A Celebration of the Life of Kathy White
2026-09-25 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York)
A Celebration of the Life of Kathy White
Friday evening, September 25th from 5:oo-7:00pm/Eastern
Held at the Institute, in person and online
With invited speakers and reflections from the audience
Presented by the Antiracism Action Working Group

Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard: Revelation of Depth, with George Mandelbaum
2026-10-01 13:30 - 15:00
The Artist Study Group of The Psychotherapy Service for People in the Arts

presents
Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard: Revelation of Depth
With GEORGE MANDELBAUM, PhD
and images by Alison Feit

Thursday, October 1, 2026 from 1:30-3:00PM/Eastern
Attend In person or Online
Attend in person at the Institute: 20 West 74th Street, between Columbus Avenue & Central Park West
Join us via Zoom: https://wawhite.zoom.us/j/8180152948?pwd=[REDACTED]

ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION
Despite his limited dramatic output, Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) is considered by many to have been the greatest playwright since Shakespeare. Our presenter, Dr. George Mandelbaum, will focus on some of the reasons why Chekhov has this reputation and why his work is of special interest to psychoanalysts. The talk will focus on the climax of The Cherry Orchard, which Chekhov wrote while he was at death’s door. The bittersweet climax of the play mixes relational pleasure and pain, and loss and gain,at its ideational, emotional and symbolic center.
With images created by Dr. Alison Feit, we will explore through multiple perspectives, the final scene of The Cherry Orchard with its blending of Lopakhin’s joyful, deep throated speech at having gained the orchard, and Ranevskaya’s physical and emotional collapse at its loss. We will consider whether every gain one achieves also represents a loss; the realization of personal and generational fantasies, transformation and transcendence; the values embodied in psychoanalysis and how those can be used in the valuation of artistic creations, including Chekhov’s plays. How did Chekhov manage to create plays that at one and the same time were outwardly directed to address the monumental changes occurring in the late 19th Century and symbolizations of his inner life?

ABOUT OUR PRESENTER
George Mandelbaum, PhD, was the 2014-15 Visiting Scholar at the William Alanson White Institute. He received his PhD in English Literature from Columbia University. He has published several articles on drama in psychoanalytic journals, including the Spring 2018 issue of Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and that journal’s 2021 issue on Checkov’s plays, and he presented at the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2011. Dr. Mandelbaum taught the WAWI elective course, “HAMLET and Hamlet: An introduction,” in 2016. Over the last ten years, he has presented to the Artist Study Group on a variety of subjects involving playwrights, including the efforts of Strindberg and Tennessee Williams to deal with their psychosis through their late plays; on Eugene O-Neill’s composition of Long Day’s Journey into Night and on American playwright, novelist, journalist and actress, Susan Glaspell. In general, his presentations view plays as varied efforts by playwrights to artistically master their inner lives. Dr. Mandelbaum is currently a candidate in the Academic Associate Track of the Adult Psychoanalytic Training Program at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York.

Please join us for a discussion that explores the intersection of drama and psychoanalysis.
RSVP to: fvdillon@gmail.com

Frances V. Dillon, MSW and Eric Dammann, PhD, Co-Directors, Artist Study Group
Ernesto Mujica, PhD, Director, Sexual Abuse Study Group and Service

STEPHEN FRIEDMAN, Clinical Encounters with Otherness: The Conundrum of White Empathy
2026-10-02 19:30 - 21:30
RACE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: ENCOUNTERS WITH OTHERNESS
The 2026-2027 Colloquium Series
presented by the Psychoanalytic Society of the William Alanson White Institute
Clinical Encounters with Otherness: The Conundrum of White Empathy
presented by Stephen Friedman, PhD, LCSW
FRIDAY, October 2nd, 2026 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 the event, follow the instructions that are sent prior to the event.

ABOUT THIS EVENT
The conundrum of white empathy summarizes the way in a cross-racial encounter the well-intentioned white analyst and the Black patient are immediately “caught” trying to navigate the reverberations of centuries of racial inequality and hierarchy. The empathic gesture inaugurating the clinical conversation allows for the possibility of authentic engagement and the inevitability of perpetration that enacts racial harm. The clinical space can never transcend the oppressive order. Yet the seduction of a color blind space can draw in both the white clinician hoping to avoid implication in their participation and benefit from anti-Black racism, and the Black patient always wary of white spaces perhaps hoping there will be a chance for some respite, but certainly not transcendence. The possibility of repair is minimal if the white analyst’s subtle unconscious investment in perpetration remains out of awareness which means that an important part of the Black patient’s lived experience in the larger world and in the consulting room is effectively off limits. Ways of combatting this silencing tendency and opening up dialogue to confront directly the conundrum of white empathy, as well as the limits of dialogue and efforts at repair, will be explored in this talk.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Stephen Friedman, PhD, LCSW, is a graduate of the William Alanson White Institute. He is currently a supervisor of psychotherapy and is an Associate Editor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He is also an MSW and PhD graduate of the Smith School for Social Work and is an adjunct Associate Professor and Clinical Instructor at Smith School for Social Work. Dr. Friedman is also on the faculty at the William Alanson White Institute, the National Institute of Psychotherapies, the Manhattan Institute of Psychoanalysis, China American Psychoanalytic Alliance, and the NYU School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry. In 2019 he published a paper in Smith College Studies in Social Work entitled, Exploration of Racial Enactments in an Interracial Dyad to Foster the Strengthening of Voice and Identity in African American Male Adolescents. His doctoral dissertation (2024) was entitled, Interrogating Whiteness: An In-depth Study of Race and Psychoanalysis in Cross-Racial dyads. He presented Crying for different reasons: The conundrum of white empathy in an anti-Black racist world, at a 2026 international conference in Japan. Dr. Friedman is this year’s President of the Psychoanalytic Society at the William Alanson White Institute and is the organizer of this colloquium series. He is in private practice in New York City.

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.

The Not-Me Speaker Series Opens with Glenn A. Albrecht
2026-10-07 19:00 - 21:00
The Not-Me Speaker Series
A Harry Stack Sullivan Society Event
presents
Dr. Glenn A. Albrecht
ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHER
On Solastalgia, the Symbiocene, and Our Emotional Bonds With the Living Earth
Wednesday evening, October 7th from 7:00-9:00PM/Eastern
A SPECIAL ONLINE EVENT

Please note: this is a Candidate/student sponsored event. CE Credit is not available.
ABOUT THIS EVENT
“Humans have now created a globalized gigantic system of consumption and production which impacts the world. It changes the climate, it has led to the sixth great extinction event, and it is leading to the seventh, which is us.”
Environmental Philosopher, Dr. Glenn A. Albrect, is the author of 2019’s Earth Emotions. Bringing both theoretical and applied interests in the relationship between ecosystem and human health, he has pioneered the research of “psychoterratic” or earth-related mental health, with the concept of “solastalgia” – or the lived experience of negative environmental change. He has also written about animal ethics, including the ethics of relocating endangered species in the face of climate change pressures.
Dr. Albrecht joins us via live stream from his home in Australia.

Paradox, Containment, and the False Self in Clinical Practice
2026-10-26 19:00 - 20:30
A New Four-Part Workshop with Todd Anderson, PhD, PsyD, LP
Paradox, Containment, and the False Self in Clinical Practice
PRESENTED IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE CONFERENCE ADVISORY BOARD OF WAWI
Attend in person at the Institute* or online. The speaker will be in person for these sessions.
Offered on four Monday evenings in October and November
6 CEs are available
* The William Alanson White Institute is located at 20 West 74th Street, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenues.

ABOUT THIS SERIES
Drawing upon four chapters from Todd Anderson’s book, The Fragmented Self, Recognition, and the Edge of Desire, this workshop explores how clinicians work with paradox, fragmentation, premature adaptation, and difficulties in symbolic life.
Across the four sessions, Dr. Anderson will examine the clinical tension between coherence and containment, the legacy of premature self-organization, and the paradoxes of false-self functioning and authenticity. Emphasis throughout the meetings will remain on applied clinical thinking: analytic stance, listening, timing, symbolization, and the conditions under which experience can become more thinkable and livable in treatment.
Complete session descriptions and readings are detailed below.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Todd Anderson, PhD, PsyD, LP, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. His clinical and theoretical work focuses on personality structure, dissociation, paradox, symbolic life, and the conditions under which experience becomes thinkable in analytic treatment. Rooted in a relational and developmental orientation, his writing draws on object relations, queer theory, and post-structural thought. He is the author of The Fragmented Self, Recognition, and the Edge of Desire and three other books in psychoanalysis.

THE SCHEDULE
Sessions are being held in person, and are also offered online via Zoom, on the following four Monday evenings from 7:00-8:30PM: October 26th, November 2nd, 9th, 16th

SERIES COST
Professionals with Early Registration discount, $450 – register by September 25th
Professionals, Regular pricing, $600 – starts September 26th
Candidates and students, $300
Special Bonus: Registrants of this Workshop will be offered a discount to attend the new, 5-part Fran Anderson mini-series set for Spring 2027, a follow-up workshop to her popular series, Chronic Somatic Pain. Announcement to come during the 2026-2027 season.

SESSION CURRICULUM
Session 1: The Original Paradox
This session introduces paradox not as a problem to be solved, but as a basic structure of psychic life and analytic process. It will consider how contradiction, fragmentation, and internal complexity may need to be borne rather than prematurely resolved, and how clinicians can work more responsively when experience cannot yet be organized into coherent meaning. The meeting will also include time to explore clinical material in relation to these themes, allowing for integration of theory and practice.
Session 2: The Dialectic of Coherence and Containment: Ferenczi’s Legacy and the Ethics of Listening
This session focuses on the tension between the analyst’s wish to help create meaning and the equally necessary capacity to contain affect, dissociation, and uncertainty without rushing toward interpretation. It will examine coherence and containment as mutually necessary yet potentially disruptive analytic functions, especially in trauma, dissociation, impasse, and enactment. The meeting will also include time to explore clinical material in relation to these themes, allowing for integration of theory and practice.
Session 3: The Wise Baby and the Unborn Self
This session explores the figure of the prematurely knowing child and the “unborn self” as enduring psychic structures organized around survival, dissociation, and foreclosed development. It will consider how some patients come to know too much before they have been sufficiently held, and how analytic work may involve not simply insight, but the gradual emergence of what has not yet been able to take form. The meeting will also include time to explore clinical material in relation to these themes, allowing for integration of theory and practice.
Session 4: The False Self as Curator: Symbolic Life, Containment, and the Paradox of Authenticity
This session rethinks the false self not as a simple mask to be stripped away, but as an intelligent structure of survival, adaptation, and symbolic mediation. It will explore how performance and accommodation may preserve aliveness under conditions of mis-recognition, and how authenticity may depend less on dismantling the false self than understanding its protective and developmental function. The meeting will also include time to explore clinical material in relation to these themes, allowing for integration of theory and practice.
SUGGESTED READING
All readings are from The Fragmented Self, Recognition, and the Edge of Desire.
Readings may consist of one book chapter for each meeting:
1. “The Original Paradox”
2. “The Dialectic of Coherence and Containment: Ferenczi’s Legacy and the Ethics of Listening”
3. “The Wise Baby and the Unborn Self”
4. “The False Self as Curator: Symbolic Life, Containment, and the Paradox of Authenticity”

MARY WATKINS, White Work: Reckoning with the Legacies of "Whiteness"
2026-10-30 19:30 - 21:30
RACE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: ENCOUNTERS WITH OTHERNESS
The 2026-2027 Colloquium Series
presented by the Psychoanalytic Society of the William Alanson White Institute
White Work: Reckoning with the Legacies of “Whiteness”
presented by Mary Watkins, PhD
with Host & Moderator Stephen Friedman, PhD, LCSW
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2026 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
When people deemed “white” in the U.S. try to understand themselves, they rarely honestly address their extended ancestral histories. Even less common are efforts to critically understand how the invention of whiteness in the late 1600’s Virginia has affected their lives.
Dr. Watkins will share her odyssey through reparative genealogy to retrieve her ancestral history of enslaving and to reckon with ancestral debt through repair and racial reparations. Her work opens a path for “white” people to develop something akin to what W.E.B. Du Bois described as double consciousness, an effort to try to see through the eyes of those who have been harmed by white supremacy. This kind of “white work” is vehemently opposed by many who embrace whiteness as a fact instead of a myth, as well as by white people who have suffered a variety of losses and are low on sources of pride. For those who believe in white superiority, the call for reparations is often seen as shaming whites. How might we mindfully approach the issue of shame so that becoming accountable for ancestral histories that have harmed others is a restorative pathway to empathic action? How might therapeutic practices open their lens to include the relevance of whiteness and ancestral history for self-understanding and reparative action?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Mary Watkins, PhD, Professor Emerita at Pacifica Graduate Institute, co-created the first doctoral program in liberation psychology in the U.S. She is the author of numerous books, including Toward Psychologies of Liberation (with Helene Shulman), Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons, and White Work and Reparative Genealogy: Reckoning with Ancestral Debt as a Path to Racial Reparations. She is the recipient of the award for Distinguished Theoretical and Philosophical Contributions to Psychology (Div. 24, APA) and is the 2023 recipient of the Seymour B. Sarason Award for Community Research and Action (Div. 27, APA). Currently, Dr. Watkins focuses on critical anti-racist genealogy and the pedagogy of the white non-poor in the U.S. for the purpose of racial reparations. She facilitates the Houses of Healing psychoeducation curriculum in prison and conducts psychological evaluations for asylum seekers in immigrant detention.

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.

ANTON HART, Maybe me? Radical Openness to the Me the Other Might See
2026-11-20 19:30 - 21:30
RACE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: ENCOUNTERS WITH OTHERNESS
The 2026-2027 Colloquium Series
presented by the Psychoanalytic Society of the William Alanson White Institute
Maybe me? Radical Openness to the Me the Other Might See
presented by Anton Hart, PhD, FABP, FIPA
with Host & Moderator Stephen Friedman, PhD
FRIDAY, MAY 7, 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
If psychoanalysis aspires to maximal exploration, how can analysts position themselves to persistently be as open as possible to what emerges within the co-participatory analytic process? The Freudian concept of transference has greatly enhanced our capacity to recognize and interpret patients’—and our own—unconscious, unformulated, solitary and relational experience. Yet might the lens of transference also occasion the jettisoning unwanted or potentially overwhelming aspects of experience in analysis?
Drawing on a dissociation-based, Ferenczian reconceptualization of unconsciousness, Sullivan described three realms of self-experience: the good me, the bad me, and the not me. The not me comprises aspects of oneself that cannot be borne as one’s own. Both patients and also analysts inevitably occupy this realm to some degree, but such not-me-ness constrains curiosity, exploration, and psychological growth. This represents and obstacle for increasingly free association and exploration.
This presentation introduces a “transitional” psychic position—the maybe me—and an accompanying analytic stance in which what feels impossible to recognize as “me” becomes available as a possible aspect of self. Extending the presenter’s previously proposed concept of radical openness, which involves listening to the “strange other” as if they are likely to be carrying personally unconscious information about oneself, the presentation explores the implications of this stance for a more fully realized, coparticipatory form of psychoanalytic inquiry.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Anton Hart, PhD, FABP, FIPA, is Training and Supervising Analyst and Faculty of the William Alanson White Institute. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalytic Psychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He has published articles and book chapters on a variety of subjects including psychoanalytic safety and mutuality, issues of racial, sexual and other diversities, and psychoanalytic pedagogy. He is a member of the group, Black Psychoanalysts Speak and, also, co-produced and was featured in the documentary film of the same name. He teaches at The New School for Social Research, The Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, Columbia/New York Presbyterian Hospital, the National Institute for the Psychotherapies National Training Program, the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, and the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. Dr. Hart served as Co-Chair of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis. He is completing a book for Routledge focusing on radical openness as a clinical and ethical orientation. He is in full-time private practice of psychoanalysis, individual and couple psychotherapy, psychotherapy supervision and consultation, and organizational consultation, in New York.

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.

NIKOL ALEXANDER-FLOYD, The Narrative Cure: An Intersectional Reading of Trauma and Dissociation in The Birdcatcher by Gayl Jones
2027-01-15 19:30 - 21:30
RACE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: ENCOUNTERS WITH OTHERNESS
The 2026-2027 Colloquium Series
presented by the Psychoanalytic Society of the William Alanson White Institute
The Narrative Cure: An Intersectional Reading of Trauma and Dissociation in The Birdcatcher by Gayl Jones
presented by Nikol Alexander-Floyd, JD, PhD
with Host & Moderator Stephen Friedman, PhD
FRIDAY, JANUARY 15, 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 presentation, Dr, Alexander-Floyd provides a psychoanalytic intersectional analysis of The Birdcatcher by Gayl Jones (1986/2022), an author who has paid special attention to psychology and trauma. Jones powerfully exposes how race, gender, and class domination persists, despite gains in civil rights in terms of race and gender, and how trauma, including through efforts to assimilate or to transgress dominant norms, can fracture the psyche, through various forms of dissociation.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd, JD, PhD, is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and a graduate of the William Alanson White Institute. A lawyer and political scientist, Dr. Alexander-Floyd has been actively engaged in a wide range of political and legal issues, providing commentary for a variety of venues such as public radio NPR, TNT World News, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. She is the author of several books, and her articles have appeared in leading journals such as Feminist Formations, The International Journal of Africana Studies, Frontiers, Meridians, The National Political Science Review, Politics & Gender, PS: Political Science & Politics, and Signs. Her latest book, Re-Imagining Black Women: A Critique of Post-Feminist and Post-Racial Melodrama in Culture and Politics (NYU Press 2021), examines liminality, utilizing psychoanalytic theory on, among other things, splitting, identification and idealization, and haunting, and won the 2022 W.E.B. DuBois Distinguished Book Award, given by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. A recognized leader committed to diversity, Dr. Alexander-Floyd is a co-founder of the Association for the Study of Black Women and Politics; she also co-chaired the Annual Meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association for two years, and led the American Political Science Association’s Committee on the Status of Women and the Profession. She is editor of a special, forthcoming issue in the Spring 2027, of Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, marking the 30th anniversary of Claudia Tate’s Freud and His ‘Negro’: Psychoanalysis as Enemy and Ally of African Americans.

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.

DANIEL GAZTAMBIDE & STEVEN KNOBLAUCH, Where We've Been, Where We're Going, and Getting Lost Getting There: an improvisational dialogue on contemporary psychoanalysis and the "decolonial turn"
2027-02-19 19:30 - 21:30
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.

MICHELLE STEPHENS, The Unthought Other: Race, Dissociation, and a Black Feminist Psychoanalytics
2027-03-12 19:30 - 21:30
RACE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: ENCOUNTERS WITH OTHERNESS
The 2026-2027 Colloquium Series
presented by the Psychoanalytic Society of the William Alanson White Institute
The Unthought Other: Race, Dissociation, and a Black Feminist Psychoanalytics
presented by Michelle Stephens, LP, PhD
with Host & Moderator Stephen Friedman, PhD
FRIDAY, MARCH 12, 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
At the end of the 1980s, the black feminist legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw wrestled with the problem of a female blackness lived as an invisible intersectionality. Almost five decades later, Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality and critical race theory has become a hot button topic for conservative assertions of the lack of relevance of racialized experience to American identity.
Meanwhile, the past 50 years has also seen the emergence of a coherent, experientially based, archive of writings—essays, scholarly works, memoirs, biographies and autobiographies, histories, fiction and poetry—articulating the distinctive position of black female subjects. This position – historical, psychic, subjective – is situated within and shaped by a centuries long colonial formation stretching from Europeans’ early encounters with the peoples of Africa and the Americas to the present. Drawing from this archive of black female writings, including perspectives by black female psychoanalysts and visual artists, this talk will explore some of the traumatic, dissociative processes that shape how we approach race and sex interpersonally. In so doing, a key goal is to demonstrate black feminist contributions to our understanding of the ‘unthinkability’ of the black female subject as an “unthought other.”

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Michelle Stephens, LP, PhD, is a graduate of the William Alanson White Institute. A practicing psychoanalyst and co-director of The Chocolate Salon, she is also Professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, and the Founding and Executive Director of Rutgers’ Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ). Recent published works include Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and The Black Male Performer (Duke University Press, 2014); and articles on the intersections of race and psychoanalysis in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA), Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society.

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.

RACHEL KABASAKALIAN-McKAY and DAVID MARK, The Space Between: Race, Racism, and Implication
2027-04-09 19:30 - 21:30
RACE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: ENCOUNTERS WITH OTHERNESS
The 2026-2027 Colloquium Series
presented by the Psychoanalytic Society of the William Alanson White Institute
The Space Between: Race, Racism, and Implication
presented by Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay and David Mark
with Host & Moderator Stephen Friedman, PhD, LCSW
FRIDAY, APRIL 9th, 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
The most fertile space in psychoanalysis is also the most fraught: the space between the two people in the room. Elaborating and affectively inhabiting what each person is bringing to the encounter asks more of us, and offers more possibility for deep engagement and change. This of course includes the identifications and lived social experience of each person, with race a particularly charged element.
Engaging with Rothberg’s concept of “the implicated subject”, a position that occupies the space between the polarities of perpetrator and victim without denying the realities of these categories, Drs. Kabasakalin-McKay and Mark suggest the concept of implication offers a way forward that may dovetail with something at the core of a Relational analytic ethos. Central to the ways implication is felt, disavowed, named, expressed and defended against are the affects and emotions that are stirred when we are called to reckon with this subject position in both the social and clinical realms.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay, PhD, EdM, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, and is co-editor with David Mark, of Inhabiting Implication in Racial Oppression and in Relational Psychoanalysis (2023, Routledge). She is on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and at the Mitchell Relational Studies Center, and she is a founding board member, Co-Director emerita, and faculty, of the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia. Additionally, Dr. Kabasakalian-McKay teaches and supervises at NIP and ICP-NY. She has written on the subjects of implication; on empathy and recognition; and on the expansion of maternal subjectivity, and thus, enriched potential space made possible by Jessica Benjamin’s theory. With David Mark, she has explored the importance of the “intersubjective real”. She is in practice in Philadelphia and New York, and serves as an associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues.
David Mark, PhD, is faculty and director emeritus of The Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia (IRPP). He is also on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Among other works, in 1997 he co-authored with Jeffrey Faude, PhD, The Psychotherapy of Cocaine Addiction: Entering the Interpersonal World of the Cocaine Addict, published by Jason Aronson. In 2023, with Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay, PhD, he was co-editor of Inhabiting Implication in Racial oppression and in Relational Psychoanalysis. He is in private practice in Philadelphia and Narberth, PA.

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.

ROMY OPPERMAN, Domination and Disalienation
2027-05-07 19:30 - 21:30
RACE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: ENCOUNTERS WITH OTHERNESS
The 2026-2027 Colloquium Series
presented by the Psychoanalytic Society of the William Alanson White Institute
Domination and Disalienation
presented by Romy Opperman
with Host & Moderator Stephen Friedman, PhD
FRIDAY, MAY 7, 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
What is the place of emotional and psychic life within planetary anthropogenic climate change and mass ecological destruction? Amongst responses to this question, attention to structural racism – including settler colonialism and imperialism – is largely absent. Ms. Opperman intervenes in these conversations by focusing on Frantz Fanon’s treatment of alienation and the conceptualization of environment central to it. Building on Fanon, she argues that colonial constructions and treatments of Nature are central to the psychic harms of racial alienation. Reciprocally, ecological alienation cannot be understood without an account of structural racism. Ultimately, ecological-racial alienation works as a form of debilitation in the service of domination. Yet, it is never total. She concludes by considering some of the implications of this account for disalienation.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Romy Opperman is a feminist philosopher bridging critical philosophy of race, environmental philosophy, and critical theory. Her research focuses on Africana and anti- colonial and -imperialist philosophies to understand ecological violence and envision liberated climate futures. Romy is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. She is currently completing her first book, Ecological Autonomy: Reimagining Environmental Racism with Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter.

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.

CARLOS PADRON, Symptom, Fetish, and/or Transformation? The Attention to Race in American Psychoanalysis Today
2027-06-04 07:30 - 21:30
RACE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: ENCOUNTERS WITH OTHERNESS
The 2026-2027 Colloquium Series
presented by the Psychoanalytic Society of the William Alanson White Institute
Symptom, Fetish, and/or Transformation? The Attention to Race in American Psychoanalysis Today
presented by Carlos Padrón
with Host & Moderator Stephen Friedman, PhD, LCSW
FRIDAY, JUNE 4th, 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
This presentation explores the contemporary focus on race in American psychoanalysis through the concepts of symptom, fetish, and transformation. Carlos Padrón examines whether this emphasis on race has led to substantive changes in psychoanalysis’ engagement with the communities whose experiences it seeks to understand or has remained largely at the symbolic level of theoretical and clinical discourse. To assess its transformative potential, he analyzes three interrelated risks.
The first risk is when psychoanalytic engagements with the experiences of BIPOC communities become oriented mostly toward producing what has been called totemic capital, that is, moral prestige, institutional legitimacy, symbolic currency, and professional distinction. Padrón examines whether this orientation reproduces a fetishistic relation to racialized others in the ways their experiences are taken up and mobilized by psychoanalysts and academics who center race in their work. The second risk concerns the displacement of class. He explores what happens when psychoanalytic engagements with race transform the experiences of BIPOC communities into symbolic objects of professional identification while overlooking class differences and reducing BIPOC identity to socioeconomic deprivation. He argues that this reduction protects psychoanalysts from confronting their own class and institutional position and the possibility of losing the moral and epistemological authority from which they speak about race. The third risk concerns theoretical innovation without meaningful changes in clinical practice or institutions and Padrón examines what happens when psychoanalytic “originality” is being driven from the top down through academic theorizing rather than from the ground up through concrete praxis in the world.
Rather than emphasizing further academic innovation, Mr. Padrón suggests that psychoanalysis’ most urgent task is to expand its presence within public institutions of care, or help create new ones, allowing sustained clinical engagement with different ethnic and racial groups to reshape psychoanalytic theory from the ground up. Addressing the aforementioned three risks may help create the conditions for the transformative horizon I envision, grounded in the ongoing creative reworking of psychoanalytic theory (on race and many other things) through praxis within the public sphere, as part of the polis, as a public service.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Carlos Padrón is a licensed psychoanalyst from Venezuela who has lived in New York City for over 20 years. He has an MA in Philosophy from the New School & an MPhil in Latin American Literature from NYU, and he trained at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in NYC.
Carlos has written and presented on the relations between philosophy & psychoanalysis & literature; on community psychoanalysis; on psychoanalysis and the political; and on clinical issues related to difference. He has published works in Out Art, the Magazine of the Argentinian Psychoanalytic Association; Division Review; Psychoanalytic Psychology; Journal of Infant, Child, & Adolescent Psychotherapy; Room: A Sketchbook for Psychoanalytic Action; Stillpoint Magazine; Trópicos, the Journal of the Psychoanalytic Society of Caracas; Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, & the Unconscious (Routledge); Psychoanalytic Dialogues; Child & Adolescent Psychoanalysis in Times of Crisis: War, Pandemic, & Climate Change(Routledge); and in the Journal of the Global Center for Advanced Studies; among other publications.
Currently a faculty member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training & Research (IPTAR), he also leads the study group “The World and the Psyche”. He has taught at various analytic institutes in New York City, including the Silberman School of Social Work at CUNY. Carlos has worked & supervised psychoanalytically in different settings, including community health clinics (Article 31s), schools, & non-profit organizations. He currently has a private practice based in Brooklyn.

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.
