Echoes of Change: Deliberative Democracy and Conflict with Dignity

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
This community psychoanalysis event aspires to co-create a reflective space with and for citizens to enable transformative thinking and psychosocial innovation. It seeks to do it using the Reflective Citizens model and the Open Space Dream Field process which combine the social dreaming matrix, large group process and open space methodologies. These are powerful democratic processes that encourage collective discernment and sense-making in the group, and facilitate the emergence of all voices, curtailing the tendency for one subsystem to dominate. These processes foster the opening of minds to a variety of discourses and/or paradigms that may emerge, and reveal the unconscious dynamics present in communities.

PRESENTERS

Kavita Avula, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist, certified group psychotherapist, Fellow of the American Group Psychotherapy Association, and Dean of the National Group Psychotherapy Association. A child immigrant from India, she has decades of experience responding to trauma in humanitarian settings, including work in Palestine, Afghanistan, India, Uganda, and beyond. She is President and Founder of Therapist Beyond Borders.

George Bermúdez, PhD, PsyD, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles and an innovator in the field of social psychoanalysis. He is widely known for his pioneering use of social dreaming to explore the “social unconscious” and collective states of mind. His work centers on the psychological dimensions of systemic trauma, including racism, xenophobia, LGBTQ+ oppression, and the emerging anxieties of the climate crisis. Dr. Bermúdez has been a keynote speaker for the American Group Psychotherapy Association and is deeply committed to democratizing psychoanalytic practice by developing participatory, community-based approaches to dialogue and healing. Through dream-sharing practices, group reflection, and public engagement, he creates spaces that bridge individual experience with social realities. His scholarship and teaching foreground psychoanalysis as a tool for collective transformation, with particular attention to multigenerational trauma, intersectional identities, and the impact of sociopolitical ruptures on the psyche.

Registration Fee:
– Mental Health Professionals $80
– CFS Members $65
– Graduate Students/Candidates $50
– Community Mental Health $25
– Artists/Academics/Activists $10

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After attending this program, participants will be able to:
1. Demonstrate how a psychoanalytic perspective can find a home in and through community, carving out a space for reflection and solidarity, especially during challenging social and political upheaval.
2. Describe the social dreaming matrix, large group and open space process and their application to deliberative democracy and reflective citizenship.
3. Evaluate the experience of participating in a social dreaming matrix, a large group and open space process as well as their benefits to the building of a sense of community, democratic deliberation and reflective citizenship.