ROMY OPPERMAN, Domination and Disalienation
2027-05-07 19:30 - 21:30 (America/New_York)
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.
