***CANCELLED***

Course Title:  Psychoanalytic Engagement in the Context of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Class (12 CE credits, IL). 

Instructor:  Susan Rios, MS, LCSW

Meeting dates (2023):  January 5, 12, 19, 26; February 2, 9

Meeting time:  Thursdays, 5:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. (CST), via Zoom

Course Description:

From an interpersonal psychoanalytic perspective, this course will consider the patient within the context of the larger socio-political world. We will examine the attitudes, values, and prejudices we all bring into the intersubjective space of therapy, while encouraging an understanding of our patients through their social locations of class, race, and ethnicity. By accepting our unwitting participation in societal and clinical processes, as psychoanalytic clinicians we can develop a deeper awareness of our own socio-cultural identities, and a better understanding of our unconscious complicity in the “othering” that oftentimes occurs within our own treatments.

We will review psychoanalytic writings and other published work on race and ethnicity.  Racialized dynamics such as cultural/ethnic transference and countertransference, disavowed or dissociated racial/ethnic self-states, and the collusion or accommodating of internalized oppressive identifications will be considered in our work within cross culture/color, as well as within white dyads. The mixed-race person who may have conflicting constructions of self will also be addressed. Racialized enactments, identification with the oppressor and the attendant guilt that can often foreclose analytic exploration at the cost of true affective engagement will be explored.

Those choosing to take this course should come with a desire to use a cultural lens as a means of better understanding what we co-create with our patients as intersubjective beings engaged in the process of effecting change. In doing so, participating clinicians can contribute to the process of deconstructing oppressive systems within the treatment relationship and beyond.

Biographical Information:

Susan Rios, MS, LCSW is Visiting Faculty at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis (CPP) and a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is Faculty, Training and Supervising Analyst at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP), and the Affective Learning Group facilitator for MIP’s One Year Program: Psychoanalysis and the Sociopolitical World. She is past consultant to MIP’s Committee on Race and Ethnicity (CORE), and active participant of CORE’s biweekly Dialogues discussions since its inception in June 2020.  Dialogues is MIP’s ongoing process group designed to provide member psychoanalysts the opportunity and experience of having difficult cross-race conversations on individual and systemic racism in an effort to facilitate institutional change.

In her practice, Susan provides individual, couples, group psychotherapy/psychoanalysis, clinical supervision, and organizational consultation.