As part of the structural challenge, psychoanalysis needs to rethink how it unconsciously reproduces its race and class biases in its curriculum and training infrastructure (Black Psychoanalysts Speak 2017).
https://aspe.hhs.gov/basic-report/psychological-impact-incarceration-implications-post-prison-adjustment
Black Psychoanalysts Speak. 2017. Trailer (Video). .
At the same time, Green points out, via her detailed analysis of the important recent documentary Black Psychoanalysts Speak (Winograd, 2014), contemporary institutionalized psychoanalysis, Kleinian or otherwise, remains frightened and frightening in the policing of its own White borders: It does not want to be subjected to anything resembling a racialized or racializing gaze, and it certainly does not wish to be infiltrated by conscious or visible Blackness.
Green’s second agenda in her essay is to draw attention to the contemporary phenomenon of disavowed White violence done by psychoanalysts to subjects racialized as Black. She does this by referring, first, to the film Black Psychoanalysts Speak, noting the hostility, marginalization, and (sometimes physical) abuse faced by analysts of color at the hands of the White self-proclaimed guardians of the psychoanalytic faith.
(2014). Black Psychoanalysts Speak [Documentary], 18 minutes, United States (accessible online via subscription to PEP Web, ).
We
can have like black psychoanalysts speak, but it's not really going to create spaces for
our communities, unless we're not just part of panels, but also part of structures, and
part of faculty, and part of organizations that have the power to make real big
decisions and real big changes.
Currently, she is a fourth-year psychoanalytic candidate at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City, and a member of Black Psychoanalysts Speak. Dr. Cowie is the director of the 2024-2026 Group Relations Conference on Authority and Leadership presented by the Center for the Study of Group and Social Systems.
Currently, she is a fourth-year psychoanalytic candidate at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City, and a member of Black Psychoanalysts Speak. Dr. Cowie is the director of the 2024-2026 Group Relations Conference on Authority and Leadership presented by the Center for the Study of Group and Social Systems.
He is a founding member of Black Psychoanalysts Speak and serves on the boards of the Holmes Commission of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the International Psychotherapy Institute {IPI} and the New York Center for Community Psychoanalysis and is the former Regional Director of the New Hope Guild Centers for Children’s Mental Health.
He is a founding member of Black Psychoanalysts Speak and serves on the boards of the Holmes Commission of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the International Psychotherapy Institute {IPI} and the New York Center for Community Psychoanalysis and is the former Regional Director of the New Hope Guild Centers for Children’s Mental Health.
Winograd’s (2014) powerful film, Black Psychoanalysts Speak, opens with Kirkland Vaughans’ account of his “exceptionally bright” analyst saying that his only “Negro” patient’s “treatment didn’t go well, because all the guy wanted to do was talk about race.
“Black Psychoanalysts Speak.”
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Trauma
Opening the film, Black Psychoanalysts Speak (Winograd, 2014), Annie Lee Jones, a black American psychologist and psychoanalyst, says, ‘There has been near violent reactions to the things I say about the way racism, culture, and economic inequality affects my life and my work with my patients.
However, the many painful experiences referenced in Black Psychoanalysts Speak, the continuing apparent ‘whiteness’ of most psychoanalytic training institutes, the occasional resurgence of antisemitism as well as racism (Frosh, 2012; Davids, 2011) in the institutional practices of psychoanalysis, and also the repeated difficulty that psychoanalysis has had in facing up to a past history in which there has been at least as much complicity with authoritarian regimes as resistance to them (Damousi and Plotkin, 2012) all suggest a continuing problem that psychoanalysis has with its discontents.
Black Psychoanalysts Speak. PEP Video Grants 20141 1 1
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(Jama Adams, in Black Psychoanalysts Speak [Winograd, 2014])
On 12 May 2012 and 11 May 2013 the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) hosted two conferences in New York City entitled “Black Psychoanalysts Speak,” as a space to discuss the experience and poor representation of people of color within psychoanalysis.
But if we look to the experience reported by black analysts at the 2012 and 2013 conferences “Black Psychoanalysts Speak,” which can be found in Carina del Valle Schorske’s article Insights from Black Psychoanalysts Speak (2014) and in the documentary Black Psychoanalysts Speak by Basia Winograd (2014), we get a different and perhaps shocking answer.
Also, I am using the term black rather than person of color so as to be in alignment with the conference title, “Black Psychoanalysts Speak.”
165unhelpful and at worst threatening and damaging.
Insights from Black Psychoanalysts Speak, Transition 115, Mad pp.
(2014). Black Psychoanalysts Speak. PEP Video Grants, 1:1. accessible here: .
Black Psychoanalysts Speak is a group of Black psychoanalysts and other psychoanalysts who seek to enable the voices and ideas of Black psychoanalysts to be heard (in psychoanalysis and in the wider world), and to draw attention, within psychoanalysis and its related clinical and scholarly fields, to the concerns of Black people.