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The Benevolent Community: Democracy, Authoritarianism, Racism and the Making of Meltzer's Model

May 10, 2025

[ CE Hours - None ]

Date: Saturday, May 10, 2025
Time: 9:00 am - 11:00 am EST
Fee: None. Open to the public.
Location: Online Webinar via ZOOM

Register Online

Visit: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/O6q4gczfTA62cRuA3WfV2Q

Program

This presentation will give an overview of the presenter's ongoing independent research project on the life and work of Beresford Hayward, who commissioned Donald Meltzer's model of the person-in-environment for the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) project on the Educational Role of the Family in the late 1970s. The presenter will show how the model grew out of preoccupations with group relations theories concerning democracy, authoritarianism, integration, and racism at the time of urban renewal on the South Side of Chicago. Using material from the films Farming and Skin, he will show how the model serves to follow the patient into and out of gang states of mind and pathological organizations: in Farming, a Nigerian boy "farmed out" by his parents to a working class white family in England, who becomes the leader of a skinhead gang; in Skin, a neo-nazi who makes the dangerous decision to leave the white supremacist gang he has been a member of since his youth. A new reading of Meltzer's Apprehension of Beauty will lend itself toward antiracist praxis in our time. The Benevolent Community in Meltzer's model will be linked with the Beloved Community in the work of MLK, hopefully offering a new perspective for psychoanalytic social workers navigating these issues today.

Presenter

Benjamin Lang, MSW, is a child psychotherapist at Sheppard Pratt in Baltimore City Public Schools, and is an avid reader at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. He previously consulted at a Central Cleveland Housing Project for the Hanna Perkins Center, where he was a Clinic Associate. Lang has worked in residential settings for people with disabilities and autism, and at residential therapeutic centers including the Orthogenic School. He is on the faculty of the International Psychotherapy Institute, where he teaches Infant Observation.

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