APsA’s Collegiality Development Groups

The Collegiality Development Task Force invites everyone who was an APsA member in 2023 to join a Collegiality Development Group. This newly developed group experience will last 8 weeks at a frequency of once per week.

These will be leaderless groups intended as one way for peers to gather for the purpose of confronting ruptures recently exposed in APsA, on its listservs and throughout the organization. By providing a new venue — one that supports developing a sense of common purpose and mutual respect across racial, religious, ethnic, geographical, generational, and theoretical differences — we hope to support repair.

Part of the problem is that listserv discussions pull for polarizations across difference. These groups are an attempt to provide a venue that pulls in the opposite direction, towards genuine dialogue across difference. We believe that this new group experience, the success of which requires everyone to confront the difficult-to-confront realities of the past year, will benefit everyone, and we hope everyone will participate.

In retrospect, our diminished sense of collegiality should not surprise. First, there are the inevitable challenges and conflicts when organizations become aware of the work that needs to be done to achieve racial equality. Second, we are several years since the start of a pandemic that stole so many opportunities for in-person meetings. Spending three years in the presence of each other’s absence understandably strained bonds of collegiality. Our collective reservoirs of shared purpose and mutual respect ran low. Third, the new APsA membership rules have changed the very nature of APsA. What had been a credential-based organization has become one open to all whose work is profoundly informed by psychoanalytic theory and values.

You can register to participate by going to forms.gle/51CCGtZNqr8eoSK66 and completing the form. If you were an APsA member during 2023 please access the form and register to participate. If you are not a member of APsA, please consider becoming one and availing yourself of this opportunity.