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Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society,
Speaker Program Meeting: October 21, 2023
Presenter: Michelle Stephens, L.P., Ph.D.
SUMMARY
At the end of the 1980s, black feminist legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw wrestled with the problem of a female blackness lived as an invisible intersectionality. In her account, “mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis,” prevented legal analysts from seeing “the compounded nature” and “multi-dimensionality of Black Women’s experiences.” However, Crenshaw’s goal went beyond identifying black female subjectivity as a complex, multi-dimensional unfolding of identity. At the same time, she also foregrounded and deployed a black feminist methodology that, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has made crucial interventions in understanding the dangers of a whiteness lived as a single-axis framework for subjectivity. In addition, Crenshaw joined a tradition of black feminist theorizing offering alternative insights on the human condition as formed from living with difference as embodied, enfleshed, black female subjects. This seminar will introduce and explore some of the implications and contributions of this tradition for what another prominent black female thinker, Hortense Spiller, has termed a culturally informed “psychoanalytics,” one informed by the psychic structures and experiences of gendered, sexed, and racialized subjects.
Michelle Stephens, L.P., Ph.D., is a graduate of the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology and a practicing psychoanalyst. She is also Professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, and the Founding and Executive Director of Rutgers’ Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ). She is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (Duke University Press, 2005) and Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and The Black Male Performer (Duke University Press, 2014). She writes regularly about the intersections of race and psychoanalysis in such journals as JAPA, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Studies in Gender and
Sexuality, and Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society.
After attending this session, participants will be able to:
(1) Describe black female ways of knowing and interacting with the American world, and white subjects’ historical relationship to blackness and to their own racial formation.
(2) Discuss key elements of psychoanalytic theory and practice that could be usefully informed and deepened by a black feminist theory that understands whiteness as a structural phenomenon built not only into the social -- the law, politics, culture – but also into intrapsychic and interpersonal fields of human relating and into psychoanalysis itself as both an institution and clinical methodology.
TITLE: A Black Feminist Psychoanalytics
DATE: Saturday, October 21, 2023
TIME: 9:30 am-12:30 pm
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 (if licensed in Florida) an additional $20 for CEUs for a total of $45 (or $15/CEU).
REGISTER ONLINE: https://tbps.wildapricot.org/
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 the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this Live Activity for a maximum of 3 hours AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE INFORMATION FOR ALL LEARNERS: None of the planners and presenters for this educational activity have relevant financial relationship(s)* to disclose with ineligible companies* whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling, or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients.
*Financial relationships are relevant if the educational content an individual can control is related to the business lines or products of the ineligible company.
-Updated July 2021-
The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society has been approved by the Florida Dept. of Health to provide Continuing Education Accreditation to Psychologists (Provider # PCE-46, Exp. 5/22) and Clinical Social Workers, Marriage & Family Therapists, Mental Health Counselors (Provider # BAP 423, Exp. 3/21). The Society certifies that these courses meet the requirements of the Board on an hour-per-hour basis for continuing education credits.
