Program schedule:
1:00-1:30pm PST: Meet and Greet: This is a chance for prospective students to meet some of our faculty and candidates and discuss our program offerings.
The Faculty and Candidate Meet and Greet will be held on a separate zoom link from the Clinical Presentation. If you plan to attend both events, please check the box for each portion of the event.
1:30-3:30pm PST: Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Reckoning with Societal Hauntings and White Silence in Psychoanalytic Spaces
3:30-4:00pm PST: Prospective Student Q/A
Audre Lorde wrote: “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”
All hauntings contain trauma. All traumas contain hauntings. Societal hauntings are marked by the “destabilizing intrusion of irrevocable pasts into an unredeemable present” (Rothberg, 2019, p. 9). Societal hauntings overlap with, and yet are distinct from, individual traumas. They are nested systems with interrelated dynamics. They move foreground and background, but often in U.S. psychoanalysis we see trauma as distinct from the sociocultural contexts that create, shape, and then embed these dynamics into perpetrator and victim. This profound disavowal paves over our violent American history. As psychoanalysts we replicate this painful erasure, closing over traumatizing and haunted spaces, by making an arbitrary line between the social and the psychoanalytic. Such non-linkings keep us unaware of how we are complicit in re-enacting dominant white norms of silence.
Weaving insights from clinical and institutional interactions in psychoanalytic spaces, Dr. Warner will discuss how societal hauntings inform the shape of individual and familial trauma and the interpenetrating and clashing experiences of injustice, trauma, and privilege. She will conclude by exploring how psychoanalysis can be a crucible in which these contradictory experiences can be welcomed and transformed if we are willing to move through our own shame and beyond our individual and collective silence.
Weaving insights from clinical and institutional interactions in psychoanalytic spaces, Dr. Warner will discuss how societal hauntings inform the shape of individual and familial trauma and the interpenetrating and clashing experiences of injustice, trauma, and privilege. She will conclude by exploring how psychoanalysis can be a crucible in which these contradictory experiences can be welcomed and transformed if we are willing to move through our own shame and beyond our individual and collective silence. A panel discussion will follow this paper presentation.
Nicole Warner, PsyD, LMFT, LPCC (Presenter) is a psychotherapist and analyst practicing in Sacramento, California. She is a recent graduate of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis Los Angeles, where she is a Board member, a member on the Candidate Progression Committee, and a member of the Task Force Against Racism and Homophobia at the institute. Currently, Nicole also co-teaches the core course titled “Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Diversity, Power, and Privilege” for the four year psychoanalytic training program at ICP. During the past two years, Nicole has taken advantage of the many online trainings available in various psychoanalytic institutes in the United States, and besides her home institute, Nicole is also a member at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis and the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in Washington D.C. Additionally, Nicole participates in a whiteness affinity group through the International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology and continues to be active in her local analytic community
Dr. Margy Sperry (Moderator) is a training and supervising analyst at ICPLA, and an International council member of IAPSP (the International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology). She started the Social Justice and Ethics group within IAPSP and was previously an associate editor for the Journal, Psychoanalysis Self and Context. Margy’s writing challenges contemporary psychoanalysis to notice the cultural and socio-political contexts which frame the therapist’s and patient’s lived histories, especially the ways that those lived histories and contexts overlap and diverge, thus shaping the therapeutic process.
Dr. George Bermudez (Panelist), Psychologist-Psychoanalyst, Training & Supervising Psychoanalyst at The Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis Los Angeles, and 2020-21 Visiting Scholar at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) has developed pioneering scholarship and practice – an expansion toward a social psychoanalysis – exploring the “social unconscious” through “social dreaming”. Currently, the Editor-in-Chief of the Harlem Family & Psychoanalytic Institute Review of Community Psychoanalysis, he is the author of “The Social Dreaming Matrix as a Container for the Processing of Implicit Racial Bias and Collective Racial Trauma” (International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 2018) and “Community Psychoanalysis: A Contribution to an Emerging Paradigm” (Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2019). He has focused on numerous contemporary socio-political concerns: American Xenophobia; Whiteness and Psychoanalysis; Black Reparations; The LGBTQ Unconscious in the Trumpian Era; and The Global Unconscious in the Time of Pandemic. Dr. Bermudez’ most recent work focuses on the applications of social dreaming to the discovery of potential psycho-political solutions to our climate crisis and the development of “deliberative democracy”.
Dr. Tyia Grange Isaacson (Panelist) Dr. Grange Isaacson is a training and supervising analyst, and a faculty member at the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She has a group private practice in Berkeley, California and Lake Tahoe, California. Dr. Grange Isaacson is the founder of the nonprofit Belonging Partnership, a training organization dedicated to allyship and professional advancement for BIPOC communities and individuals. She holds a Ph.D in contemporary psychoanalysis from the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, a masters degree in Social Work from Columbia University, and a BA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin Madison. Tyia is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) in the States of New York and California. She is published in Psychanalytic Perspectives and her writing has been anthologized by Karnac Books. Dr. Grange Isaacson is an internationally invited speaker and trainer, on culture and mental health.
Dr. Joel Miller (Panelist) is a Training and Supervising Analyst at ICP and has a private practice in Pasadena, CA. He has been the co-chair of the Task Force Addressing Racism and Homophobia since 2008. He has been an adjunct faculty for the candidate Power and Privilege course at ICP, and contributor to the Arts Section of The American Journal of Psychoanalysis and the Montreal Review.
