The 2026-2027 Colloquium Series

presented by the Psychoanalytic Society of the William Alanson White Institute

Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, and Getting Lost Getting There: an improvisational dialogue on contemporary psychoanalysis and the “decolonial turn”

presented by Daniel Gaztambide, PsyD, and Steven Knoblauch, PhD

with Host & Moderator Stephen Friedman, PhD

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2027 from 7:30-9:30pm/Eastern

Held in person at the Institute, 20 West 74th Street, New York City and via live stream online

1.5 CEs are available for attending. In order to receive your credit after attending, follow the instructions that are sent prior to the event.

ABOUT THIS EVENT

In this conversation, Drs. Gaztambide and Knoblauch assess their own experiences as well as those they have observed in the larger professional community. Each bringing their historical and personal perspectives to consider how, as psychoanalysts, we are responding to the challenging impacts concerning race, class, gender, culture and power differentials in social configurations, on  individual practices and professional institutions.

In particular each speaker will address how our theory and forms of practice with those who come for treatment, are changing in response to the effects of the “decolonial turn” in various social/political/economic contexts in which we are performing as professionals.  Drs. Gaztambide and Knoblauch are not looking for simple answers — so much as seeking an exploration and ongoing delineation of the complexity and immediacy of the challenges confronting all of us in both similar and different ways.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Daniel José Gaztambide, PsyD, is assistant professor of psychology at Queens College, where he is the director of the Frantz Fanon Lab for Decolonial Psychology, and a faculty member in the Department of Critical Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of the books, A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology, and the recent Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Technique: Putting Freud on Fanon’s Couch, which received a 2024 Gradiva Award for Best Book. He is in analytic training at the NYU Post-Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and is the recipient of multiple fellowships and awards including a Mellon Foundation Fellowship, a Miranda Family Fellowship, and the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education’s Outstanding Psychoanalytic Educator Award. Lastly, he is the recipient of a presidential citation for his service as part of the American Psychological Association’s Taskforce on Strategies for the Elimination of Racism, Discrimination, and Hate.

Steven H. Knoblauch Ph.D. is an internationally recognized clinician, teacher and lecturer on  psychoanalysis and psychotherapy with emphasis on the interaction between the unconscious, the body and the social.  He is faculty and clinical consultant at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and faculty/supervisor at The Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity.  Additionally he has been a guest lecturer/teacher for institutes in North and South America,  Africa,  Asia, Australia, Europe and the Middle East. Dr. Knoblauch is author of The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue (2000), Bodies and Social Rhythms: Navigating Unconscious Vulnerability and Emotional Fluidity (2021), and co-author with Beebe, Rustin and Sorter of Forms of Intersubjectivity in Infant Research and Adult Treatment (2005).  He serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and Psychoanalysis, Self and Context.  For 18 years prior to entering psychoanalytic training, Steven worked in Community Mental Health in various community based programs.  From 1975 to 1988 he worked at The Door, an internationally recognized model program for integrating  service delivery across the health, mental health, education, vocational and educational/recreational needs of inner city adolescents. His roles there included clinician, administrator and trainer/consultant to organizations globally. After the 9/11 event in New York, he worked with Emanuel Ghent’s daughter, Valerie, Latin band leader, Arturo O’Farrill, and a variety of other New York-based musicians/artists, as a trainer and supervisor in the development and implementation of Feel The Music, a program for families who lost family members in that tragedy. His work there built on his early experience performing as saxophonist and percussionist in jazz, rock, blues and Brasilian musical formats.  From 2022 to 2023 he served as a supervisor for The Women’s Prison Association in New York.  He continues to develop his approach to psychoanalytic treatment that combines perspectives across subjective, intersubjective and sociogenic dimensions of experience as a complex and opaque navigational process.

ABOUT THIS SERIES

The ability to live with differences, let alone to enjoy such living and to benefit from it, does not come easily and certainly not under its own impetus. This ability is an art which like all arts, requires study and exercise…

Zygmunt Bauman (2000)

Psychoanalysis at its best lingers in liminal spaces and gleans wisdom from encounters on the margin (bell hooks, 2000), with things unseen and experienced as ‘Other.’ The spirit of this colloquium series on Race and Psychoanalysis is to foster a dialogue about otherness in far flung places and deep within ourselves. The hope is to sustain the conversation and build authentic human connection without a collapse into a realm where defensiveness reigns, thoughts cannot be thought and feelings become rife with experiences of anxiety and shame.

Although the repair of centuries of racial oppression is impossible, the speakers in this colloquium series will address in an interdisciplinary fashion, the myriad ways in which psychoanalysis may help inform pathways towards some semblance of healing in the consulting room and beyond.

All the speakers will present their talks in person. We encourage everyone to attend in person and continue the tradition of meeting at the Institute. At the same time, the series will be offered on a live stream, allowing us to reach a broader audience beyond New York, and connect with those who are unable to join in person.

This series is presented at no charge to its audience. Please consider making a donation to The Psychoanalytic Society when registering.