IN A RECENT ISSUE of Harper's Magazine, Maggie Doherty describes a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA): “The crowd seemed old, strikingly so … Almost every person I saw was white.” She goes on to describe a community that appears to be at risk of coming apart over discussions of racism. Shortly after that 2023 meeting, the organization experienced a painful and very public racial and political enactment that was ostensibly about Palestine, but for many symbolized deep disagreements about race in psychoanalysis writ large: Do we take up race and other social realities, often dubbed the “social turn,” or do we insist that such content is not psychoanalytic because it ventures outside of the individual psyche?
In the aftermath of the 2023 conflicts, many younger and more diverse clinicians who had been pushing for the field to engage with social issues left APsA altogether. For those of us who care about the future of psychoanalysis, and who know that future must involve reckoning with systemic racism, the picture is grim: a community that can barely acknowledge its own lack of diversity without splintering. There is clearly a group-level defense against race and other social realities that is brittle, and potentially destabilizing when breached.
And yet APsA does not represent all of American psychoanalysis, as many institutes are not affiliated with the national organization. Bolstered by the groundbreaking Final Report of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis, some institutes have had more success in navigating the social turn that threatened to tear APsA to pieces, but when only an estimated 0.2 percent of American psychoanalysts are Black, there is still a long way to go.
If we seek even greater fluency and maturity in conversations about race and the unconscious, I suggest we look to the Group Relations Conference (GRC) in the Tavistock tradition: a small corner of the psychoanalytic world, forgotten by many analysts or never known in the first place, but vibrant nonetheless.
The GRC experience consists of a mix of smaller process groups and larger group events, typically held over the course of a long weekend. With a focus on studying unconscious group dynamics in the here-and-now, GRC members welcome the sort of painful group interactions that most of us would rather avoid, seeing them as learning opportunities. Like an analytic session, GRCs have a frame to organize the experience. Consultants start and end each group session exactly on time—and are known to get up and leave right on the hour, even if a member is midsentence. This can feel brusque to the uninitiated but provides a sense of clarity and predictability about boundaries. Similarly, the consultants work very hard to stay in their roles at all times, with neutral facial expressions, in order to facilitate member learning. Members, on the other hand, are encouraged to use the space creatively to facilitate their learning about power and authority—even if that means arguing with management about the conference rules.
At a recent GRC that I attended in a large American city, the membership was quite racially diverse, and members came ready to talk about race, not as an abstraction “out there” but as a real thing happening right here. In a political moment where any sort of conversation about identity is under attack, it's hard to overstate how refreshing and healing it felt to encounter this radical openness. It felt like freedom. The humdrum university classrooms where we gathered transformed into laboratories for unlocking human potential. A consultant explained to one of my small groups that the conference is a space to explore one's own liberation, and that it looks different for everyone: yes, liberation from racism, but also from all the other arbitrary limitations that we unwittingly impose on ourselves in group life. The aim is to be our most effective selves in groups. After all, it is within groups—including psychoanalytic institutes—that we usually make important decisions about human society.
Groups are hard. The intensity of feeling that the GRC experience can stir up often comes as a surprise to newcomers. Even for those of us who have spent quite a bit of time in our own therapy and think we know ourselves well, group work can activate new parts of our experience that don't typically arise within the analytic dyad. Starting in the 1950s, British analyst Wilfred R. Bion used Melanie Klein's intervention methods to study groups. He found that group life has its own unconscious process, greater than the sum of its individual members, that exists in between the fear of engulfment and extrusion: that is, the fear of being swallowed whole by the group and losing one's identity and the fear of being cast out and scapegoated. At either extreme, the survival of the individual member as such is at stake, and infantile annihilation fantasies can easily be activated.
When we add conversations about race to this mix of primal fears, it's no wonder that even skilled people get overwhelmed. I have watched brilliant psychoanalysts regress very quickly when asked to discuss race and power in a group. At the GRC I attended, members described a large group event as a “firing squad” and a “killing field.” Group work really is this fraught and this challenging, so why should we expect it to be different in our institutes?
Analysts get a lot of training about how to navigate complex dynamics between two people, but very little about how to do it in groups. If conversations about race and psychoanalysis often devolve into regression and chaos, the good news is that Group Relations practitioners have had technologies to address this problem for quite a while now. It's time we used them.
It is not only the field of psychoanalysis that stands to benefit. If we can figure out how to effectively process racial enactments, and teach the skill to others who need it, we could make a meaningful difference in the world.
In one of my small groups at the conference, we had an opportunity to study this type of enactment together. After a group challenge exercise that involved moving around the room, a white member said casually to a Black member, “I saw you twerking just now.” The Black member responded with confusion and dismay that her walking across the room was interpreted in this way. As a group we named this as a racially coded attack, made without conscious awareness. It was no surprise that this should happen, since groups are a microcosm of society. What moved me deeply was our ability to sit in the pain together and process it. To her credit, the white member owned that she had attacked the Black member. Her willingness to take responsibility, along with guidance from our staff consultant, opened up space for us to see the incident as a group-level phenomenon. Other white group members began to acknowledge that talking about racism as we had been doing made them uncomfortable, even angry.
The more that other members expressed their individual feelings, the more the burden was lifted from the two participants in the enactment. The group realized that it had unconsciously elected these two members to play the roles of perpetrator and victim, to express the latent anger about having to discuss race that white people in the group had been holding. Or to put it another way, the group felt that it needed to cast someone out in order to cohere. There were few dry eyes in the room as we grieved the pain of this, but we did not fall apart. In naming and owning our unconscious racism, we were able to work with it and transform it.
As I reflected on this incident later, I considered how many racial enactments are never resolved, leaving all participants feeling worse off, even though the theory about how to effectively work through such moments has been around for a long time. I thought of the brilliant work of the late Black psychologist Leroy Wells Jr. In his book chapter “The Group as a Whole: A
Systemic Socioanalytic Perspective on Interpersonal and Group Relations,” he explains how a group-level assessment can open up new possibilities for resolving group conflicts, including racial enactments.
In his case example, a seemingly intractable battle between two group members could be seen as a story about two personality-disordered individuals who are mired in their own incompetence: At a training for addiction counselors, a white man and a Black woman take on opposite roles and begin to argue constantly, disrupting the group; the white man denies the impact of race and criticizes the training, while the Black woman defends the training and criticizes him. But as Wells demonstrates, when looking at the group as a whole system, it becomes clear that all group members have a stake in the conflict and are unconsciously invested in perpetuating it. To resolve the problem, with its painful racial overtones, the whole group needs to change its behavior, and Wells shows us how to do just that with an effective method of group-level intervention. In short, everyone in the group needs to begin owning their feelings. In processing the enactment, it emerges that other group members also have strong emotional reactions to the training and the discussions about race. But as long as they remain silent, the two most vocal members can be scapegoated as the source of trouble.
In a political moment where any sort of conversation about identity is under attack, it's hard to overstate how refreshing and healing it felt to encounter this radical openness. It felt like freedom.
When I first encountered the Wells chapter, I felt a sense of wonder mixed with grief. We have had an effective psychoanalytic approach for resolving racial enactments available to us since the 1980s, but here we are in 2025, still struggling to take it up and put it to use. Clearly there is resistance to engaging with these technologies, but there may also be a marketing problem: Practitioners of the GRC method have not always known how to explain its usefulness to other fields that might truly benefit.
The group-as-a-whole approach that Wells used to resolve the conflict is an essential part of the GRC experience: Behaviors are seen less as a function of the individual and more as an expression on behalf of the entire group. Through the mechanism of projection, the group unconsciously attempts to disown feelings that are too painful to hold, instead ascribing them to an individual member or members. When an individual member has a valence for what is being projected, they may receive it, and then the projection “sticks” and becomes projective identification—that is, an individual becomes what the group projects. Analytic clinicians who are familiar with these processes in the consulting room may find that they are significantly more intense in a group, where the displaced feelings of multiple people are projected into one psyche. Yet the theory also offers a way to depersonalize acting-out behaviors and reduce shame so that more work can happen. For instance, if one person expresses rage in a GRC, they are likely to be seen as holding anger for the whole group—an overwhelming experience for anyone—rather than as a problematic individual.
The mental muscle behind this approach grew stronger for me as I flexed it repeatedly over the weekend of the conference. Like the Magic Eye books from my childhood, group enactments require careful appraisal to be seen in all their complexity. At first we may only see the individual who lost their temper or said something offensive, and we may rush to pathologize them. But if we look again through the group-as-a-whole lens, another picture slowly comes into focus: an interdependent system that has its own “mind,” where individuals are unconsciously recruited to act on behalf of the group.
I wonder what our psychoanalytic institutes might look like if more of us participated in GRCs and learned to think in this way. What kind of uncomfortable truths could we then take up and work with, that for now still feel too scary to touch as a group? Maggie Doherty noted that in her role as a journalist writing about psychoanalysis, some who were opposed to APsA's racial justice work refused to go on the record, for fear of being labeled as racist. It appears that as a system, American psychoanalysis is not yet ready to have authentic conversations about race because individuals fear they will not be safe. This is not surprising given the real challenges of such dialogues, but what do we lose by not having them at all?
The problem is twofold: Like many American professions, psychoanalysis has a serious lack of racial diversity in its ranks due to a history of systemic discrimination. But more perniciously, psychoanalysis also has a well-documented culture of not allowing the topic of race in the consulting room, where it could be integral to treatment. Many BIPOC analysts have reported that when they brought up racism in their personal treatment, their feelings about it were invalidated and instead ascribed to “universal” things like birth order. We'll never know how many promising BIPOC clinicians left the field because a core part of their experience was not welcomed or seen as worthy of analytic inquiry.
Our success in diversifying our profession—and treating our diverse clients—will depend on our ability to change this culture. I recognize there are still some analysts who rigidly adhere to the idea that talking about race and identity is inherently
Perhaps we could forgo the fleeting pleasure of treating someone like a pariah and uniting against them when they say something uncomfortable. Instead, we might say: This time it was you, but next time it will be me who steps into the mess. It doesn't matter who stepped in it; let's talk about it.
nonpsychoanalytic; perhaps no amount of emotional processing will change their minds. Yet I know there are also many in our community who recognize the importance of the social turn but avoid it because of the painful feelings it evokes. Like the white members of my small group in the GRC, they are angry at having to talk about race and scared of being shamed. Using the technology of group-level analysis, can we make space for their anger while still holding them accountable to the task of creating a future for psychoanalysis that includes everyone?
Another example from the conference may help to illustrate the point. During a large group session, a Black member pointed out that the dark-skinned people were all sitting on the outer edge of the room and wondered why no one else had named it. A few minutes later, a straight white male member expanded on the Black member's observation by stating, “the group wants to kick out the people of color and the queers.”
This was unquestionably a bold and provocative statement—but it expressed something very real in the group that needed to be addressed. “I'm glad someone said it out loud,” responded the Black member who had first observed the racialized seating arrangement.
Of course, it was inevitable that some members would hear the white man's statement through the individual lens, as an expression of his personal wishes, and turn against him. Yet, using the group-as-a-whole perspective, we could instead see it as a courageous statement that helped the group address something that was already happening. Since he took a risk and named it, we were able to work with it.
Imagine what might happen if someone made the same observation in a meeting of their psychoanalytic institute. Would others be able to take it in as a factual statement about the group, or would they succumb to the temptation to see it as an individual problem and shun the person who spoke? There is ample evidence that psychoanalysis—as a group—really does want to kick out the people of color. And as we have seen, it is hard to talk about all this without things going off the rails. But if we don't talk about unconscious racism, it will just continue to happen. My intention is not to offer any cover to people who make offensive comments to cause harm, but rather to express support for continuing the conversation, even when it's hard. Sometimes that means a willingness to hear out people we disagree with, including those who openly express their difficult feelings about the task—feelings like anger and fear. They are not wrong; it is indeed difficult.
Consider a hypothetical example: A white analyst publicly states her fear that talking about race will be damaging for her institute. A likely response from other members would be to dismiss her as a conservative or racist who is an obstacle to making progress, but as any seasoned GRC member will tell you, that would miss some essential truths. One, she is speaking on behalf of the system and she is not the only one who feels that way, so shunning her will not solve anything. She is expressing feelings that will keep showing up in the whole group's behavior until they are heard and worked through. Two, the fact that she was elected by the system to express this idea tells us nothing about her true beliefs.
This point is worth emphasizing, because we appear to be in a moment where a major barrier to the growth of psychoanalysis is white people's fears. Specifically, fears of being publicly shamed and called racist if they voice any discomfort whatsoever with the process—as if participating in unconscious racism were a stain on one's character. The truth is that we are all participants in unconscious systems of domination and oppression. It is not shocking or scandalous when we are caught acting out those systems; it is inevitable. Our ultimate ability to break out of this painful cycle lies in our willingness to recognize and process such moments.
What would it look like if psychoanalytic clinicians had a practice of normalizing the processing of racial enactments in our institutes? Again, I am not referring to avowed racists, but to the more common scenario of well-intentioned individuals who oppose racism and yet do it anyway. Perhaps we could forgo the fleeting pleasure of treating someone like a pariah and uniting against them when they say something uncomfortable. Instead, we might say: This time it was you, but next time it will be me who steps into the mess. It doesn't matter who stepped in it; let's talk about it. Perhaps that would make people less anxious about voicing their feelings, and in turn, lower their resistance to the task at hand.
As I wrapped up the weekend of the conference, my primary feelings were gratitude and love: that this group of courageous individuals had just spent 30 hours together, wrestling with the study of deeply painful realities, and trying to imagine how to change the world. My time at the GRC persuaded me that there is a way forward for American psychoanalysis to navigate the social turn, using well-established theories and interventions that already exist. Notably, in its section on racial enactments, the Holmes Commission Report recommended that group process become a formal part of psychoanalytic education, an idea which I wholeheartedly support. Using these technologies requires us to let down some of our defenses and feel things we would rather not. This work is incredibly difficult, but as psychoanalytic clinicians we already know quite a bit about looking at painful realities. We are well-positioned to face this challenge.
Max Beshers is a therapist with a private practice in Chicago. His clinical interests include identity formation, LGBTQ experience, and trauma. His writing has previously been featured in ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action.