Western New England Psychoanalytic Society

This event addresses: climate crisis and leadership

Speaker: Merritt Gardiner Juliano, JD, LCSW This half-day workshop will explore Otto Scharmer’s Theory U Leadership principles of “presencing,” or operating from the future as it emerges. During this time of great disruption as evidenced by the planetary health crisis, and massive failures in our social, political, and economic institutional systems, Scharmer sets forth a framework to address these challenges drawing from the work of Fritjof Capra, and calling for us to heal the ecological, the social and the spiritual. Participants will become familiar with Scharmer’s three arenas of the social world: (1) objective structures and systems, (2) enacted structures and systems or intersubjectivity, and (3) deep sources of enactment or trans-subjectivity. Finally, we will explore principles and practices of presencing. Participants will discuss parallels in the psychoanalytic process, and contrast learning from the past with operating from the future (that wants to emerge). We will also consider aspects of psychoanalysis that can nurture presencing, as well as aspects of psychoanalysis that may no longer be useful in light of emerging complexity and systems science.