Chapter 5: The Curriculum, Racism as an Analytic Lens, and Supervision

If I am not in the world simply to adapt to it, but rather transform it, and if it is not possible to change the world without a certain dream or vision for it, I must make use of every possibility there is not only to speak about my utopia, but also to engage in practices consistent with it.

Racial issues and racially minoritized people are marginalized across all levels of psychoanalytic education. Most faculty and candidates concurred that the field of psychoanalysis needs to increase focus on race, racism, and white supremacy. A majority of faculty and candidates agreed that people of color were underrepresented throughout the curriculum both as authors and as topics of required reading. Faculty tended to see themselves as prepared and comfortable discussing the topic of race or racism; candidates were less likely to see faculty equipped for those discussions. Survey and interview respondents frequently noted how matters of race and racism were addressed only in isolation through courses marginalized from the rest of the curriculum by their rarity, through the frequent designation of matters of social diversity as being questionably psychoanalytic, and through the minimization of racial incidents within the institution as uncomfortably disruptive and personalized.

One interviewee noted, “People coming into psychoanalysis would like to see the field reflect the world that they live in and not the ivory tower that we have built, with analytic identity as something that [is] somehow pristine and unbreachable.” The failure to robustly incorporate the realities of race and systemic racism, or of DEI into psychoanalytic training programs not only impoverishes these programs but is a deterrent to potential candidates. One psychoanalytic psychotherapist who has chosen not to pursue analytic training called into question the ethics of training programs that center cisgender whiteness. “To go through a psychoanalytic training program th