DISTURBING THE SLEEP OF THE WORLD: PSYCHOANALYSIS, SOCIAL AWAKENING & RADICAL POLITICS
The Colloquium Series 2023-2024, presented by the Psychoanalytic Society of the William Alanson White Institute
The Fundamental Radicalism of Psychoanalysis from Freud to Fanon
ELIZABETH ANN DANTO, PhD
and DANIEL JOSÉ GAZTAMBIDE, PsyD
DISCUSSANT: PASCAL SAUVAYRE, PhD
About Dr. Danto’s Presentation: Class, Conscious and Unconscious
“In your private political opinions you might be a Bolshevist,” Ernest Jones wrote to Sigmund Freud in 1926, “but you would not help the spread of Y to announce it.” Freud’s modernist views on social justice and the right to mental health care had triggered Jones’s discomfort. Today, despite ample evidence that the free psychoanalytic clinics of Europe in the 1920s and 30s did enact Freud’s views, Jones’ concerns continue to underlie the cultural tenacity of his class-based narrative.
About Dr. Gaztambide’s Presentation: Racial Capitalism as Psychoanalysis’ Unconscious Underside: Clinical Lessons from Freud, Du Bois, and Fanon
Cedric Robinson coined the term “racial capitalism” to underscore the racial underpinnings of capitalism today, drawing on the insights of the Black Radical Tradition before and after W.E.B. Du Bois’ groundbreaking work. Little known is Du Bois’ engagement with psychoanalysis, and how his and Freud’s theorizing on race and class present an undertheorized parallelism on how the unconscious is formed within social location. This presentation will draw on the “missed encounter” between psychoanalysis and the Black Radical Tradition encapsulated in Frantz Fanon’s work, revealing to us not only a theory of race and class, but its application in contemporary clinical practice.
ABOUT ELIZABETH ANN DANTO, PhD
Elizabeth Ann Danto is professor emeritus, Hunter College of the City University of New York. Dr. Danto is a writer and international lecturer on the history of psychoanalysis as a marker of urban culture. Her book Freud’s Free Clinics – Psychoanalysis & Social Justice, 1918-1938 (Columbia University Press), won the Gradiva Award and the Goethe Prize. Other books include Historical Research (Oxford University Press) and the co-edited Freud/Tiffany – Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and the ‘Best Possible School'” (Routledge – History of Psychoanalysis series).
ABOUT DANIEL GAZTAMBIDE, PsyD
Daniel José Gaztambide, PsyD, is assistant professor of clinical practice in the Department of Psychology at the New School for Social Research, where he also directs the Frantz Fanon Lab for Intersectional Psychology. He is the author of the book A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology. Dr. Gaztambide is in analytic training at the NYU Post-Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and is a member of the Puerto Rican Poetry Troupe, the Titere Poets.
ABOUT PASCAL SAUVAYRE, PhD
Pascal Sauvayre is faculty and training analyst at the William Alanson White Institute. He studies, teaches, and writes at the intersection of psychoanalysis and philosophy. A recent project includes editing, with Roger Frie, the book entitled ‘Culture, Politics, and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis’, published at Routledge. He has a private practice in New York City.