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?
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.
