Critical Consciousness: Beyond Impasses in Environmentalism, Psychoanalysis, and Education (Routledge, 2025) provides insight into the antagonism and disputative dialogue present in contemporary discourse.

Our guest for this interview, author Joseph Scalia III, Psya.D. is a psychoanalyst, environmental activist, and Co-Director of the Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis. Co-authored with Lynne Scalia, Critical Consciousness is of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and to readers interested in the psychological aspects of dehumanization, competition, and opposing group identity.

Taking a broad, pluralistic psychoanalytic perspective, the authors shed light on how and why ideology and conflict have infiltrated education, environmentalism, and psychoanalysis. This book unpacks forms of indoctrination and rejection of new ideas in environmentalism, considers the desubjectification of the human in mental health "services," and assesses how the educational world needs leaders who can articulate unspoken educational aims that perpetuate inequalities, hidden oppression, and their pathogenic effects on disenfranchised groups. This book takes account of the competing schools of psychoanalysis, their members' dismissiveness and enmity toward each other, and their rationalized resistances to discussion across the aisles. From that viewscape, a challenging path forward is proposed.

Your host, Ben Greenberg, PsyD is a psychologist, psychoanalyst, and founding director of the Center for Dynamic Practice in Santa Fe, NM. After a wonderful recent conversation with Tracy Morgan about Psychoanalysis, she suggested I become a host to do interviews about a few books I mentioned I'm excited about. I love to hear interviews about new books. I have published several scientific papers among other written media, and am working on a few book manuscripts as well.

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