Zoom Invite Will Be Sent to Registrants on October 25th

Co-Sponsored with NJSCSW (New Jersey Society for Clinical Social Work)

4 CEs for Counselors, Psychologists and Social Workers

CEs accepted by many states – check with your local boards.

Daniel Gaztambide, PsyD

Workshop Description

Contemporary Psychoanalysis finds itself at a crossroads, with clinicians and scholars debating the centrality of attachment and the therapeutic relationship versus the relevance of culture, identity, and politics in psychoanalytic treatment. This “confusion of tongues,” notable across psychoanalytic training, scholarship, and social media, has resulted in heated debates on the role of the cultural and political in psychotherapy. This presentation will bridge this gap between “the relational” and the “sociocultural” by reviewing theory, research, and practice from a decolonial psychoanalytic point of view. Drawing on Fanonian conceptions of development, traditional attachment and relational theory based accounts of development will be challenged and of necessity repositioned to better account for a broader conception of human subjectivity. This integrative, sociogenic theory of development posits two core unconscious systems with attendant motivations—a “horizontal” system of attachment, affiliation, and closeness, and a “vertical” system of status, hierarchy, and positionality. Using case illustrations and extant research, the presentation will outline how we can better listen to different dimensions of the patient’s experience in ways that do not require us “choose” between the relational and “the political,” but understand human subjectivity as organized by both. Implications for integrating these dimensions in case formulation and treatment will be discussed, with examples from the presenter’s practice.

Daniel José Gaztambide, PsyD, is assistant professor of psychology at Queens College, where he is the director of the Frantz Fanon Lab for Decolonial Psychology, and a faculty member at the Department of Critical Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of the books A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology, and the recent Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Technique: Putting Freud on Fanon’s Couch, which received a 2024 Gradiva Award for Best Book. He is in analytic training at the NYU Post-Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and is the recipient of multiple fellowships including a Mellon Foundation Fellowship and a Miranda Family Fellowship for his research on colonial mentality and the application of psychoanalytic treatment to diverse populations. His recent paper, “Standing against racial capitalism: Reconsidering psychology’s role in dismantling systemic racism,” was published in a recent special issue in American Psychologist on addressing racism in psychology. This work is an extension of his service as a Taskforce member at the APA’s Taskforce on Strategies for the Elimination of Racism, Discrimination, and Hate, for which he received a presidential citation for his work.