Decolonising Psychoanalysis Seminars

Photo by Alex Green from Pexels

The Psychoanalysis of Racism and the Racism of Psychoanalysis

Robert Beshara (speaker) with Fakhry Davids (respondent)

Saturday 19 February 2022, 3:00pm - 5:00pm GMT

Online seminar £12 - £24

Book here

 

This is the first in a series of seminars on Decolonising Psychoanalysis, organised by the Race and Culture Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists. The series is intended to open up conversations about psychoanalysis by initiating Transatlantic Dialogues between academics and psychotherapists, bringing clinical responses to their academic decolonial work. How will clinicians speak to those concepts from the standpoint of their practice? And how can we use these ideas to think about subjectivity, development, racial trauma and so on.

For an abstract of Robert Beshara’s paper, further event details, extended biographies and ticketsplease visit our EventBrite Page by following this link - Book here

Robert portraitRobert K. Beshara teaches at Northern New Mexico College in the Unites States, where he is Director of the Integrated Studies Program. He is the author of Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies (Routledge, 2019) as well as Freud and Said: Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis (Palgrave, 2021). For more information, please visit   www.robertbeshara.com.

 

 

 

Fakhry portrait 2Fakhry Davids is a training analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a member of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists. His book Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference (2011) presented an original theory of the psychology of racism and was a major contribution to how we understand what happens in the mind of those engaged in or experiencing racism, both in the consulting room and the ‘outside world’.

 

 

 

Organised by the Race and Culture Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists

The Race and Culture Committee (RCC) was set up to provide a forum for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic members of The Guild of Psychotherapists to discuss issues of common concern, address ‘racial’ and cultural questions from a psychoanalytic and analytical psychology perspective, and promote anti-racist practice and racial equity within psychotherapy and the wider community. It embodies the values and purposes of The Guild in establishing ‘a pluralistic professional body to foster independence of thought, a spirit of inquiry, and freedom to develop creatively for the benefit of the profession and the public seeking psychological help.' 

Image caption
The image at the top of this page is available from the internet and described as 'Black man resting and lying on a cozy sofa'. By ignoring the therapist's hand with a notebook and pen in the foreground - the most common cultural trope of 'psychoanalysis' - we can surmise that the people distributing the image could not conceive of a black man in therapy and were unable to see what was in front of their eyes. What they saw was a black man 'chilling out' - that's what black men do, isn't it? - rather than a man in psychic pain grappling with the difficult process of psychotherapy.
Photo by Alex Green from Pexels