William Alanson White Institute

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 (America/New_York)
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.
