Psychoanalysis: My Profession ‘Tis of Thee: How will Psychoanalysis Face the Challenges of Pursuing Racial Equity in the Political Reality of a Second Trump Term?

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Presenter: Dorothy Holmes, MD
Discussant: Dionne Powell, MD

Thursday, December 5, 2024 at 8PM

Location: Columbia University Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive
(enter via 116th St. click here for directions)
or via Zoom

Dr. Holmes will give a brief talk that reflects on the work of the Holmes Commission – its inception, process, work products, and ongoing challenges and opportunities as efforts towards equity meet headwinds now strengthened in the wake of the presidential election. She will reflect on some of the ongoing objections to focusing on race within psychoanalysis to facilitate an understanding of some bases for the objections.

Is there concern about the loss of established institutional integrity, power, and control? Is there fear that conventional and enshrined ways of understanding will be lost? Is there dread of experiencing and examining intense affects attached to race (e.g., hate, rage, murderousness) for which we have not been trained? A second aspect of the event will be a dialogue with Dr. Dionne Powell as Dr. Holmes’ interlocutor. Finally, Drs. Holmes and Powell will field questions from the audience.

PRESENTER

Dorothy Evans Holmes, PhD, ABPP, FABP, is a Teaching, Training, and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas and IPTAR; Professor and PsyD Program Director Emerita at the George Washington University; and Teaching, Training and Supervising Analyst Emerita at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis.

Dr. Holmes is widely recognized for her examination of the impact of race and gender on the psychoanalytic treatment process. Her most recent of many journal articles includes two papers on whiteness in the Spring 2021 issue of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Two works are in press, one in Psychoanalytic Inquiry, “Hatred: A traumatizing underpinning of Racism,” and the other in JAPA, “In Pursuit of Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis: Findings and Recommendations of the Holmes Commission,” co-authored with all members of the Commission. Dr. Holmes has served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In 2021, she received a JAPA Prize, and in 2022, a Sigourney Award. Dr. Holmes continues to be involved in national psychoanalytic organization leadership, including serving as the eponymous Chair of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis (2020-2024). She is also a member, emerita, of Black Psychoanalysts Speak.

Dr. Holmes practices psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Bluffton, SC.

DISCUSSANT

Dionne Powell, MD, is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research as well as at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY-NYU affiliated). She is an Adjunct Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at The New York Presbyterian Hospital, Columbia University in New York, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Assistant Attending Psychiatrist at The New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. Dr. Powell is a founding member of Black Psychoanalysts Speak, was Co-Chair of the Holmes Commission of Racial Equality in Psychoanalysis (CO-REAP), and is Vice-President of the American Association for Psychoanalytic Education (AAPE).

Dr. Powell has written and presented extensively on race, racism, gender, and ambition with articles published in journals such as JAPA, the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and Psychoanalysis Today. She was section editor on racial and ethnic diversity in the second edition of Glen Gabbard’s Textbook of Psychoanalytic Treatments in 2022, where she also contributed a chapter, as well as authored a chapter in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership, edited by Arnold and Brody in 2019. She is an author of the final report of the Holmes Commission report, released in June 2023 and published in JAPA in 2024.

Dr. Powell is in full-time private practice in New York City.

This evening is chiefly an in person event though there will also be a hybrid option.

The deadline for registering for the in-person presentation has been extended to Tuesday, December 3, by 5 pm to give campus security time to process our requests for external guests. If you have a Columbia ID, please bring it with you to facilitate your admission to the campus.

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ASD and the Human Spectrum

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ASD and the human spectrum: 

Adverse childhood experiences, closed system functioning, and the refusal of love

Presenter: William Singletary, MD
Discussant: Timothy Rice, MD

Tuesday, November 12, 2024 at 8 PM

Location: Columbia University Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive
(enter via 116th St. click here for directions)
or via Zoom

All humans, autistic and non-autistic, have a common need for trust and caring social connection, which provides a sense of safety. In Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), neurobiological factors lead to adverse childhood experiences which disrupt the infant’s capacity to engage in reciprocal interactions with caregivers. Without this back-and-forth engagement, the infant experiences an ongoing sense of danger and stress overload. Feeling alone in a dangerous world, to survive, the child resorts to closed system functioning characterized by a protective stance of mistrust, isolation, power, anger, and excessive control, which blocks out positive experiences and the needed help of caring others. The child’s maladaptive internal structure which involves the refusal to experience and use available loving connections hardens and stabilizes. The cornerstone of treatment involves work focusing on the patient/therapist interaction – moving from closed system functioning to open system functioning and becoming able to tolerate and make use of and not refuse available love experienced in therapy. This formulation and the process of treatment are illustrated by the drawings from the therapy of a young boy with ASD. He considered these drawings to elucidate the “missing piece of the autism puzzle.” This clear developmental process in autistic children serves as a model for non-ASD infants and young children who may respond in a similar manner to adverse childhood experiences, develop closed system functioning and, over the entire lifespan, refuse the love which is offered. Perhaps this is the “missing piece” of the non-autism puzzle.

William Singletary, MD, is a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, a member of the faculty and child analytic supervisor of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, and President of the Board of the Margaret S. Mahler Child Development Foundation. He is in private practice in Philadelphia, PA, and has worked in intensive psychotherapy with children and adults with ASD for over 30 years. A major focus of his work has been on how building relationships contributes to changing the brain. His paper, “An Integrative Model of Autism Spectrum Disorder,” a Target Article in Neuropsychoanalysis, describes the pathological role of stress in ASD on both the neurobiological and psychological levels and the importance of the development of loving relationships and emotional regulation in its alleviation.

Timothy Rice, MD, is a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in practice in New York, NY.  He is Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Co-Chair of the Child Division at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.

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Annual APM Movie Night

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Join us for the revival of the annual APM Movie Night at the Thalia, in abeyance since 2019!

Friday, November 1, 2024
FREE to APM members and their guests

POOR THINGS (2023)
director Yorgos Lanthimos

Discussants: Tony Bass and Hillery Bosworth
Poor Things, adapted from the 1991 novel by Scottish author Alasdair Gray, is both a dark comedy and a multilayered allegory about quests for independence and recognition. The film’s provocative sexual themes and imagery have sparked the most public debate: is Poor Things a feminist work or a sexist work? Does it have anything meaningful to say about female sexuality, as opposed to male fantasies about female sexuality?

Analysts, however, will also note its many subtler motifs, such as epistemophilia, the interpersonal nature of human development and metamorphosis, the phenomenon of scientists using their children as research subjects (take note, Freuds, Kleins and Jungs!), and other boundary violations.

*Warning to purists: Due to the movie’s length (2 hr 20 min), we will be screening most but not all of it to allow more time for conversation. Streaming makes it easy to see the rest another time.

There is so much to talk about.

Thalia Cafe and Theater, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at 95th St.
Free for APM members and their guests.

Steven Cooper PhD

Psychoanalysis as Play and the Play of Psychoanalysis

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Psychoanalysis as Play and the Play of Psychoanalysis

A Discussion of Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis with
Alison Brown and Steven Cooper

Presenter: Steven Cooper PhD
Discussant: Alison Brown PhD

Tuesday, October 15, 2024 at 8 PM
Please note the date.*

Location: Columbia University Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive
(enter via 116th St. click here for directions)
or via Zoom

Please join Steven Cooper and Alison Brown for a conversation about his recently published book, Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2023).

Cooper’s book is deeply rooted in clinical experience and process. At the same time, it creatively elaborates the theoretical relationships between play and a wide variety of psychoanalytic concepts and perspectives. These include mourning in psychoanalysis, an ethic of participation, the transformation of unrepresented experience, and, in contrast to some other views of play, “bad” objects.

It is our hope that this conversation will extend to include audience engagement throughout the presentation.

Steven Cooper PhDPresenter:
Steven Cooper, PhD, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, where he is also a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, and the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. In 2023, he published his fourth book by Routledge, Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis, the subject of our evening.

In 2024, he published an edited book, The Selected Papers of Anton Kris, with Judith Kantrowitz. In May of 2025, he has two new books coming out on subjects related to play, each published by Routledge, Psychoanalysis in Play: Expanding Psychoanalytic Concepts from a Play Perspective and “Beyond Playing and Dreaming: Winnicott’s 1967 Letter to Bion after his Without Memory and Desire Lecture, a coedited book with Christopher Lovett. He is in private practice in New York City.

Discussant:
Alison Brown, PhD, is a faculty member at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research, where she is a co-chair of the Curriculum Committee. Her recent teaching and writing interests focus on gender, intersubjectivity, and the psychological experience of technology. A former member of the JAPA editorial board, she is currently on the board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. She is in private practice in New York City.

* Normally, we schedule scientific meetings for the first Tuesday of the month. Due to election-related conflicts, this event is scheduled for the third Tuesday. Additionally, our next scientific meeting is scheduled for November 12, the second Tuesday.

Click Here to Register