PANY Scientific Meeting: Summary

317th Scientific Meeting
Monday, December 6, 8:15 pm
Einhorn Auditorium, Lenox Hill Hospital, 131 E. 76th Street, NYC

Dialogues in Black and White

Kimberlyn Leary, PhD (by invitation)
Director of Psychology, Cambridge Health Alliance,
and Visiting Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School

Introduction by Lawrence Friedman, MD

Summary

Many clinicians struggle with how to work most effectively when the psychodynamics of race are activated within the clinical consulting room. This paper begins with the assumption that race and ethnicity inflect clinical process, subtly and explicitly. Formulations from contemporary psychoanalysis (e.g. enactment and clinical intersubjectivity) and from multicultural perspectives outside of psychoanalysis are deployed to define new sites for psychoanalytically meaningful understandings of race. This paper will explore what is gained and lost when racial material is viewed as a psychoanalytic expression of personal psychology; the challenges of dealing with racialized subjectivity in clinical treatment; and a discussion of the way in which race illuminates tensions in our contemporary constructs of self and identity. To do so, the author will draw on clinical vignettes from her own analytic practice as well as from published case reports in the analytic literature.