08/18/2025
The IPA Journal Club’s next meeting, featuring Dionne Powell, MD, will be on Friday, September 26, 2025, at 4 p.m. London time, 11 a.m. US Eastern Time.
You can register here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/wqBpDA7DRCSOlPq7SO9GDA
Registration, which is free of charge, is open to IPA members and candidates, other interested mental health professionals, scholars and academics. A downloadable copy of the paper is available to registrants.
Ideally, all registrants will have read the paper beforehand and have an opportunity to ask questions or make comments to the guest author. At the registration site, you can also submit questions to the moderators to share with the author.
Reading:
Powell, D.R. (2018). Race, African Americans, and psychoanalysis: Collective silence in the therapeutic conversation. J. American Psychoanalytic Association, 66(6):1021-1049.
We are grateful to JAPA and SAGE publications for giving the IPA Journal Club permission to distribute a copy of the paper to our registrants.
You can register for the September IPA Journal Club by clicking here
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/wqBpDA7DRCSOlPq7SO9GDA
A link to download Dr. Powell’s paper is at the registration site
Abstract
Both historically and currently, assaults on the black body and mind have been ubiquitous in American society, posing a counterargument to America as a postracial, color-blind society. Yet the collective silence of psychoanalysts on this societal reality limits our ability to explore, teach, and treat the effects, both interpersonal and intrapsychic, of race, racism, racialized trauma, and implicit bias and privilege. This silence, which challenges our relevance as a profession, must be explored in the context of America’s racialized identity as an outgrowth of slavery and institutional racism. Racial identifications that maintain whiteness as a construct privileged over otherness are an obstacle to conducting analytic work. Examples of work with racial tensions and biases illustrate its therapeutic potential. The challenge for us as clinicians is to acknowledge and explore our racial bias, ignorance, blind spots, and privilege, along with identifications with the oppressed and the oppressor, as contributors to our silence.
Registration Link
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/wqBpDA7DRCSOlPq7SO9GDA
