Introduction to IARPP Plenary Panel,Toronto, June 2015

These brief remarks introduce the symposium on Power and Authority, with clinical material by Francesca Colzani and discussions by Irwin Hoffman, Susanna Federici Nebbiosi, and Gillian Straker. I am glad we have the opportunity in this symposium to discuss power and authority in the clinical situation, because while this subject has been a center of interest for relational psychoanalysts since the inception of the relational perspective, explicit attention has not been paid to the topic in the recent past. Yet power and authority are always present and always important in our activities—in every clinical session, every supervision session, and every page we write. This symposium is composed of an incisive and moving clinical report by Francesca Colzani, followed by discussions by Irwin Hoffman, Susanna Federici Nebbiosi, and Gill Straker.     

The Toronto Manifesto

Within the past century there were two major ventures to advance the building of a scientific theory of evolution. The first was the building of the neoDarwinian paradigm during the early part of the century. The second was the sociobiological paradigm late in the century. Both made important contributions to science, but at the same time both shared the same monumental blind side. Claiming the Darwinian heritage exclusively for themselves, they rigorously excluded everything that both in Darwin earlier and throughout the 20th century in the whole of science-particularly among creative evolution theorists across the full spectrum of science, that is in many fields linked together by a meeting ground in systems science-sought to expand evolution theory to capture the heights as well as the depths embraced by the actuality of humanity, as our species' potential, and of nature.