Black History Month 2024
This year’s Black History Month theme is: “Reclaiming Narratives", this theme centers around taking ownership of the stories that define Black culture, contributions and identity.
Over this month, we’ll be signposting to resources that discuss Black history, culture and identity, in a psychoanalytic context. We’ll be sharing resources from our professional community and beyond.
Keep an eye on this web page over October, we’ll be adding resources, thought-pieces, podcast recommendations and more.
When thinking about race, history and identity in a psychoanalytic context, explore below for some some suggested further reading and listening on the subject:
Helen Morgan and Marchelle Farrell: In Conversation
Learn more
Sharon Frazer-Carroll: So Much Trouble in the World
Learn moreMore resources
“But for this sense of Britishness there has been a mass repression, a collective denial akin to madness. To begin to consider our relationship with this place, and its meaning in shaping our lives, would mean reckoning with the painful truth of that history.”
Read Marchelle Farrell’s New Associations article that explores gardening, identity and history (page 1). Click above to read an interview where we caught up with Marchelle, a year on since her New Associations article and within a somewhat shifted political landscape.
“Race in the mind is determined by both internal and external factors, and both realities are important”
In this New Associations article, Kannan Navaratnem explores the way notions of race and identity can play out in the consulting room (page 22).
Saturday 26 Oct 3 – 5pm
This is the latest 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 dialogues between psychotherapists and social thinkers whose work has a direct bearing on issues of racial injustice, prejudice and marginalisation. We will explore how this work can be applied to the clinical setting, for both therapist and client alike.
Bursaries available for those who would not be able to attend without financial support. CPD certificates available on request.
Click here to attend.
“It’s a fallacy to think that we just hate what is different, or that there is an ideal state which readily embraces difference. What we need to focus on is the internal blockages which keep the ‘other’ out.”
In this New Associations article (front page), Maxine Dennis looks at racial divisions in and out of the consulting room, and at times of heightened anxiety.
Click here to read.
“I have seen all around me in this country opportunities for what we learned to be applied to psychoanalysis. There’s a special role for psychoanalysis in South Africa, and it’s a little different from other places.”
In this written piece for Room, Mark Solms reflects on the personal, social and cultural ramifications of owning farmland in South Africa. This piece explores what whiteness and landownership can mean in a broader historical context.
Click here to read.
25th October, 5.00pm – 8.00pm (online)
26th October, 10am – 5.00pm (in person)
These workshops are presented by BIPOC Masters trained by Dr Isha Mckenzie-Mavinga in a ‘Black Empathic approach’ to therapy, and the challenge of racism.
These workshops support participants to develop a framework for therapeutic understanding based on concepts such as Recognition Trauma and a black empathic approach presented in Dr Isha Mckenzie-Mavinga’s books. Black Issues in the Therapeutic Process (2009) and The Challenge of Racism in Therapeutic Practice (2016).
Click here to attend.
For Black History Month 2024, we’ve made a section of our PPNow 2022 conference free to view.
Watch below, Fakhry Davids, Maxine Dennis and Helen Morgan discuss: The Question of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Institutional Racism.
