Scientific Meetings
The Margaret Morgan Lawrence Lecture
for Social Justice
The APM is honored to present the second
Margaret Morgan Lawrence Lecture for Social Justice
This Lecture brings to the APM/Columbia community speakers who apply psychoanalytic theory or practice to socially, racially and culturally diverse community contexts and honors the life and work of Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence.
Whiteness and the Psychoanalytic Frame
Kirkland Vaughans, PhD.
February 10, 2026
8:00 pm - 9:30 pm Eastern Time
Dr. Vaughans has been at the forefront in helping white American psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to acknowledge and struggle to manage our racial bias. In this Lecture, Dr. Vaughans attempts to examine the findings of the Holmes Commission of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2023) through the lens of the Latin American psychoanalyst Jose Bleger and his notion of the psychoanalytic frame. The mission of the Holmes Commission was to assess systemic racism within psychoanalytic training and its entrenched impact on theory and practice. However, Bleger discredited the traditional focus on breaches and ruptures of the frame. Instead, he proposed scrutinizing the frame when everything is going smoothly, believing that absence of perceptible issues may obscure underlying tensions or that systemic problems may be going on unnoticed.
Kirkland Vaughans, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. A training and supervising analyst of IPTAR, he is also on faculty and founder of the Adelphi Derner/Hempstead Child Clinic and supervisor in the Child & Adolescent Program of the Derner Postgraduate Program. Dr. Vaughans is on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis and the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center. He is a Founding Editor of the Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy and co-editor of the two-volume Psychology of Black Boys and Adolescents. He has presented at numerous conferences and panel discussions on white racism, generational trauma among African Americans, and the school-to-prison pipeline for boys and girls of color, and is a subject of the documentary, “Your Mum and Dad.” A founding member of Black Psychoanalysts Speak, Dr. Vaughns was a member of the Holmes Commission of APsA and is the recipient of the 2024 Founder Award of the American Psychological Association, Div. 39.
Discussant:
Dr. Dionne Powell is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at our own Columbia Psychoanalytic Center and at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY). She is Adjunct Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York Presbyterian Hospital (NYPH)/Columbia and Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at NYPH/Weill Cornell. She served as Co-Chair of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equity in American Psychoanalysis and currently serves on the IPA Board as North American Representative. Dr. Powell has written and presented extensively on a range of issues with her most recent contribution, (2025) Becoming Raced: Psychic Consequences of Transgenerational Racial Trauma in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She gave the inaugural Margaret Morgan Lawrence Lecture (March 2022) and is the recipient of many awards for her work, including the 2026 APsA Sabshin Teaching award. She is in full-time private practice in NYC.
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Columbia University Faculty House
64 Morningside Drive
and via Zoom
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