Lara Sheehi - Liberation, not representation: "Diversity" and stabilizing coloniality

Foluke Taylor - Following Broken Water: Decolonial continuities and therapeutic emergent-cy

This is the third in a series of seminars on Decolonising Psychoanalysis, organised by the Race and Culture Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists. The series is intended to open up conversations about psychoanalysis by initiating Transatlantic Dialogues between academic research and clinical practice.

Members of the Guild are invited to use the promotional code MEMBER for a 25% discount. Students are invited to use the promotional code STUDENT for a 50% discount.

In this instance, both speakers are clinicians, researchers, teachers and activists, and their talks address the seemingly intractable problem of 'diversity' in psychoanalysis - within the profession, the theory and the therapeutic relationship.

How might we explore layers of diversity, within and without the psychoanalytic encounter?

How can we rethink notions of diversity in an 'anti-colonial' way?

Must clinicians learn a language of diversity to ethically address their patients?

And how can these ideas contribute to the task of 'decolonising psychoanalysis' and lessening the psychic price of everyday racism and discrimination?

Abstracts

Lara Sheehi - Liberation, Not Representation: "Diversity" and Stabilizing Coloniality

This talk will confront the failures of diversity/diversification efforts that may work to stabilize coloniality rather than disrupt the logics of settler colonial and colonial viability. Attention will be given to how over-investment in representational politics may abandon political analyses and work to shore up systems of oppression rather than create sites and spaces of life and liberation.

Foluke Taylor - Following Broken Water: Decolonial Continuities and Therapeutic Emergent-cy

The need for a ‘decolonial’ and ‘diversified’ psychoanalysis is considered through the lens of a Black feminism. Having considered the ways that ‘diversity’ replicates and reproduces the problem that it seeks to resolve, this presentation offers a Black feminist ‘poethic’ as a space from which to think and be with the problem — and problems — ‘otherwise’. I suggest that fundamental to a discussion of the troubles and challenges of practicing therapy is how present moments are held within the context of their colonial and decolonial continuities, and our capacity to be part of this holding. Emergent strategy, and properties of water, are offered as examples of alternate spaces from which we might theorise and practice a more capacious therapeutic.

Speakers’ Biographies

Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/hers), is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University's Professional Psychology Program. She teaches decolonial, liberatory and anti-oppressive theories and approaches to clinical treatment, case conceptualization, and community consultation. She is the president-elect of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA Division 39), and the chair of the Teachers' Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and co-editor of CounterSpace in Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society. Lara is on the advisory board to the USA–Palestine Mental Health Network and Psychoanalysis for Pride. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022).

Foluke Taylor is a *therapist and writer currently teaching at the Metanoia Institute in London. She is interested in therapeutic practices that hold open space for thinking (from and into) the position of Blackness, which in the development of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, has most frequently occupied the position of the unthought. Following the work of Christina Sharpe, the asterisk before the therapist functions as both wildcard and placeholder. As an (asterisked) *therapist, she practices without prefix to signal both excess, and a black feminist mode of attention to the emergent and yet-to-be. She accredited with BACP, is a member of the Editorial Board at Lapidus International Research and Innovation Community Journal (LIRIC), and a trustee at Mslexia. Published work includes How the Hiding Seek (2018); As Much Space as We Can Imagine: Black Presence in Counselling and Psychotherapy (2019); Black Paranormal: A Playlist (in ‘What is Normal?’ Confer Books 2020); Reimagining the Space for a Therapeutic Curriculum – a Sketch, (co-authored with Robert Downes in Black Identities and White Therapies: Race Respect and Diversity. PCCS 2021) and Otherwise: Writing Unbearable Encounters Through the Register of Race (LIRIC 2021). Her forthcoming book Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room will be published by W.W. Norton in 2023.