From: Andrew Phelps <math_anxiety@yahoo.com>

To: withholdapadues@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [withholdapadues] Re: Nature editorials

Date: Wednesday, June 24, 2009, 10:30 AM

You wrote 6/11 that:

I think that the first time I responded to this, I concentrated on the first sentence, "who the 'client/survivor activists' are." We have some 40 years of activist experience and some 15 years of Internet experience; my point there was it would take something of a "learning curve" to gather fully the insight into what that's all about and how to relate to it.

How about "counter any current stalling and deep process of denial?"  The current stalling of the APA leadership can be given a positive cast, in mass psychological terms.  What's positive is that the presenting "problem" which I learned from bitter personal experience was "torture denial" has now been "brought to awareness."  Both by practices like the defection of Bryant Welch from the Practice Directorate and by the good work of the Ethical APA group.  If I had written a "dream" on the Radical Psychology Network list in 1994, that such would happen, most folks there would have demeaned that as "ideation" or otherwise distanced themselves. 

But we also know that "bring to awareness" has the consequence of "bringing up the next layer of resistance."  What you are referencing by "deep process of denial."  The presenting fact, to me as a community organizer, is that now we have to notice that the clinical social relation itself has elements of "torture" attached.  I didn't invent that, in fact it's Foucault's argument regarding the "clinical gaze."  What's apparent to me is that networking "client/survivor activism" and "social justice psychology" subverts the organizational dominance paradigm of the Practice Directorate.  That the "change the practice" imperative seems organizationally worth pursuing.

We could learn to listen across our ideological divide and start to hear one another.  Now, that's a dangerous idea!