Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society
Saturday, February 21, 2026 9:30 am-12:30 pm EST
Speaker: Dionne R. Powell, M.D.
“Becoming Raced:
Psychic Consequences of Transgenerational Racial Trauma”
Racism, and otherness, continues to be contentious for psychoanalysts to consider as a psychic phenomenon. Unlike aggression and sexuality, racism is held in silence and resistance, inhibiting exploration of this aspect of mind. By closely examining how and where the analyst/psychotherapist locates themselves racially and working through our resistance and countertransference to this type of exploration, this paper invites us to include these aspects of mind for our analytic use. This paper expands on how we become raced by exploring the transgenerational transmission of racial trauma, and its intra-psychic, structuralizing components. Using examples from the creative arts and clinical vignettes to demonstrate how being raced, as a universal phenomenon, is embodied and symbolized in mind, opens a therapeutic aperture for clinicians who may benefit from a psychoanalytic, intrapsychic perspective on this aspect of our shared humanity.
Objectives
1. Greater awareness of transgenerational racial trauma and its formation in mind.
2. Understand how this form of trauma affects the clinical situation, especially the clinicians ’ approach.
3. Learn to work clinically with transgenerational trauma.
Dionne R. Powell, M.D., is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York, where she is Chair of the Education Committee. She is an Adjunct Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, Columbia University, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Assistant Attending Psychiatrist at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Powell is Co-Chair of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equity in American Psychoanalysis, Vice-President of the American Association for Psychoanalytic Education, and a North American Representative on the IPA Board. Dr. Powell’s publications include “Race, African Americans and Psychoanalysis: Collective Silence in the Therapeutic Conversation (2018), for which she received the new author prize from the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and “From the Sunken Place to the Shitty Place: The Film Get Out, Psychic Emancipation and Modern Race Relations from a Psychodynamic Clinical Perspective” (2020), in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.
3 CME ’S
LOCATION: Virtual - Zoom
CHARGE: Members get up to 21 CMEs/CEUs for free per year.
Non-members pay $25 to attend a 3 hour speaker program meeting and an additional $20 for CEUs for a total of $45 (or $15/CEU).
Register Online: https://tbps.wildapricot.org/
ACCME Accreditation Statement
This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of American Psychoanalytic Association and Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
AMA Credit Designation Statement
The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this live activity for a maximum of 3 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
The APsA CE Committee has reviewed the materials for accredited continuing education and has determined that this activity is not related to the product line of ineligible companies and therefore, the meets the exception outlined in Standard 3: ACCME,s identification, mitigation and disclosure of relevant financial relationship. This activity does not have any known commercial support.