Black Psychoanalysts Speak

This film comprises material from the IPTAR hosted Black Psychoanalysts Speak Conference of 2012, and the IPTAR and The William Alanson White Institute hosted Black Psychoanalysts Speak Conference in 2013, also hosted by the Clinical Psychology Department of the New School for Social Research (with the support of NYU Post Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis). The film features interviews of the eleven Black psychoanalysts who participated in the conferences as well as two other participants. The film is intended to raise awareness of the need for greater openness and understanding of cultural and ethnic pressures in psychoanalytic training, in transferential and countertransferential interactions, and in the recruitment of people of coulour into psychoanalytic training.

These participants contend that psychoanalysis has a long history as a progressive movement devoted to the common good. Psychoanalysis asks us to examine the processes of self deception that perpetuate both individual unhappiness and social structures that are inequitable and oppressive. Yet psychoanalytic education has for the most part focused on training and treating the relatively privileged. The Black psychoanalysts here examine this dilemma and engage in a vibrant and thought provoking discussion about race, culture, class and the unrealized promise of psychoanalysis.