More than a century ago, Freud gathered colleagues for Wednesday meetings that opened the world of psychoanalysis to a wide range of powerful ideas. Psychosocial Wednesdays are modeled on those Wednesdays and on Jung´s meetings at the Psychological Club, and feature speakers from various psychoanalytic traditions, schools, and associated fields
I believe we can work together towards transformative change in analytical psychology by creating new conceptual, work and life knowledge systems that meet the collective needs of our time with social justice is a core value. This requires generating many forms of systemic change that create new conditions for liberation from our oppressive practices that we seek to eliminate. I ground this outrageous proposal in an autoethnographic portrayal of Lucas Harris, a gay rights/AIDS activist and co-founder of an AIDS clinic in 1989. I met Lucas in the maelstrom of early AIDS and his magnetism and love pulled me into what became a thriving mutual aid community that I was actively engaged with for over a decade. I support my discussion around key concepts of Gloria Anzaldúa’s corpus through which I sketch a form liberatory activism and coalition building that we may conceptually consider and embrace as a community. Anzaldúa (1942-2004) was a scholar, poet, philosopher, and queer feminist of color who explored the aesthetics of knowledge production as they are shaped by identity transformation, healing, and social justice. Her work was influenced by Jung and Hillman’s thought; however, the aim of her spirit-inflected relational ontology was to facilitate a space where new ways of knowing could be valorized, particularly from third-world queer feminist voices in contrast to dominating Western-centric discourse. Aspects of liberation psychology and Latina/o feminist decolonizing philosophy (whose time has already come) are also woven throughout my discussion.