What’s Repaired in Reparations: A Conversation Among Psychoanalytic and Social Activists

Medria Connolly, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Santa Monica, California. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University, and has been in practice for more than 30 years working with adolescents, adults and couples. In addition to her private practice, Dr. Connolly worked for many years as a consultant to a Los Angeles-based treatment program for adolescents in the juvenile justice system and in a high school-based health clinic in Watts. Her long-time work in these community settings, plus frequent contemporary encounters with implicit bias in professional groups, contributed to her recognition that individual, family and small group interventions are too limited in scope to alter the structural inequities confronting historically victimized groups, especially African-Americans. This recognition led to the embrace of a prospective national intervention, i.e., reparations, to address the underlying psychosocial challenges and promote racial healing. In addition, Dr. Connolly works as an organizational consultant to facilitate leadership, team building, communication and collaboration within diverse groups.

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Ph.D., is Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University, where she holds the South African National Research Foundation Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma and the Research Chair in Historical Trauma and Transformation. She is the 2020-2021 Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her research interest is in historical trauma and its intergenerational repercussions. She has published extensively on victims and perpetrators of gross human rights violations, on forgiveness, and remorse. Her books include the critically acclaimed A Human Being Died that Night: A Story of Forgiveness. She is editor and coauthor of several other academic publications.

Lynne Layton, Ph.D., is a member of the Grassroots Reparations Campaign organizing committee. She is a psychoanalyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and part-time faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She teaches Social Psychoanalysis in the Community, Liberation, Indigenous and Eco-Psychologies specialization at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is Past-President of Section IX, Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility, and the author of Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes (Routledge, 2020, with Marianna Leavy-Sperounis).

Bryan Nichols, Ph.D., is a Los Angeles-based Clinical Psychologist with a practice focusing on teens, families, adults and couples. He received his Doctorate from UCLA, and was a long-time consultant and supervising psychologist for a Los Angeles city gang prevention and intervention program. Dr. Nichols’ work in both his private practice and the community has led to the recent development of societal, “macro-level” ideas about how to remediate persistent issues of bias that infect and undermine interracial relationships and the multi-disciplinary collaborations required to effectively implement community-based psycho-educational interventions. His early professional experiences included being a Trainer, and Trainer of Trainers in the “Effective Black Parenting Program,” and conducting numerous trainings in the “Dealing with Anger Program” designed for African-American youth.

Billie Pivnick, Ph.D., is a psychoanalytic psychologist who specializes in treating children and families confronting difficulties with traumatic loss, particularly those resulting from adoption and mass catastrophe. She is faculty/supervisor in the Columbia University Teachers College Doctoral Clinical Psychology Program and the William Alanson White Institute Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Training Program, and is the former head of the Graduate Dance Therapy Program at Pratt Institute. She served as a consulting psychologist to Thinc Design, the exhibition designers partnered with the National September 11 Memorial Museum, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, and the Smithsonian. Of her numerous publications, her essay “Spaces to stand in: Applying clinical psychoanalysis to the relational design of the National September 11 Memorial Museum” won the 2015 Schillinger Memorial Essay award.

Romy Reading, Ph.D., is clinical psychologist in private practice in New York City, who received her Ph.D. from The New School for Social Research, and is currently a candidate at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She has worked as a Supervising Psychologist at the Center for Intensive Treatment of Personality Disorders at Mt. Sinai West and at the Peter Krueger Clinic for HIV/AIDS services at Mt. Sinai Beth Israel. She is also a co-host with Dr. Billie Pivnick of the podcast titled Couched, which features interdisciplinary conversations between psychoanalysts and experts from a wide array of fields. She has also coauthored manuscripts on the topics of therapist reflective functioning, mindfulness, and group psychotherapy for LGBT asylum seekers. She recently published a book review of Celia Brickman’s Race in Psychoanalysis: Aboriginal Populations in the Mind, in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
CONTACT Romy Reading, Ph.D. New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, 80 5th Avenue, 1406, New York, NY 10011