ve been in CCP programs for about fifteen years or so. Across that time and through most of the programs, from the Fellowship to Analytic Training, CCP has provided a sense of place and belonging I did not expect early on. I value this organization all the more for it.
There are a lot of people throughout CCP who have been doing the hard work of keeping the programs, lectures, classes and mentorships going and I know there are plenty of fine wishes for the future growth of CCP. My hope is we can continue expanding the scope of leadership roles across the whole of the organization. There is a lot to do.
Our field has a long and awful history of being elitist – culturally, racially, and economically. And the work of psychoanalysis, I suspect, is terribly misunderstood in this culture. Even worse, this culture nurtures the growing networks of proto-fascists in the U.S. attempting to erase the rights of others based on race, gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, class, and economics. Not coincidentally, we’re also destroying the Earth we depend on. There’s a lot to do, inside and outside of CCP.
And we have the joyful aspects of this culture to celebrate, where our creativity can continue the ongoing conversations between psychoanalysis and the fields of art, music and literature. These possibilities are all around us, too.
While we’re each almost too busy with our own practices and educations and personal lives, I still hope we can, as a community, start some important conversations regarding how we bring our work – as therapists, analysts, organizers, writers, speakers, and activists -- into the world to leave this place in better shape than we found it.
Mari Ruti wrote that psychoanalysis is about the art of living:
“… our very subjectivity is a function of the various external things that matter to us as well as of the persistent and idiosyncratic ways that we care about them—that our ‘originality’ only emerges in relation to things we deem precious enough to be worth paying attention to. This is to say that our most heartfelt commitments to the outside world inform our identity and distinctive existential approach.”
Thank you for your time.
I look forward to seeing what we do.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, I’d like to hear them.
Zak Mucha, LCSW
President, The Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis
773-273-0474