928 – Calabria Elective

Description:   Especially when practicing in settings like prisons, schools, or county clinics, clinicians often have the experience of feeling that despite all the profound difficulties inherent in individual clinical work, it is their individual patients and clients who are the least of their problems when compared to the seeming relentlessly complicated systems within which they provide care – the dynamics of which often seem to work to thwart the provision of that care. Yet in this moment of Interregnum, Late-Stage Capitalism, The End Of The World As We Know It, The Polycrisis, Anthropocene Age, The Broligarchy, Technofascism, or AI Apocalypse (just a few of the names given to this current epoch), all of us in the United States are (to varying degrees) implicated and/or interpellated by the dynamics of racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and this emerging era in ways that leave all of us struggling with how to think (perhaps unable to think) about our clinical work with our patients and clients when feeling so overwhelmed by the systems and structures within which we are working and living.  How these dynamics live in us and in our patients/clients as well as how they emerge as normative unconscious processes in our clinical work to be taken up (or not) as forces to be resisted or reenacted will be the topic of exploration in this course.  In the spirit of “thinkability,” a core value of psychoanalysis, we will strive to deploy psychodynamic concepts that so often help us so much in our clinical work with individuals to the systems and structures that – however disavowed – are in the room with us all the time, wherever those rooms may be. 

Target Audience: This course is designed for beginning and advanced level clinicians who practice psychodynamically and are interested in thinking about the sociopolitical systems and structures within which we work in the United States from a multidisciplinary perspective as they relate to our clinical practices. Enrollment will be limited to 16 students.

Prerequisite:  Students should bring their “psychodynamic sensibilities” with them into this course and be able and willing to think about course material while holding fundamental theoretical assumptions such as the role of the unconscious, the primacy of anxiety and defense, attachment needs, drives, etc. in mind. Students should have an interest in deep-diving into a multidisciplinary exploration of field-level forces related to race, class, gender, tech, politics, and economics that both implicate us and interpellate us (i.e., that we both make and that make us) and look at the ways in which better understanding these dynamics can help us to situate our clinical work and the problems with which our patients struggle (and with which we struggle to help them). Students should be able to hold in mind the ways in which individual experiences are shaped by racial, gender, and class positionalities in a larger collective context where power operates differentially and be able to hold in mind how those differences live within themselves and their fellow students in the class.