Our Difficulties with Otherness: Cultivating Curiosity in Psychoanalytic Treatment and Organizations
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2018 | 9:00 AM — 1:00 PM
Practitioners and General Public: $80
Students: $20
4 CE credits for Licensed Psychoanalysts, Social Workers, and Psychologists
Too often, psychoanalysis misses the opportunity to attend to the task of penetrating the surface of otherness. This presentation will examine both the resistances to, and the necessity for, psychoanalytic engagement—and prioritization—of issues of otherness, difference, and diversity. Anxieties associated with authentic, curious, exploratory dialogue about difference and diversity are identified. The presenter argues for a stance of curiosity in relation to difference and also for an emphasis on noticing and learning from those moments where diversity-related communication seems to break down. Attention to such breakdowns is portrayed as crucial to facilitating forms of dialogue that can lead to more diverse—and diversely applied—psychoanalysis.
Proceeding from the premise that racial, ethnic, sexual, socioeconomic, and other forms of prejudice and discrimination represent dissociative defenses involving profound failures of curiosity, this workshop focuses on how issues of difference and “othering” might emerge and be engaged in the psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic situation (and in organizations attempting to support this therapeutic work). Through the use of clinical material, supplemented by opportunities to view and reflect on pertinent video material, this workshop will offer an approach to diversity, discrimination, and otherness that stands in contrast to prevailing approaches emphasizing multicultural “literacy” or “competence.” The talk will conclude with practical recommendations for both psychoanalytic practitioners and organizations alike.
Anton H. Hart, PhD, FABP, is a training and supervising analyst and on the faculty of the William Alanson White Institute in New York City. He is the chair of American Psychoanalytic Association’s Department of Education’s Diversities Section. A fellow of the American Board of Psychoanalysis, he supervises at Teachers College of Columbia University and at the Derner Institute of Adelphi University. He is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Psychoanalytic Psychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He teaches in the Department of Psychology at Mt. Sinai/St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, and at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies. He has published papers on issues of mutuality, disruption, and safety, and has work in press on issues of diversity and racism. He served as associate coproducer of the film “Black Psychoanalysts Speak,” in which he was also featured. He is a cofounder of the White Institute’s Study Group on Race and Psychoanalysis. He is writing a book, to be published by Routledge, entitled Beyond Oaths or Codes: Toward Relational Psychoanalytic Ethics. He is in full-time private practice in New York City.
Practitioners and General Public: $80
Students: $20
NYGSP
BGSP
ACAP
NAAP
SMP
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