In-Person + Zoom: Getting Next To Ourselves Again

Presented by Michelle Stephens, Ph.D.

This seminar will discuss racism as an instance of dissociative othering, placing interpersonal psychoanalytic approaches in dialogue with critical race theory, reading theories of dissociation and double consciousness alongside each other, and engaging in conversation with Jungian psychoanalysts about the intersections and juxtapositions between a racial and a collective unconscious.   We will examine some of the ways in which dissociation and dissociative othering can affect our work as clinicians and in the ways that we interpret and respond to our patients. Jung’s concepts of the shadow and the collective unconscious will be explored in terms of how they relate to parallel concepts from interpersonal and critical race theory

Learning objectives:

• Describe dissociation and dissociative othering and its implications for the therapeutic relationship
• Describe the interpersonal approach to double-consciousness and racialized not-me states
• Compare concepts from interpersonal and critical race theory with Jung’s concepts of the shadow and the collective unconscious.

Michelle Stephens, Ph.D., is a Professor and Founding and Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University in New Jersey,  a graduate of the William Alanson White Institute , a practicing psychoanalyst in New York city, and a co-director with Kathy White and Sam Wyche of The Chocolate Salon.  She is the author of Black Empire:  The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (2005) and Skin Acts:  Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer (2014).  She publishes frequently on the intersections of race and psychoanalysis in such journals as JAPA, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society.

Refund requests must be sent by email at administration@junginla.org before noon (12:00 pm) prior to the program being paid for. No refund will be issued otherwise.