Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

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.

Psychoanalytic institutes have developed a variety of approaches to address the reality that psychoanalytically trained clinicians generally practice more psychodynamic psychotherapy than they do formal psychoanalysis. At the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research we developed a course for advanced candidates challenging them to integrate what they have learned about doing psychoanalysis during training with their ongoing fund of knowledge about psychotherapy practice. We encourage them to consider how they select treatments and to reflect on similarities and differences between the two modalities with regard to listening, selecting a focus, intervening, and managing the relationship. We also discuss how they approach terminations and how they transition between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. We selectively use the psychotherapy research literature grounded in the common factors approach in order to update candidates about current knowledge in the field.

Curriculum development can play a role in preparing future psychoanalysts to participate in ongoing dialogue with colleagues in neighboring disciplines. Curriculum design can be used to encourage an interdisciplinary perspective that helps candidates think about psychoanalytic knowledge in the context of what is known in other disciplines about the functioning of mind and brain. It is possible to teach these complex matters in a way that students find accessible and useful. Exemplars taken from the curriculum designed and taught at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research are presented, as are problems encountered with this curriculum and the lessons that have been learned.