Since the beginning of 2020, the global community has been wracked with the COVID-19 world-wide viral pandemic, as well as associated economic and social upheavals. In the US, unemployment rates have been unprecedented, on par only with numbers and suffering seen during the Great Depression. In a testament to deep-seated, refractory societal inequities, these calamitous developments have disproportionally affected people of colour; working- and lower-class peoples; and those of the growing under-class, such as the large homeless population across the US, including a significant and growing number in Los Angeles.

 

Significantly, long-standing issues of serious social injustice have yet again burst into the mainstream with the high- profile killings of African-Americans, including George Floyd, Ahamud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade. These murders have mobilised the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, prompting protests not only across the US, but world-wide.

 

The LAISPS community unequivocally condemns the historical and systematic injustices suffered by marginalised groups and individuals, as well as the manifestations of white supremacy and the oppression of others in all of its expressions.

 

At this historic moment, LAISPS renews its commitment to foster a genuinely searching, inclusive, diverse, anti-racist society.

 

By extension, this includes LAISPS dedicating itself, as an organization, to these goals, including greater inclusivity and diversity within its membership. We commit to a rigorous examination of our own institutional practices with a willingness to identify and address any racism in our teaching, supervision, and clinical praxis.

 

Cornerstones of the psychoanalytical project include recognising how profoundly the past informs the present, remembering what we wish to forget, and facing the truth. As our nation reckons with its inheritance, so too does our Institute. Addressing racism and inequality will be difficult, sensitive, and long-term projects. At times, it also involves a disciplined introspection into our own conscious and unconscious racial biases. As inheritors of the psychoanalytical movement, we are mindful of, and sensitive to, those groups which have experienced exclusion by and even oppression from the psychoanalytical project. As psychoanalysts, our values are based on a deep respect and curiosity for individual and group differences. Through our commitment to listening, to empathy, and to seek emotional and psychological truths, we value diversity and affirm human equality. LAISPS remains committed not only to sustaining and promoting such values and ethics, but also to establish policies and procedures that promote the awareness of racism and inequality. Overcoming internalised and institutionalised racism requires constant vigilance and openness to discovery – of self and of other – through dialogue.

We believe psychoanalysis has an important role to play in fighting for a more just, equal, and free world.