Course Title:  Psychoanalytic Engagement in the Context of Our Socio-Cultural Identities (12 CE credits, IL)

Instructor:  Susan Rios, MS, LCSW

Meeting dates (2024):  March 4, 11, 18, 25; April 1, 8

Meeting time:  Mondays, 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. (CST), via Zoom

Course Description:

From an interpersonal psychoanalytic perspective, this class will consider the patient within the context of the larger socio-political world we currently inhabit. We will examine attitudes, values, and prejudices we all bring into the intersubjective space of therapy, while encouraging Sullivan’s idea that “we are all more simply human than otherwise.”

We will review and discuss 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 with cross culture/color and white/white dyads.

By forgoing cultural assumptions and examining exact meaning and implication for each individual’s cultural subjectivity, we increase our patient’s opportunity for self-coherence in the creation of their evolving narratives and shifting identities. Stern’s ideas (2009) on having a witness to our life stories and our very human need to believe that we are “known by the other,” feels most fitting for a psychoanalytic exploration of the racial/ethnic experience lived in America.

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.

Biographical Information:

Susan Rios, MS, LCSW is Visiting Faculty at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis.  She is Faculty, Training and Supervising Analyst at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP), and facilitator of the Affective Learning Process Group in MIP’s One Year Program: Psychoanalysis and the Sociopolitical World. She is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City.