Over the last six months, we have had monthly Association of Ethnic and Minority Issues (AEMI) chairperson meetings intended to prepare us for our roles in facilitating what Elliot and the faculty had described as a program-wide agenda to bring greater prominence to matters of diversity in our meetings, colloquia, the Far Fund Guest Lecture series, and in our courses.

We view this letter as a way of sharing with the community what we, as co-chairs, have been thinking and talking about with each other. Early in the fall semester, Elliot raised the question of our program’s commitment to social justice. This has led us to think about what social justice means, and in what way a commitment to social justice is inherent to our clinic’s pledge to provide psychotherapeutic services to the Harlem and the City College communities. We realize that, beyond our program’s agreement on the common merits of psychodynamic treatment, we do not have an agreed-upon set of “core values” for our academic/training program.

This said, a question remains for the entire community to contemplate: What are the “core values” of our program? Is there something radical about the work therapists and patients do at the Psychological Center? We think there is. Part of the reason why each of us chose City College is that we perceived an underlying commitment to social justice within the program, and we would like to think that part of the reason that City College chose us was that it saw in us a spark that seemed up for the challenge.

Social justice is more than an amorphous concept. Social justice is about real life opportunity, opportunity that comes in the form of education, employment, legal rights, financial prospects, safety, and health care. Social justice generates positive change, creating a ripple effect that impacts people in both large and small ways. Within that wide net of opportunity, we imagine that social justice in our field is the unrestricted chance for the exploration of one’s inner world regardless of race, gender, economic background, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or immigration status. It seems that our professional pursuits at City College are, in part, about the facilitation of our patients’ intrapsychic explorations and also about the advancement of social justice in our community. The former is readily addressed in our courses and practica, but we do not fully explore the latter so much beyond general platitudes like “doing the good work” and “fighting the good fight.”

These questions seem all the more important and timely as admissions season is now in full swing. How we represent ourselves as ambassadors of our program to prospective students is critical. It is equally significant to consider how these applicants reflect on, and question thoughtfully, the goal of furthering the values that are essential to providing therapeutic support to the community. With this in mind, we ask ourselves (and we encourage you to do the same): What are we looking for in applicants, and what do we want to convey to candidates about our program in terms of social justice and action? Do we have core values we intend to share with prospective students during the interview and selection process? Do we acknowledge the radical, far-reaching possibilities that affordable psychotherapy and neuropsychological assessment creates for children, teens, adults, couples and families?

It is important that we convey the potential of psychodynamically-oriented psychotherapy to impact individuals in communities. One way to do that is by challenging ourselves to live outside of our personal comfort zones and by continuing to explore our own levels of commitment to social change. We do not have the luxury of avoiding the difficult areas that form the larger social constructs that influence our lives, our patients’ lives and the work we do together. We hope that you will continue to have conversations and thoughts about the impact and influence of class, race, sexual orientation, gender, religion, and ethnicity, that have been so rich and fruitful over the past year. We look forward to struggling together toward change, toward better understanding, and toward the implementation of our “core values” in our community. It is important, and it can be revolutionary for us, for our patients, and for the work we do together.

Sincerely,

Monique Sulle Bowen and Melissa Ilardi
Co-Chairs
Association for Ethnic Minority Issues (AEMI)
Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology
City College of New York

January 2005