speaker-1: We're constantly mapping what is our place in the world, how do we fit in in terms of class and race and gender and sexuality, all that good stuff. What we're trying to do in psycholytic therapy is to try to kind of activate modes of reflection and modes of being with one another. It's simply that what we're reflecting on is both our interpersonal dynamics, but we're also opening space to reflect on our position in the room and in the world.
speaker-0: Welcome to In-Depth Psychoanalysis in the Academy, a podcast from Academics for the Advancement of Psychodynamic Psychology, also known as A2P2. We're a group of scholars, clinicians, and educators working to promote psychodynamic research, training, and clinical practice in a field that's becoming increasingly narrow in both theory and treatment. This podcast is a space for thoughtful conversations with psychoanalytic academics. Who are actively shaping the future of psychotherapy and psychology education. If you're drawn to depth-oriented thinking, critical scholarship, and the enduring relevance of the unconscious, welcome, you're in the right place. Hi, I'm Dr. Bevan Campbell, and thank you for listening to In-Depth. Dr. Daniel Gotsambide's path to academic psychology is a unique story that also illuminates some universal truths about the opportunities and challenges facing psychoanalytic scholars. Dr. Gotsambide takes us on his journey from growing up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to creating the Franz Fanon Lab for Decolonial Psychology at Queen's College, tracing the influences of Catholicism, liberation theology. And liberation psychology on his current scholarship, which occupies a radical position at the intersection of empirical research, social justice, and psychoanalysis. Within psychoanalytic theory, there is an essential tension concerning the influences of cultural forces versus the influence of the unconscious. Often, debates around the relative importance of each of these factors can become polarized. Dr. Gotson Biday explores in this episode how Fanon's work. Has helped him resolve this polarization and has informed his thinking about how we can decolonize psychoanalytic theory and praxis. We also discuss the enduring power of the dietic default, how psychoanalytic leadership in the academy can inadvertently hinder new academics, and the relationship between religion and psychoanalysis. It's a wide-ranging and moving discussion, and it is A2P2's hope that it expands your sense of what is possible within psychoanalytic scholarship. Let's get into it. Please note that this episode contains content related to the death of a beloved colleague to many, Dr. Jeremy Safron. Daniel Jose Gatsambide, Psy D, is assistant professor of psychology at Queen's College, where he is the director of the Franz Fanon Lab for Decolonial Psychology and a faculty member in the Department of Critical Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of the books A People's History of Psychoanalysis. From Freud to Liberation Psychology and the recent decolonizing psychoanalytic technique, Putting Freud on Fanon's Couch, which received a 2024 Gradiva Award for Best Book. He is an analytic training at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and is the recipient of multiple fellowships and awards, including a Mellon Foundation Fellowship, a Miranda Family Fellowship, And the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education's Outstanding Psychoanalytic Educator Award. Lastly, he is the recipient of a presidential citation for his service as part of the American Psychological Association's task force on strategies for the elimination of racism, discrimination, and hate. His research and scholarship focuses on colonial mentality among Puerto Rican populations. Decolonial pr approaches to treatment and case formulation, and qualitative approaches to the study of race, gender, and sexuality. I just wanted to start ⁓ by asking you to tell us a little bit about your professional trajectory as someone who is both interested in psychoanalysis and and obviously working as an academic. How did you end up where you are? Can you give us a bit of the history?
speaker-1: The I mean, like many histories of this kind, it all naturally goes back to my mother. ⁓ I was ⁓ you know, she had a different podcast and venues where I was ⁓ you know, I was born and raised in San Juan Puerto Rico and my mom was the secretary for this church called Humisterio Sanador por una iglesia sanadora, a healing ministry by a healing church. And it j it just so happened that our pastors ⁓ had Pastoral counseling training, particularly psychodynamic training, with one of them at the time pursuing a PhD at Albizo University in clinical psychology. And so she would do the work of doing like briefs of different books that they didn't have time to read. So they she would just read them for them. And she would just bring that home and make for some like very odd bedtime reading. So yeah, so basically. You know, other kids wanted to be astronauts and cowboys and firemen and I wanted to be a psychoanalyst. So I was just a weird kid at like age five or whatever. So I have these interests. They they were cultivated further by my pastors. When I was inner youth group, ⁓ the youth pastor Ariad Badilla would kind of pick me up from home and take me to church for the youth group. And we talk about Albert Ellis and Kyle Rogers and Sigmund Freud. And it was just very, you know, palpable and exciting. The ways that psychoanalytic thinking in particular could offer something to the community. ⁓ The idea that there's like a whole other world that we're not aware of, but still informs our behavior and how we think and feel was also very palpable in thinking about all the things that were unspoken, maybe even unspeakable within our society, right? So the ways in which we grew up in the shadow of a colony. One of the world's oldest continuing colonies today, ⁓ textured by colorism, anti-blackness, economic inequality, as well as gender, gender identity, and sexuality-related issues. So all of that is kind of crackling in my mind that psychoanalysis is something to share, something to show, something to say about issues of community and society. And then I come stateside, right? And I take my like, Bachelor's in psychology. And it's all about like the rods and cones in your eye and like the vasillar membrane in the fucking ear. And I'm like, well, this is not this is not at all what I envisioned when I came to stateside to go to school. So I was kind of disenchanted with psychology for a while, wound up taking courses in the Department of Religion at Rutgers.
speaker-0: Dig to love, yeah.
speaker-1: And there I wound up connecting with ⁓ James W. Jones, who was a psychoanalyst and a psychologist of religion. And then ⁓ he sent me over to take this personality course with George Atwood, who was at Ruck Rutgers at the time in the psych department. So I kind of put together this sort of double major in psychology and religion. And I got to work with James and George and just just reading. Psychoanalytic theory, primarily intersubjective systems theory, and different kinds of New York style relational psychoanalysis. So when I'm getting ready to graduate and I'm figuring out what I'm going to do with my life, they both recommend that I not only apply to doctoral programs in clinical psych, but that I also apply to this master's in psychiatry and religion at Union Theological Seminary. And I was sort of like, I'm at this point now, having gone through all the college experiences one would have, including a healthy dose of, you know, critical studies of religion. I was like, I'm basically a heathen now. Why are you sending me to seminary? And they're like, no, no, like it has this history of social justice. Like, you think you'd really like it? So I applied and it it was, you know, heartbreaking at the time because I didn't get into any of the doctoral programs I wanted. I got into One doctoral program that then, because of like things happening behind the scenes, turned my application into a master's application. Like a one year master's, no funding. versus I wound up hearing back from Union and they're like, We'll give you a full ride and housing. And I'm like, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. I'm going to seminary.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: Cause I can like live, you know what I mean? I can like have thing and I'll pay the tuition. I guess this is what I'm gonna do. So I go to Union Theological Seminary where I study with ⁓ Ann Ulanov, who who's big in the Jungian world, and Harry Fogarty, who was a big interpersonalist. ⁓ and I'm taking these psychoanalytically oriented courses, but because it's seminary, I also have to take courses in theology. At the time, I was taking courses with James Cohn, who's kind of the founder of Black Liberation Theology. And through him, I'm getting exposed to different liberation theology. So Latin American liberation theology, queer theology, feminist theology, et cetera. And I come to learn how these two discourses are at odds with each other. So the psychoalytic faculty were like, ⁓ but you're forgetting about the individual and all the social stuff is secondary. And all the liberation theology people were like, this is individualistic, you're completely ignoring the social context of suffering. These two discourses are at odds with each other until ⁓ we have a guest lecture by Claude Barber over at the I think it was at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology at the time. And he gives this lecture on Paulo Freire, Franz Fanon, and Ignacio Martin Baro. So kind of introducing us. To liberation psychology as a perspective that's kind of fusing these discourses, liberation theology and psychology. And that was very exciting because it was sort of confirming a lot of the things that I felt and knew growing up in Puerto Rico in a very like religious context. But the other major thing was I was at ⁓ Burke Library, which was Union Theological Seminary Library, and I was looking for a copy of Jessica Benjamin's. ⁓ one of her big books, I think was it entitled Beyond Door and Done Two? Maybe. Like it was it was kind of her big book. As I'm looking for that book, I trip over a fucking stool and I drop all the books I'm carrying. And as I'm getting my stuff together, I see this one book in the stacks called ⁓ Freud's Free Clinic: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice by Elizabeth Danto. And That was sort of like, you know, divide intervention, like a spot of light shine on that book. And ⁓ you know, it's it was just like speaking again to this concern, like, is there a way? So not only is there a way of bridging psychoanalysis and social justice, but is it possible that the stories we've told about Freud, about the first generation, about psychoanalysis writ large, may those stories be incomplete. Is there perhaps a way in which this way of thinking about human subjectivity ⁓ was inherently concerned with the social world? B came from a group of people who had very progressive ideals. C connected these progressive ideals with their clinical practice. So these things, as they all kind of were cultivated at union, were the foundation of what would become my work. So I write a whole bunch of stuff, I publish, ⁓ I reapply again, and I get into my school of choice, which was the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rockhurst. But in the process of doing the interviews, I interviewed at a number of psychoanalytic programs. Right. And it was interesting that like there were people I interacted with in those interviews that were either Let's just say like not totally interested in what I was interested in, at times a little antagonistic ⁓ towards all the social justice culture stuff, but we're also ambivalent about the question of say qualitative research. Like I could feel that there was a real anxiety around we're psychoanalytic, we gotta get the RCTs done, we gotta show that the stuff works, or else it's not valid. And we got to produce students who do this very particular kind of work, or else it's no good. So I like notice that, just entering the field.
speaker-0: And that work being the quantitative is the only kind of research that matters. Yeah. Right.
speaker-1: Exactly, exactly. Like even the idea of mixed methods, I I could feel in some of my like interviews for grad school was just not well not exactly welcome, potentially threatening, because again we have to show that psychoanalysis has evidentiary backing. So I noticed both of those things, like ⁓ a real anxiety, sometimes hostility towards the social justice stuff, but not so much hostility but ambivalence around different research paradigms that can include quantitative work, obviously, but that also integrate mixed methods, qual work, community participatory action research, et cetera. So I then get into Gazap and ⁓ I went up being advised by Nancy Boyd Franklin, who's kind of like a matriarch of the multicultural psychology movement, family systems therapist, but very open particularly to interpersonal approaches to psychoanalysis. course Salmonuchin kind of evolves from all that. But that I also had the opportunity to do a research assistantship with Nancy McWilliams. So I I had this kind of unique blessing of working with both Nancy's in cultivating these ideas around social justice and psychoanalysis. So I'm doing my coursework, we're all required to do a foundational like you have to pick up a case basically and treat that case psycholytically. And you have to do do the same thing with a cognitive behavioral case. And at the time, you know, my CBT supervisors were like surprisingly open to psycholytic stuff. Like one of them was a schema-focused therapist. So they're integrating object relations theory with a cognitive therapist. ⁓ another supervisor of mine, ⁓ Fred Rogers, was more of like a CBT motivational interviewing guy, but still very germane, like, hmm, I think we have to talk about this guy's childhood. And How it relates to their substance use. So there was a lot of like at a training level, I experienced a lot of openness. Yeah, it wasn't really rigid, you know? So there was like openness around playing with these models and potentially integrating them. And Stan Masser, who was their dean at the time, was big in the assimilative integrationist movement. So I'm going through my training, going through coursework. ⁓ I start developing ⁓
speaker-0: It wasn't too rigid.
speaker-1: a potential dissertation program, ⁓ based on my second year placement, which was at a ⁓ trauma focused clinic focused on children and adolescents. And it was part of a grant developing culturally adaptive treatments for this population, predominantly black and Latino, inner city, kids who are involved with like the SVU. So literally everything that you saw week after week, Mariska Haggerty saving the day, right? was what I was living, because it was like special victim unit was on the second floor, first floor was the clinic. So it's a very dynamic environment. We're trying out these treatments. One of them is a psychodynamic, integrative, culturally adaptive treatment. The other is a more cognitive behavioral, culturally adaptive treatment. And part of what I was doing was basically coding what interventions were being used in the treatments to see what the relationship would be between specific Therapeutic interventions and outcome, whether it was rupture of pair episodes or doing titrated exposure or addressing issues of culture and identity. To make a long to make a long story short, without super spilling all the tea here, ⁓ there were political issues that came up that impeded my being able to use that data. And so suddenly I was without. The data that I wanted to use. So I had to do a theoretical dissertation. That kind of politics, which was both a politics around the qual and quant issue, it was also politics around CBT versus psychodynamic. It was also politics around who gets the resources to do the research. I know I'm being a little vague, but just to give you a kind of the bird's eye view, all of that really prevented me from developing the kind of quantitative psychoanalytic dissertation that I think a lot of people want students to produce within the field. And and I had like very little choice but to do a more theoretically oriented dissertation.
speaker-0: You knew at this point, Daniel, that you wanted to be in academia. The goal. Yeah.
speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, that was a hundred percent like I'm gonna go be in academia, right? Because I'm learning from Nancy Boyd Franklin and Nancy McWilliams there in academia. Surely there's a pathway for me to get there too. But that, you know, that quant dissertation didn't pan out. I did a more theoretical one because that's kind of what I had on hand. And on the one hand, that theoretical dissertation became the foundation. Not only for the books that I've written and not just the clinical papers I've written, but it became the foundation for the actual research that I'm doing. At the time, however, when I finished graduate school, it it, you know, I finished graduate school, I wrapped up my internship, and I was applying to academic programs. ⁓ two things happened. One of them was even though I'd published a whole lot as a graduate student. ⁓ and even, you know, delivered presentations on some of this research I was doing. Because I couldn't do the dissertation in that way, I didn't have the chops, right? Like I hadn't demonstrated that I had the skills as a researcher. And that obviously stood out for places I applied to. That even though I had the training, right, I hadn't had the more quantitative publications. So that in and of itself became a huge barrier for me to even enter academia. But the other was related to kind of the social justice identity stuff. And that I would make it to a third, second, final round of interviews. And then, for example, one institution would say, ⁓ well, you know, the faculty raised a concern that if we went with you, you'd spend all your time just calling us racists and criticizing us. And I'm like, okay, I know that there's a certain kind of person where that's their brand or the thing they do, that's not really my thing. Like my thing is not like, let me shame you into social justice issues or whatever. But it sort of became like because I talk about these issues, because I'm Puerto Rican, by default, that's what I'm gonna do. Therefore and the fact that it came up in a in a job interview was very fraught because now I'm in the position of trying to reassure you that I'm Gonna call you racist, which is itself a weirdly racist environment. So things like that came up, and and I became ⁓ very disenchanted. There was another experience where ⁓ I was invited in for a job talk and then told last minute there's actually no job. That they already had given the job to a white person who was an alumnus of that program, but
speaker-0: ⁓ wow.
speaker-1: Because they didn't want the students to revolt and they didn't want it to seem they didn't consider any diverse candidates. That's why they were giving me this job talk. And what I'm telling you is verbatim from the person who invited me to the job talk. So I then have to dissociate so I could go give this talk that's not gonna go anywhere. So things like that.
speaker-0: Can I ask just to interject, like at this point, what is getting you through this? Cause obviously, I mean, these challenges I I could imagine start to feel insurmountable. And like, how did you find the resilience to kind of keep going down this path as all these doors are shutting?
speaker-1: I mean, so in the moment I'd kind of given up on academia. I'm just like, well, guess I really should just do like, you know, hospital work, really. And ⁓ I did have the opportunity to move from my internship and postdoc into a staff psychologist dash assistant professor position with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. So I was like, well, this is it. You know, I'll just kind of do my clinical work, do my writing on the side. And if there's opportunities for research, I'll avail myself of them, do what I can. So I'd kind of given up on it. It really was a mentor of mine who had ⁓ you know, come through to basically put up a research project at Mount Sinai, who pulled me aside one day and he was like, What are you doing here? And I'm like, Well, I'm you know, I'm doing routine outcome monitoring and I'm seeing patients and I'm you know in part of the internship program. And he's like, no, no, no, but but like really what are you doing? Like you should be in academia. You should be writing books. You should be doing this. And ⁓ I was really, you know, moved by that. yeah, I mean just to give you the the full story. So that this was Jeremy Safron. Right. So Jeremy Safron, who I met when I was a graduate student. and I was kind of asking about forense and short-term therapy. We connected, he was very supportive. And then when he saw me at Mount Sinai, he just kind of called me out. And that kind of reawakened my desire to do all those things, write books, be in academia, etc. So he gives me kind of a second win to get out there and you know try applying again. Now I apply again and I came up against. The same stuff, the exact same barriers. ⁓ what happens next is just you know, it's just fucking tragic. Like he was starting to talk to me about, you know, potentially applying to the new school and he's mur he's it's just the most random thing. He he gets ⁓ so you know, like I don't know how to say it, like you you're having a conversation with someone and they're suddenly just and you know, after he's murdered.
speaker-0: But yeah.
speaker-1: The new school reaches out and they're like, hey, he was taught he was talking to us about you. Would you be willing to pick up his courses and teach us courses, run his supervision groups? So I was very conflicted about it. ⁓ they needed an answer, so I wound up agreeing. And it just put me in this position where I was both teaching his course and running a supervision groups, and then just trying to, you know, basically do grief work with our students. 'Cause we had all d just lost Jeremy. So that became the kind of random way that I entered academia. This is because Jeremy was advocating for me and and then he was murdered. ⁓ so now I'm in academia in this random, tragic, weird fucking way. And everybody's processing their loss. I'm processing my loss and what it is that got me here. And As we're all kind of working with that, ⁓ Doris Chang, who was at the time the director of the culture and mental health lab at the new school, she takes a position at NYU. And so they then approach me and say, Hey, would you be open to taking a one-year appointment running this lab? So then this part-time position became a full-time one-year appointment running a lab. So again, it was a sort of serendipitous thing that happened. Where now I have a lab and I had some a little bit of funding. So I'm like, okay, well, I'm here doing this. ⁓ guess I'll make the best of it. And so I started using these research and travel funds that they offered to launch my first study, which was ⁓ a replication of ⁓ Critali Capri Rosario's work on colonial mentality among Puerto Ricans. So I launched that study and ⁓ you know, again, I don't want to get you know, too much in the T here. ⁓ I'm I'm processing in real time how to tell this story. Essentially I take this one year appointment, ⁓ a tenure line opens up and they invite me to apply. I I apply for this position, which is a tenure track position, and through a confluence of different factors, it is turned into a renewable term appointment contract position. Now, ⁓ With all respect to my colleagues, it was clear, both from the feedback I received as well as the word on the street from other faculty, that part of the reason why it was turned from a tenure track position to a contract position was A, the question of am I too political? Is this work too political? But B, perhaps more importantly, is this really psychological science? Right, is qualitative research really a form of research? So it ⁓
speaker-0: And these are psychoanalytic faculty who are raising this question. Well.
speaker-1: Right. I mean, to be fair, I I don't think they were raising both of those questions. You know, Department of Psychology there has very nuanced politics, shall we say, about how decisions are made, etc. For my ⁓ clinical colleagues and the clinical program, that was certainly an ongoing conversation. ⁓ could I see my way to turning this project into an experiment? And I'm like, I could visualize how one could, but It's not my interest. It's just not what I'm interested in. Like there's already been both experimental research and quantitative correlational research on these issues. I'm interested in doing more psychoanalytically informed qualitative research to kind of flesh out what we're finding in the more general data, both population-based data as well as ⁓ quantitative studies on the subject matter. So there was again the sort of like anxiety around. It's got to be quantitative. Could you turn it into a more quantitative thing? That doing qualitative research is a little bit, it's anxiety provoking. For folks in our position where we're psychoanalytic or in academia, but there are questions around the veracity of psychoalytic theory and therapy. So to a certain extent, you can understand the anxiety, but then there are also consequences, right? For me, in terms of my trajectory. It meant that ⁓ I was not a tenure line faculty member. And there were different systemic consequences of that. That ultimately ⁓ led to conditions where ⁓ without getting into all the details, I was basically like, okay, the story is I really can't get a tenure line position given my profile as a scholar and a qualitative researcher. I wound up testing that theory. I mean, after all, I'm being asked to run experiments while I ran experiments. I applied and I got a tenure aligned position. At a place, ironically, ⁓ you know, now I'm at Queens College with a joint appointment at the graduate center. ⁓ most of my colleagues, a lot of them are folks who are doing laboratory work. Right. They're they're doing very like molecular level research, ⁓ animal research, alongside folks who are doing applied behavior analysis research. ⁓ there's literally one other psychoanalyst on faculty. And he's doing memory research, like looking at different memory apps and whether they have an impact on people's cognitive function. So these are people who are doing scientific research, quantitative work. They're not at all threatened or concerned or worried about my work. And when I present my work in faculty meetings, they're excited. There's a there's a sense of like, ⁓ yeah, this is different kind of work that we need and want. So it was a real it was a really shocking experience. To be working with primarily psychodynamic colleagues who had this anxiety and to then be in an environment which is not a psychoanalytic program. It's not a psychoanalytically oriented clinical or departmental program. And yet they've seemed quite welcoming and not anxious about the work that I do.
speaker-0: What's your sense of? Because I imagine this is a widespread issue that psychoanalysts who are in academia have such a almost kind of existential fear about the position of the theory within academia that they're not trying to challenge the system in any way, right? They're not like trying to speak to the value of theory or qualitative research, or it's almost like they're saying, you just have to play the game. That's the only way we're gonna survive. Do you think that's a widespread? I mean, outside of your stories, your sense that's a widespread.
speaker-1: ⁓ a hundred thousand percent. I mean, I have students ⁓ who are ⁓ so I have my students at Queen's College, but then there will be students from other programs, right? Some other programs in the United States that are psychoanalytically oriented. I've also have have had students from psychoanalytic doctoral programs internationally. They all like I have different versions of the same story where they want to do some kind of psychoanalytically informed research. Maybe it's mixed methods, right? So quant's in there, quant's in the room. But it's got a qual element.
speaker-0: And then other.
speaker-1: Who wanna do qual research. And both of those situations create incredible anxiety for their mentors. And their mentors will give them the spiel: look, we're psychoanalytically oriented, so we're threatened in academia. We have to show our stuff that we're doing good empirical research, so you can't do this kind of work. And if you do this kind of work, you're not gonna be able to find a job. Right? Now, let's be fair, to an extent. They are correct. I, without question, experienced multiple obstacles because I didn't ultimately do right, I wasn't able to do a quantitative dissertation. I've experienced the obstacles. I've also experienced the possibility if we're able to expand the contours of our imagination. I've seen both of those things. They're both to an extent true. So there isn't like a way of mentoring students who want to do. Qual or mixed methods work and be able to say to them, yeah, it's gonna be hard, but there's a pathway for you, even as a psychoanalytic researcher. Right. Depending on what you do and how you structure it. And my experience has been that because ironically, because I am psychoanalytic, number one, number two, because I am fusing ⁓ qualitative research with population level data, right? That that speaks to people as something that's exciting. They're able to think about, ⁓ wait a minute, yeah, like I can totally find that A, B, and C are related or have predictive value. But what does it mean? Maybe I got to do some qual work to flesh out the model. That might lead to other quantitative, right? That there can be a synergy between these things as opposed to a zero sum. It's either quant work or literally die.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: And I'm like, it certainly doesn't have to be that way, not with psychoanalytic psychotherapy, not in looking at like severe mental illness, not in looking at issues of social injustice and inequity. It doesn't have to be like that. Right. So I see that in my own experience. I see it with a lot of students I mentor outside of my institution. I see that internationally. So at a very, at the very least anecdotal level. Right. Let me caveat that. Yeah. At least an anecdotal level, it seems like this is a collective anxiety that we share and that we haven't learned how to manage it. Yeah. In a way that doesn't like crush our students.
speaker-0: Right, right. Or funnel them into something that's completely disconnected from their passions or what they really want to learn. I mean, there's so much in your story that I think speaks to larger issues like in academia, in psychoanalysis, but I I mean a couple of things stood out to me, like the all the doors you had slammed in your face, like in in many ways it sounds like the position you occupy, a kind of the intersection of social justice and psychoanalysis. Part of the door slamming is about psychoanalysis' uneasy relationship with that intersection, right? Like that it's sort of something that there's been a lot of discussion about, reckoning with, often very polarized conversations, right? As though if you're interested in social justice, you are not interested in the unconscious. And I I just wonder, you know, what your thoughts are on that discussion as it exists today, kind of in academia and in psychoanalysis, like how these two things which are clearly very passionate about, both of them, like how they are talked about and and what makes these discussions about them so polarized.
speaker-1: I mean, it's a dumpster fire of an enactment, right? I mean, ⁓ let me speak somewhat, ⁓ let me caricature a little bit and then get into the weeds. It would almost seem like there's one side of this debate that's sort of like, ⁓ any discussion of social context, of culture, of politics and identity is simply needlessly politicizing our work. This has nothing to do with clinical practice, let alone research. This is ultimately about two people in an intimate relationship trying to explore the contours of their experience. ⁓ and then on the other end, you have this other side of the debate that's sort of like if you're not broaching issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality from like the first millisecond of the patient showing up, you are fucking up, you're you're you're doing a social injustice of some kind. Any consideration that the patient is somehow contributing. The challenges in their lives, automatic victim blaming, automatic ⁓ perpetuation of some kind of oppression. And and I look at that, at that panorama, and I'm like, this like this can't fucking be it. Like it can't be so polarized that any consideration of social context means ignoring the unconscious, means ignoring subjectivity, means ignoring relatedness, but it also can't possibly be. That trying to understand how the patient makes meaning in ways that both serve them and hinder them automatically means victim blaming, right? So I'm sort of working in this weird midpoint between these kind of extreme modes of discourse that ultimately make clinical practice really hard. And it certainly me makes theorizing about these things infinitely difficult. Oftentimes, ⁓ like just last week I was at a ⁓ group therapy conference and I led a workshop that was basically about identity politics and the nature of our lived clinical experience. And it kind of allowed forgive me, a safe space where clinicians could talk about ⁓ the pressures that they feel that unless they're practicing and talking in a certain way, they're gonna get rejected by their psychoanalytic community. But unless they're talking in just a certain way, they're gonna get rejected by their more, let's call it broadly, multicultural psych, decolonial psych communities. Right. So there were clinicians of color, ⁓ clinicians of color who are LGBT talking aloud about how, well, wait a minute, I really do think the patient, there's something going on here we need to look at. It's not just everybody else. But then they'll get dinged like, don't you dare raise that question. Racist, sexist, queer phobic, et cetera. ⁓ and then really trying to work through the nuances of clinical practice. But they're getting kind of shut down by both extremes of this debate. And when I say extremes, I don't mean like, how do you say this? Sometimes people bring in the language of both sides are extreme to not articulate the truth, right? But when I use it in this context, I want to be precise about what I mean. ⁓ Fanun, who is kind of like the forerunner of what I would call the decolonial psycholytic perspective, stated it very plainly. When we think about psychic suffering, he writes, it's both the result of conflictual clusters arising in part out of the environment and in part out of the purely individual idiosyncratic ways. That we respond to that environment. And this debate basically takes that statement and rips it in two. Either it's all the environment or it's all the individual in their intimate interpersonal dynamics. Right. And what we're saying, right, if you just take this debate to the side and actually read and engage with what people like me and Lynn Layton and Larish Sheehe and Usha Tmalanar are saying, is that in clinical Practiced. It's not just there's systemic oppression. It's not just there's trauma. It's that there are ways that in trying to survive those things, we create patterns of relatedness, defenses, identity that do something for us. They're textured by pleasure, they serve a function, they help us survive, but at some point they start to not work so well and they create problems in living, problems in interpersonal relationships, problems in politics. And it's that nuance that gets lost. ⁓ my own kind of journey to getting there, right? Like I was trained in like a very relational theory, rupture repair, take ownership of your contribution, right? Be very empathic. And then I had a rotation in an on internship at the Center for the Intensive Treatment of Personality Disorders. And and my supervisor, ⁓ her name was Lucia Vail, she was more of a DBT person. And she would notice how I'd get stuck with my patients trying to constantly validate and constantly looking at what am I doing that's leading to this contribution to the enactment, right? And at some point she's like, you know, it's not just about caring for the poor, the widow, and the orphan. Like sometimes you gotta say no. Like sometimes you gotta say, in order for this to work, we gotta meet on time. In order for this to work.
speaker-0: With
speaker-1: We need to meet on a weekly basis because you're telling me you're self harming, your your substance use is really high and out of control. In order for me to help you, we got to meet. Right. So I had to like rediscover how to say no as a therapist, right? And that doing that didn't automatically mean a betrayal of my social justice commitments. If anything, and this was also a realization ⁓ when I was at ⁓ Mount Sinine. The realization that sometimes when people go into that mode of like the hypervalidating empathic stuff, that itself becomes a defense against really problematic shit, what I call a kind of empathic abandonment. I had a I was in a a consultation group and this clinician was talking about how the patient's not showing up, they come every other week at best, show up 30 minutes late. And ⁓ you know, I raise kind of the obvious question, like, ⁓ have you talked to your patient about what's going on there? What that what's that about? And the clinician says, Well, no, they're just so oppressed. They face so many adversities. How could I, as an XYZ person, possibly explore with this ABC person what might be contributing to these issues? And at that point, you know, I just kind of let the person talk. And without even noticing, they start to say, Yeah, you know, and I get so exhausted listening to their stories and their traumas and their experiences. And when they don't show up, I'm kind of relieved because I can catch up on paperwork. And I'm just like, like, do you think maybe this thing you're feeling could be the the thing, the reason why they're not coming? Right? That there's like this layer of pseudo empathy. Mm-hmm. That's masking all the stuff that's coming up around race, around class, right? So it's like performing a social justice, quote unquote.
speaker-0: But not engaging in a real relationship.
speaker-1: Right, right. It's not engaging in a real relationship. It masks all of these retaliatory feelings where like the not showing up is on the one hand, like the patient communicating, I don't feel welcomed here. I don't feel seen. And then the performance of the social justice stuff becomes I feel all sorts of like racial engendered resentment towards this patient self to see. So I cover it up with the pseudo empathy and then I'm relieved when they don't show up. So it's like the discourse itself can be used defensively.
speaker-0: The thing that also stood out to me in your story, I don't I don't really know what to make of it, but the fact that the place from the beginning of your life that you have found most comfortably can hold the tension between social justice and psychoanalysis is religion. Like that's just fascinating to me. It almost makes me wonder if if religion is much more open to psychoanalysis than psychoanalysis is to religion.
speaker-1: Huh. I mean, yeah, it's funny, right? 'Cause like I I I really do think my pastors, right, had they had that psychological mindedness, that curiosity about people's inner lives, that those inner lives were kind of impacted by this broader context of like, you know, gross income inequality and like intergenerational substance use and all these different things that like start in a very structural place but trickle down. into people's lives. And it's sort of like how how do you help people find a sense of meaning? Like when people feel makes me a little emotional thinking about it, because like when people feel so downtrodden and just forgotten. But here you're saying, right, here's this relationship that will never leave you feel abandoned. God, right? Your relationship with Jesus, or those things have a lot of they have a lot of meaning. When you have a community that says we're not gonna be Even if you're say that even if they say that like you're bad. Like that was a thing that like it's as much part of my research as it is my clinical practice, as it is my lived experience, where like in the colonial situation, the message is you're fundamentally lazy. That's why things don't get better for you. Right. You're fundamentally a criminal. That's why your society is broken. Right. And so when when there's this message that it's coming from this colonial situation, we internalize it. we repeat against each other, then it's sort of like, fuck, then are we like fundamentally lovable? Do we deserve care? So here you have a space that's saying, no, no, no, no, like you fundamentally deserve care. Because this community and this, you know, living, breathing God cares about you. Right? It's sort of like this where the liberation theology stuff comes in. Cause it's sort of like, you know, it's a it's a Yeah, literally a God of the oppressed. Within the Christian tradition, which is of course where I'm like born and raised in, it it's such a powerful narrative that like God made himself flesh and walks among, you know, the poor, the prostitute, the leper, everybody who's seen as like the outcast, right? There's something like very compelling there because what is that in a way, if not like the the fundamentals of the psychodynamic stance, right? Like I care less about what metaphor you use. You know, you call it neutrality, knock yourself out. I I call it like the psychodynamic stance because it's a mind in motion. Be able to entertain multitudes. You're remaining open to this other person. You don't have to agree with everything they say. You ain't even got to like half of their behavior. But there's still a Anton Hart calls it a radical openness. That you're you're you're fundamental humanity. Right, that matters. Yeah. Right. Doesn't mean that you're necessarily a quote unquote good person. Doesn't mean everything you do is great, but you matter. And I think there there's something, ⁓ there's something really beautiful that can be articulated in terms of like a psychoanalysis and religion discussion, with the caveat that ⁓ As Freud said in in Civilization is Discontents, which was a response to, you know, Alan Rowland's whole thing about, ⁓ but religion gives us meaning. He says, like, look, human beings are not gentle creatures simply looking to be loved. Right? That's the other side of this. It's like remaining open to the humanity of everyday people, despite of, maybe to an extent, because of the incredible brutality we can do to each other. Mm-hmm. And Freud doesn't mince words here. He's like, look at the history of programs, of persecution, of colonialism, of Genghis Khan. Look at the first world war we just rapped. Look at the second world war that's ramping up. Right? So I think there's a way of like entertaining all of that without being like Pollyannish about human nature. People are fucked, man. But even though people are fucked, they still kind of matter. That that's kind of
speaker-0: Yeah. I love that. And I I before we end, Daniel, I want to ask you a question about your scholarship because I think there's something that's really I feel like you occupy a very kind of amazingly radical place in the field. And I think it's very inspiring. And specifically, I think it could inspire students who want to be in academia but have absolutely no interest in replicating another randomized control trial of a 12-station treatment. Right. You know, and And I just wanted if you could just speak to just like a give us a little piece of of your work. And in particular, I'm interested in your work on, you know, ⁓ decolonizing psychoanalytic technique and theory. And you talked about this idea of the dyadic default. Could you just say a little bit about that and how you think about that?
speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, absolutely. I mean, the the basic default, whether we're talking about ⁓ classical Freudian, contemporary Freudian, ⁓ relational, interpersonal, object relational, self-psychological, the fundamental default is that you're theorizing about something happened once upon a time with a mommy and a baby, or there's some prototypical prototypical story about what should happen between a mommy and a baby, and however you configure that. is how you model the therapeutic relationship, right? Where therapist and patient, that relationship is like, it replicates, it enacts, it creates the opportunity for some kind of developmental striving to be rethought in a new way. Call it a collective corrective emotional experience or some new insight that's cultivated by the relationship, blah, blah, blah. And you know, like it has obvious explanatory value. But it's also limited in how it conceives of human subjectivity. And I made the argument in my books and ⁓ my academic papers as well, bringing together research and theory, that if you think about ⁓ human subjectivity in that way, then the scope of therapy is necessarily going to be narrow. Right. Like a lot of people like myself who are trying to think through how do you honor the kind of wisdom. Of developmental thinking and psychoanalysis, and also make room for exploring the social world in our clinical practice. It's like you're trying to fit two things that don't fit together. Because the general orientation of this dyadic thinking is two people oriented towards each other, right? You can think of Beatrice Beebe's wonderful research on the face-to-face relation and the microdynamics of that interaction, and that the ultimate product is the capacity to reflect on your mind and somebody else's mind. So where do you fit in? Questions of the social. I bring in ⁓ other research, some of which people like Peter Fonegy have talked about. And I often joke, you know, don't get mad at me, decolonial diva, Daniel José Gatambianunes, take it up with management. Take it up with Peter Phonegie. Because there's basically research that suggests that the dyadic mode we tend to privilege in our theories might be more reflective of a more middle class global north approach to attachment and development. That if we look at if we look outside of middle upper class populations, and if we look at the global south, there's this other mode of attachment that we might call alloparentic or collective. To make a long story short, the research suggests that in this mode of attachment, it's not baby and mommy oriented towards each other. The baby is oriented physically and metaphorically outward. So not facing towards the dyad. They're facing outward towards the community. And it's not just one mommy. It might be multiple mommies and aunts and uncles and dads who share a role in raising the kid. ⁓ Jessica Benjamin, by way of Daniel Stern, posed the question how do we get a sense that there's other minds out there? One answer is the dyadic mode, obviously. But the other answer is, well, if you take the kid and you face, you know, you have them facing outside, how do they get a sense that there's other minds out there? Because they observe those other minds in the community. What they're mentalizing is not their inner thoughts and feelings. They're mentalizing people's positions in the community, their status, and how that conveys collective modes of thinking, feeling, and believing. What I what I've argued recently is not that in the global north we do attachment like this, in the global south we do attachment like that. I argue instead that the research, right, and here I'm drawing on social psych and cognitive science, the research suggests that we have this interconnective, unconscious social cognitive system that operates on both a horizontal mode of closeness and distance that's very interpersonally attuned. But we have this other mode that's hierarchically organized. It's about figuring out not how do I get close to a significant other. It's figuring out what's my place here? ⁓ What's my place in this setting? What's my place in the community? I enter the classroom. I am Dr. Gastambide, award winning researcher, scholar, blah, blah, blah. Very clear hierarchy in relation to my students. They walk into the room as students, they they operate in a certain way. And we operate differently in the classroom than we do at home with our loved ones or in our houses of worship. We're constantly mapping what is our place in the world, how do we fit in in terms of class and race and gender and sexuality, all that good stuff. Therefore, I argue what we're trying to do in psycholytic therapy is ⁓ to try to kind of activate modes of reflection and modes of being with one another. It's simply that what we're reflecting on is both our interpersonal dynamics, apps a hundred fucking percent. But we're also opening space to reflect on our position in the room and in the world. Okay. All of that plays a role in transference, counter transference. And the research bears this out that it's not only negotiating closeness in psychotherapy that plays a role in therapeutic outcome. It's also negotiating identity roles and negotiating power in the relationship. All of that plays into what we call enactments, what we call rupture and repair. So it's not like replacing one mode of thinking with another. It's understanding that yes, we are grabbing different parts of the elephant. And these are, in effect, different parts of the elephant that we're just as much oriented. For intimacy and closeness as we are oriented towards deservingness, as we are oriented towards fairness, as we are oriented to wait a minute, what's my place in this world? We want to be loved. Of course we want to be loved, but we also want to feel that we're respected and valued in the community. Right? We can talk about it in terms of, say, theories of narcissism, but even that gets interpersonalized.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: If we go back to Kohat and Sullivan, Sullivan's very clear. It is about interpersonal relationships. It's also about a sense of status. But we lose that nuance when we interpersonalize, when we dyadisize human subjectivity. Right? I joke in my presentations when I do this, it's like, look, I'm not, I'm not trying to take away your diads. I'm not trying to take away your mom. If you love your mom,
speaker-0: Keep her face into her eyes all you want.
speaker-1: Talk about it with your therapist, right? But it's about expanding the frame using theory and research, expanding the frame of how this thing we call the mind works. That's when
speaker-0: I that feels to me to be the thread that's running through a lot of your work, which is like as you describe it, it's like, ⁓ right, like you're you're opening up a lens, right, that due to bias has been just like this on me, right? And and it through my training, through my upbringing, I haven't seen this larger picture. And you're sort of bringing that in. it feels, yeah, it feels very additive. Like we don't need to throw away other ideas and replace them with. Different ones, but is there a way to kind of just widen our scope so we're not missing things that do the biases we would have just left out of the picture?
speaker-1: 100%. I mean, if if I could ⁓ you know, add again that that layer of nuance that gets missing here, there are people who are gonna hear what I just said and they're like, ⁓ you're bringing politics into the psychotherapy. ⁓ my god. ⁓ you're ignoring the individual. They're they're gonna have that reaction. And I'm gonna say something th right now that's gonna both throw them a bone and potentially annoy some of my colleagues on my side of the eye. Being able to have this model lets us do two things. One of those things is certainly to embed human subjectivity in a broader social, cultural, and political context. What it also does is it helps us clarify how people can use those very contexts defensively. The payoff of this model is not to say to our patient, you are but a victim of racial capitalist patriarchy and colonialism. Let's call it a day being home in time for lunch and dinner. That that's not the payoff. Payoff is lets us see a little more clearly both how the social world impacts our patients. It lets us see more clearly how sometimes, in the interest of survival, they can craft modes of identity that can precisely get in the way of their being able to live and find joy and connect even within our broken system. What that means is that it provides a language.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: For both appreciating the nuances of identity, but also it makes a critique of the defensive ways that we can use identity. What often happens is that when people who say this is in interjecting politics, whatever, they'll take that critique of identity politics and then they'll say, and this is why racism doesn't exist. Here's why economic inequality doesn't exist. Here's why sexism doesn't exist, et cetera. Right? So they'll take something that's true. And they'll turn it in a very distorted direction. Just as much people sometimes on my side of the aisle will take the fact that oppression ⁓ absolutely exists, but sometimes use that to foreclose exploration. Right. Defensive patterns of operation. That I think is part of the enactment here. That certain realities get taken and then people run with it and it forecloses space. So suddenly we can't talk about social injustice. But then suddenly we can't talk about defenses either. And I think both of those become a kind of obvious clinical problem, as much as a theoretical political problem in turn.
speaker-0: Well, I I just want to thank you so much, Daniel, for speaking to me. I mean, this feels like such an enlivening conversation. And in some ways, it feels like we're just getting started. And I I think your work is really helpful to me as a teacher because I know a lot of, you know, the first year doctoral students I teach, they say things like, you know, well, I'm interested in psychoanalysis, but what about its sexism? Or what about its, you know, how white it is? And, you know, it in a way like having a way to to speak to students who are very concerned about an interest in social justice, but who also want to be open to psychoanalytic ideas. I just think you you have a way of ⁓ bringing those things together that I think young people in particular are really gonna be enthusiastic about. And ⁓ it was so wonderful to speak to you today.
speaker-1: Well th thank you so much. I I really appreciate the time to share with you and with your audience today.
speaker-0: Thank you so much. Okay, bye-bye. Thank you for listening to in-depth. Academics for the Advancement of Psychodynamic Psychology is a community-driven organization working to shape the future of psychoanalytic education, from undergraduate study through postdoctoral training. We have ongoing projects devoted to improving mentorship and educational resources, supporting psychoanalytic research, and changing the public discourse around psychoanalytic and psychodynamic training. Join one of our existing projects or suggest one of your own. We're actively looking for volunteers and we especially encourage students to get involved. If this work resonates with you, visit a2p2group.org or reach out to us at a squared p squared at group.org and take part in shaping what comes next.
speaker-0: Welcome to In-Depth Psychoanalysis in the Academy, a podcast from Academics for the Advancement of Psychodynamic Psychology, also known as A2P2. We're a group of scholars, clinicians, and educators working to promote psychodynamic research, training, and clinical practice in a field that's becoming increasingly narrow in both theory and treatment. This podcast is a space for thoughtful conversations with psychoanalytic academics. Who are actively shaping the future of psychotherapy and psychology education. If you're drawn to depth-oriented thinking, critical scholarship, and the enduring relevance of the unconscious, welcome, you're in the right place. Hi, I'm Dr. Bevan Campbell, and thank you for listening to In-Depth. Dr. Daniel Gotsambide's path to academic psychology is a unique story that also illuminates some universal truths about the opportunities and challenges facing psychoanalytic scholars. Dr. Gotsambide takes us on his journey from growing up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to creating the Franz Fanon Lab for Decolonial Psychology at Queen's College, tracing the influences of Catholicism, liberation theology. And liberation psychology on his current scholarship, which occupies a radical position at the intersection of empirical research, social justice, and psychoanalysis. Within psychoanalytic theory, there is an essential tension concerning the influences of cultural forces versus the influence of the unconscious. Often, debates around the relative importance of each of these factors can become polarized. Dr. Gotson Biday explores in this episode how Fanon's work. Has helped him resolve this polarization and has informed his thinking about how we can decolonize psychoanalytic theory and praxis. We also discuss the enduring power of the dietic default, how psychoanalytic leadership in the academy can inadvertently hinder new academics, and the relationship between religion and psychoanalysis. It's a wide-ranging and moving discussion, and it is A2P2's hope that it expands your sense of what is possible within psychoanalytic scholarship. Let's get into it. Please note that this episode contains content related to the death of a beloved colleague to many, Dr. Jeremy Safron. Daniel Jose Gatsambide, Psy D, is assistant professor of psychology at Queen's College, where he is the director of the Franz Fanon Lab for Decolonial Psychology and a faculty member in the Department of Critical Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of the books A People's History of Psychoanalysis. From Freud to Liberation Psychology and the recent decolonizing psychoanalytic technique, Putting Freud on Fanon's Couch, which received a 2024 Gradiva Award for Best Book. He is an analytic training at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and is the recipient of multiple fellowships and awards, including a Mellon Foundation Fellowship, a Miranda Family Fellowship, And the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education's Outstanding Psychoanalytic Educator Award. Lastly, he is the recipient of a presidential citation for his service as part of the American Psychological Association's task force on strategies for the elimination of racism, discrimination, and hate. His research and scholarship focuses on colonial mentality among Puerto Rican populations. Decolonial pr approaches to treatment and case formulation, and qualitative approaches to the study of race, gender, and sexuality. I just wanted to start ⁓ by asking you to tell us a little bit about your professional trajectory as someone who is both interested in psychoanalysis and and obviously working as an academic. How did you end up where you are? Can you give us a bit of the history?
speaker-1: The I mean, like many histories of this kind, it all naturally goes back to my mother. ⁓ I was ⁓ you know, she had a different podcast and venues where I was ⁓ you know, I was born and raised in San Juan Puerto Rico and my mom was the secretary for this church called Humisterio Sanador por una iglesia sanadora, a healing ministry by a healing church. And it j it just so happened that our pastors ⁓ had Pastoral counseling training, particularly psychodynamic training, with one of them at the time pursuing a PhD at Albizo University in clinical psychology. And so she would do the work of doing like briefs of different books that they didn't have time to read. So they she would just read them for them. And she would just bring that home and make for some like very odd bedtime reading. So yeah, so basically. You know, other kids wanted to be astronauts and cowboys and firemen and I wanted to be a psychoanalyst. So I was just a weird kid at like age five or whatever. So I have these interests. They they were cultivated further by my pastors. When I was inner youth group, ⁓ the youth pastor Ariad Badilla would kind of pick me up from home and take me to church for the youth group. And we talk about Albert Ellis and Kyle Rogers and Sigmund Freud. And it was just very, you know, palpable and exciting. The ways that psychoanalytic thinking in particular could offer something to the community. ⁓ The idea that there's like a whole other world that we're not aware of, but still informs our behavior and how we think and feel was also very palpable in thinking about all the things that were unspoken, maybe even unspeakable within our society, right? So the ways in which we grew up in the shadow of a colony. One of the world's oldest continuing colonies today, ⁓ textured by colorism, anti-blackness, economic inequality, as well as gender, gender identity, and sexuality-related issues. So all of that is kind of crackling in my mind that psychoanalysis is something to share, something to show, something to say about issues of community and society. And then I come stateside, right? And I take my like, Bachelor's in psychology. And it's all about like the rods and cones in your eye and like the vasillar membrane in the fucking ear. And I'm like, well, this is not this is not at all what I envisioned when I came to stateside to go to school. So I was kind of disenchanted with psychology for a while, wound up taking courses in the Department of Religion at Rutgers.
speaker-0: Dig to love, yeah.
speaker-1: And there I wound up connecting with ⁓ James W. Jones, who was a psychoanalyst and a psychologist of religion. And then ⁓ he sent me over to take this personality course with George Atwood, who was at Ruck Rutgers at the time in the psych department. So I kind of put together this sort of double major in psychology and religion. And I got to work with James and George and just just reading. Psychoanalytic theory, primarily intersubjective systems theory, and different kinds of New York style relational psychoanalysis. So when I'm getting ready to graduate and I'm figuring out what I'm going to do with my life, they both recommend that I not only apply to doctoral programs in clinical psych, but that I also apply to this master's in psychiatry and religion at Union Theological Seminary. And I was sort of like, I'm at this point now, having gone through all the college experiences one would have, including a healthy dose of, you know, critical studies of religion. I was like, I'm basically a heathen now. Why are you sending me to seminary? And they're like, no, no, like it has this history of social justice. Like, you think you'd really like it? So I applied and it it was, you know, heartbreaking at the time because I didn't get into any of the doctoral programs I wanted. I got into One doctoral program that then, because of like things happening behind the scenes, turned my application into a master's application. Like a one year master's, no funding. versus I wound up hearing back from Union and they're like, We'll give you a full ride and housing. And I'm like, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. I'm going to seminary.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: Cause I can like live, you know what I mean? I can like have thing and I'll pay the tuition. I guess this is what I'm gonna do. So I go to Union Theological Seminary where I study with ⁓ Ann Ulanov, who who's big in the Jungian world, and Harry Fogarty, who was a big interpersonalist. ⁓ and I'm taking these psychoanalytically oriented courses, but because it's seminary, I also have to take courses in theology. At the time, I was taking courses with James Cohn, who's kind of the founder of Black Liberation Theology. And through him, I'm getting exposed to different liberation theology. So Latin American liberation theology, queer theology, feminist theology, et cetera. And I come to learn how these two discourses are at odds with each other. So the psychoalytic faculty were like, ⁓ but you're forgetting about the individual and all the social stuff is secondary. And all the liberation theology people were like, this is individualistic, you're completely ignoring the social context of suffering. These two discourses are at odds with each other until ⁓ we have a guest lecture by Claude Barber over at the I think it was at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology at the time. And he gives this lecture on Paulo Freire, Franz Fanon, and Ignacio Martin Baro. So kind of introducing us. To liberation psychology as a perspective that's kind of fusing these discourses, liberation theology and psychology. And that was very exciting because it was sort of confirming a lot of the things that I felt and knew growing up in Puerto Rico in a very like religious context. But the other major thing was I was at ⁓ Burke Library, which was Union Theological Seminary Library, and I was looking for a copy of Jessica Benjamin's. ⁓ one of her big books, I think was it entitled Beyond Door and Done Two? Maybe. Like it was it was kind of her big book. As I'm looking for that book, I trip over a fucking stool and I drop all the books I'm carrying. And as I'm getting my stuff together, I see this one book in the stacks called ⁓ Freud's Free Clinic: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice by Elizabeth Danto. And That was sort of like, you know, divide intervention, like a spot of light shine on that book. And ⁓ you know, it's it was just like speaking again to this concern, like, is there a way? So not only is there a way of bridging psychoanalysis and social justice, but is it possible that the stories we've told about Freud, about the first generation, about psychoanalysis writ large, may those stories be incomplete. Is there perhaps a way in which this way of thinking about human subjectivity ⁓ was inherently concerned with the social world? B came from a group of people who had very progressive ideals. C connected these progressive ideals with their clinical practice. So these things, as they all kind of were cultivated at union, were the foundation of what would become my work. So I write a whole bunch of stuff, I publish, ⁓ I reapply again, and I get into my school of choice, which was the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rockhurst. But in the process of doing the interviews, I interviewed at a number of psychoanalytic programs. Right. And it was interesting that like there were people I interacted with in those interviews that were either Let's just say like not totally interested in what I was interested in, at times a little antagonistic ⁓ towards all the social justice culture stuff, but we're also ambivalent about the question of say qualitative research. Like I could feel that there was a real anxiety around we're psychoanalytic, we gotta get the RCTs done, we gotta show that the stuff works, or else it's not valid. And we got to produce students who do this very particular kind of work, or else it's no good. So I like notice that, just entering the field.
speaker-0: And that work being the quantitative is the only kind of research that matters. Yeah. Right.
speaker-1: Exactly, exactly. Like even the idea of mixed methods, I I could feel in some of my like interviews for grad school was just not well not exactly welcome, potentially threatening, because again we have to show that psychoanalysis has evidentiary backing. So I noticed both of those things, like ⁓ a real anxiety, sometimes hostility towards the social justice stuff, but not so much hostility but ambivalence around different research paradigms that can include quantitative work, obviously, but that also integrate mixed methods, qual work, community participatory action research, et cetera. So I then get into Gazap and ⁓ I went up being advised by Nancy Boyd Franklin, who's kind of like a matriarch of the multicultural psychology movement, family systems therapist, but very open particularly to interpersonal approaches to psychoanalysis. course Salmonuchin kind of evolves from all that. But that I also had the opportunity to do a research assistantship with Nancy McWilliams. So I I had this kind of unique blessing of working with both Nancy's in cultivating these ideas around social justice and psychoanalysis. So I'm doing my coursework, we're all required to do a foundational like you have to pick up a case basically and treat that case psycholytically. And you have to do do the same thing with a cognitive behavioral case. And at the time, you know, my CBT supervisors were like surprisingly open to psycholytic stuff. Like one of them was a schema-focused therapist. So they're integrating object relations theory with a cognitive therapist. ⁓ another supervisor of mine, ⁓ Fred Rogers, was more of like a CBT motivational interviewing guy, but still very germane, like, hmm, I think we have to talk about this guy's childhood. And How it relates to their substance use. So there was a lot of like at a training level, I experienced a lot of openness. Yeah, it wasn't really rigid, you know? So there was like openness around playing with these models and potentially integrating them. And Stan Masser, who was their dean at the time, was big in the assimilative integrationist movement. So I'm going through my training, going through coursework. ⁓ I start developing ⁓
speaker-0: It wasn't too rigid.
speaker-1: a potential dissertation program, ⁓ based on my second year placement, which was at a ⁓ trauma focused clinic focused on children and adolescents. And it was part of a grant developing culturally adaptive treatments for this population, predominantly black and Latino, inner city, kids who are involved with like the SVU. So literally everything that you saw week after week, Mariska Haggerty saving the day, right? was what I was living, because it was like special victim unit was on the second floor, first floor was the clinic. So it's a very dynamic environment. We're trying out these treatments. One of them is a psychodynamic, integrative, culturally adaptive treatment. The other is a more cognitive behavioral, culturally adaptive treatment. And part of what I was doing was basically coding what interventions were being used in the treatments to see what the relationship would be between specific Therapeutic interventions and outcome, whether it was rupture of pair episodes or doing titrated exposure or addressing issues of culture and identity. To make a long to make a long story short, without super spilling all the tea here, ⁓ there were political issues that came up that impeded my being able to use that data. And so suddenly I was without. The data that I wanted to use. So I had to do a theoretical dissertation. That kind of politics, which was both a politics around the qual and quant issue, it was also politics around CBT versus psychodynamic. It was also politics around who gets the resources to do the research. I know I'm being a little vague, but just to give you a kind of the bird's eye view, all of that really prevented me from developing the kind of quantitative psychoanalytic dissertation that I think a lot of people want students to produce within the field. And and I had like very little choice but to do a more theoretically oriented dissertation.
speaker-0: You knew at this point, Daniel, that you wanted to be in academia. The goal. Yeah.
speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, that was a hundred percent like I'm gonna go be in academia, right? Because I'm learning from Nancy Boyd Franklin and Nancy McWilliams there in academia. Surely there's a pathway for me to get there too. But that, you know, that quant dissertation didn't pan out. I did a more theoretical one because that's kind of what I had on hand. And on the one hand, that theoretical dissertation became the foundation. Not only for the books that I've written and not just the clinical papers I've written, but it became the foundation for the actual research that I'm doing. At the time, however, when I finished graduate school, it it, you know, I finished graduate school, I wrapped up my internship, and I was applying to academic programs. ⁓ two things happened. One of them was even though I'd published a whole lot as a graduate student. ⁓ and even, you know, delivered presentations on some of this research I was doing. Because I couldn't do the dissertation in that way, I didn't have the chops, right? Like I hadn't demonstrated that I had the skills as a researcher. And that obviously stood out for places I applied to. That even though I had the training, right, I hadn't had the more quantitative publications. So that in and of itself became a huge barrier for me to even enter academia. But the other was related to kind of the social justice identity stuff. And that I would make it to a third, second, final round of interviews. And then, for example, one institution would say, ⁓ well, you know, the faculty raised a concern that if we went with you, you'd spend all your time just calling us racists and criticizing us. And I'm like, okay, I know that there's a certain kind of person where that's their brand or the thing they do, that's not really my thing. Like my thing is not like, let me shame you into social justice issues or whatever. But it sort of became like because I talk about these issues, because I'm Puerto Rican, by default, that's what I'm gonna do. Therefore and the fact that it came up in a in a job interview was very fraught because now I'm in the position of trying to reassure you that I'm Gonna call you racist, which is itself a weirdly racist environment. So things like that came up, and and I became ⁓ very disenchanted. There was another experience where ⁓ I was invited in for a job talk and then told last minute there's actually no job. That they already had given the job to a white person who was an alumnus of that program, but
speaker-0: ⁓ wow.
speaker-1: Because they didn't want the students to revolt and they didn't want it to seem they didn't consider any diverse candidates. That's why they were giving me this job talk. And what I'm telling you is verbatim from the person who invited me to the job talk. So I then have to dissociate so I could go give this talk that's not gonna go anywhere. So things like that.
speaker-0: Can I ask just to interject, like at this point, what is getting you through this? Cause obviously, I mean, these challenges I I could imagine start to feel insurmountable. And like, how did you find the resilience to kind of keep going down this path as all these doors are shutting?
speaker-1: I mean, so in the moment I'd kind of given up on academia. I'm just like, well, guess I really should just do like, you know, hospital work, really. And ⁓ I did have the opportunity to move from my internship and postdoc into a staff psychologist dash assistant professor position with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. So I was like, well, this is it. You know, I'll just kind of do my clinical work, do my writing on the side. And if there's opportunities for research, I'll avail myself of them, do what I can. So I'd kind of given up on it. It really was a mentor of mine who had ⁓ you know, come through to basically put up a research project at Mount Sinai, who pulled me aside one day and he was like, What are you doing here? And I'm like, Well, I'm you know, I'm doing routine outcome monitoring and I'm seeing patients and I'm you know in part of the internship program. And he's like, no, no, no, but but like really what are you doing? Like you should be in academia. You should be writing books. You should be doing this. And ⁓ I was really, you know, moved by that. yeah, I mean just to give you the the full story. So that this was Jeremy Safron. Right. So Jeremy Safron, who I met when I was a graduate student. and I was kind of asking about forense and short-term therapy. We connected, he was very supportive. And then when he saw me at Mount Sinai, he just kind of called me out. And that kind of reawakened my desire to do all those things, write books, be in academia, etc. So he gives me kind of a second win to get out there and you know try applying again. Now I apply again and I came up against. The same stuff, the exact same barriers. ⁓ what happens next is just you know, it's just fucking tragic. Like he was starting to talk to me about, you know, potentially applying to the new school and he's mur he's it's just the most random thing. He he gets ⁓ so you know, like I don't know how to say it, like you you're having a conversation with someone and they're suddenly just and you know, after he's murdered.
speaker-0: But yeah.
speaker-1: The new school reaches out and they're like, hey, he was taught he was talking to us about you. Would you be willing to pick up his courses and teach us courses, run his supervision groups? So I was very conflicted about it. ⁓ they needed an answer, so I wound up agreeing. And it just put me in this position where I was both teaching his course and running a supervision groups, and then just trying to, you know, basically do grief work with our students. 'Cause we had all d just lost Jeremy. So that became the kind of random way that I entered academia. This is because Jeremy was advocating for me and and then he was murdered. ⁓ so now I'm in academia in this random, tragic, weird fucking way. And everybody's processing their loss. I'm processing my loss and what it is that got me here. And As we're all kind of working with that, ⁓ Doris Chang, who was at the time the director of the culture and mental health lab at the new school, she takes a position at NYU. And so they then approach me and say, Hey, would you be open to taking a one-year appointment running this lab? So then this part-time position became a full-time one-year appointment running a lab. So again, it was a sort of serendipitous thing that happened. Where now I have a lab and I had some a little bit of funding. So I'm like, okay, well, I'm here doing this. ⁓ guess I'll make the best of it. And so I started using these research and travel funds that they offered to launch my first study, which was ⁓ a replication of ⁓ Critali Capri Rosario's work on colonial mentality among Puerto Ricans. So I launched that study and ⁓ you know, again, I don't want to get you know, too much in the T here. ⁓ I'm I'm processing in real time how to tell this story. Essentially I take this one year appointment, ⁓ a tenure line opens up and they invite me to apply. I I apply for this position, which is a tenure track position, and through a confluence of different factors, it is turned into a renewable term appointment contract position. Now, ⁓ With all respect to my colleagues, it was clear, both from the feedback I received as well as the word on the street from other faculty, that part of the reason why it was turned from a tenure track position to a contract position was A, the question of am I too political? Is this work too political? But B, perhaps more importantly, is this really psychological science? Right, is qualitative research really a form of research? So it ⁓
speaker-0: And these are psychoanalytic faculty who are raising this question. Well.
speaker-1: Right. I mean, to be fair, I I don't think they were raising both of those questions. You know, Department of Psychology there has very nuanced politics, shall we say, about how decisions are made, etc. For my ⁓ clinical colleagues and the clinical program, that was certainly an ongoing conversation. ⁓ could I see my way to turning this project into an experiment? And I'm like, I could visualize how one could, but It's not my interest. It's just not what I'm interested in. Like there's already been both experimental research and quantitative correlational research on these issues. I'm interested in doing more psychoanalytically informed qualitative research to kind of flesh out what we're finding in the more general data, both population-based data as well as ⁓ quantitative studies on the subject matter. So there was again the sort of like anxiety around. It's got to be quantitative. Could you turn it into a more quantitative thing? That doing qualitative research is a little bit, it's anxiety provoking. For folks in our position where we're psychoanalytic or in academia, but there are questions around the veracity of psychoalytic theory and therapy. So to a certain extent, you can understand the anxiety, but then there are also consequences, right? For me, in terms of my trajectory. It meant that ⁓ I was not a tenure line faculty member. And there were different systemic consequences of that. That ultimately ⁓ led to conditions where ⁓ without getting into all the details, I was basically like, okay, the story is I really can't get a tenure line position given my profile as a scholar and a qualitative researcher. I wound up testing that theory. I mean, after all, I'm being asked to run experiments while I ran experiments. I applied and I got a tenure aligned position. At a place, ironically, ⁓ you know, now I'm at Queens College with a joint appointment at the graduate center. ⁓ most of my colleagues, a lot of them are folks who are doing laboratory work. Right. They're they're doing very like molecular level research, ⁓ animal research, alongside folks who are doing applied behavior analysis research. ⁓ there's literally one other psychoanalyst on faculty. And he's doing memory research, like looking at different memory apps and whether they have an impact on people's cognitive function. So these are people who are doing scientific research, quantitative work. They're not at all threatened or concerned or worried about my work. And when I present my work in faculty meetings, they're excited. There's a there's a sense of like, ⁓ yeah, this is different kind of work that we need and want. So it was a real it was a really shocking experience. To be working with primarily psychodynamic colleagues who had this anxiety and to then be in an environment which is not a psychoanalytic program. It's not a psychoanalytically oriented clinical or departmental program. And yet they've seemed quite welcoming and not anxious about the work that I do.
speaker-0: What's your sense of? Because I imagine this is a widespread issue that psychoanalysts who are in academia have such a almost kind of existential fear about the position of the theory within academia that they're not trying to challenge the system in any way, right? They're not like trying to speak to the value of theory or qualitative research, or it's almost like they're saying, you just have to play the game. That's the only way we're gonna survive. Do you think that's a widespread? I mean, outside of your stories, your sense that's a widespread.
speaker-1: ⁓ a hundred thousand percent. I mean, I have students ⁓ who are ⁓ so I have my students at Queen's College, but then there will be students from other programs, right? Some other programs in the United States that are psychoanalytically oriented. I've also have have had students from psychoanalytic doctoral programs internationally. They all like I have different versions of the same story where they want to do some kind of psychoanalytically informed research. Maybe it's mixed methods, right? So quant's in there, quant's in the room. But it's got a qual element.
speaker-0: And then other.
speaker-1: Who wanna do qual research. And both of those situations create incredible anxiety for their mentors. And their mentors will give them the spiel: look, we're psychoanalytically oriented, so we're threatened in academia. We have to show our stuff that we're doing good empirical research, so you can't do this kind of work. And if you do this kind of work, you're not gonna be able to find a job. Right? Now, let's be fair, to an extent. They are correct. I, without question, experienced multiple obstacles because I didn't ultimately do right, I wasn't able to do a quantitative dissertation. I've experienced the obstacles. I've also experienced the possibility if we're able to expand the contours of our imagination. I've seen both of those things. They're both to an extent true. So there isn't like a way of mentoring students who want to do. Qual or mixed methods work and be able to say to them, yeah, it's gonna be hard, but there's a pathway for you, even as a psychoanalytic researcher. Right. Depending on what you do and how you structure it. And my experience has been that because ironically, because I am psychoanalytic, number one, number two, because I am fusing ⁓ qualitative research with population level data, right? That that speaks to people as something that's exciting. They're able to think about, ⁓ wait a minute, yeah, like I can totally find that A, B, and C are related or have predictive value. But what does it mean? Maybe I got to do some qual work to flesh out the model. That might lead to other quantitative, right? That there can be a synergy between these things as opposed to a zero sum. It's either quant work or literally die.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: And I'm like, it certainly doesn't have to be that way, not with psychoanalytic psychotherapy, not in looking at like severe mental illness, not in looking at issues of social injustice and inequity. It doesn't have to be like that. Right. So I see that in my own experience. I see it with a lot of students I mentor outside of my institution. I see that internationally. So at a very, at the very least anecdotal level. Right. Let me caveat that. Yeah. At least an anecdotal level, it seems like this is a collective anxiety that we share and that we haven't learned how to manage it. Yeah. In a way that doesn't like crush our students.
speaker-0: Right, right. Or funnel them into something that's completely disconnected from their passions or what they really want to learn. I mean, there's so much in your story that I think speaks to larger issues like in academia, in psychoanalysis, but I I mean a couple of things stood out to me, like the all the doors you had slammed in your face, like in in many ways it sounds like the position you occupy, a kind of the intersection of social justice and psychoanalysis. Part of the door slamming is about psychoanalysis' uneasy relationship with that intersection, right? Like that it's sort of something that there's been a lot of discussion about, reckoning with, often very polarized conversations, right? As though if you're interested in social justice, you are not interested in the unconscious. And I I just wonder, you know, what your thoughts are on that discussion as it exists today, kind of in academia and in psychoanalysis, like how these two things which are clearly very passionate about, both of them, like how they are talked about and and what makes these discussions about them so polarized.
speaker-1: I mean, it's a dumpster fire of an enactment, right? I mean, ⁓ let me speak somewhat, ⁓ let me caricature a little bit and then get into the weeds. It would almost seem like there's one side of this debate that's sort of like, ⁓ any discussion of social context, of culture, of politics and identity is simply needlessly politicizing our work. This has nothing to do with clinical practice, let alone research. This is ultimately about two people in an intimate relationship trying to explore the contours of their experience. ⁓ and then on the other end, you have this other side of the debate that's sort of like if you're not broaching issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality from like the first millisecond of the patient showing up, you are fucking up, you're you're you're doing a social injustice of some kind. Any consideration that the patient is somehow contributing. The challenges in their lives, automatic victim blaming, automatic ⁓ perpetuation of some kind of oppression. And and I look at that, at that panorama, and I'm like, this like this can't fucking be it. Like it can't be so polarized that any consideration of social context means ignoring the unconscious, means ignoring subjectivity, means ignoring relatedness, but it also can't possibly be. That trying to understand how the patient makes meaning in ways that both serve them and hinder them automatically means victim blaming, right? So I'm sort of working in this weird midpoint between these kind of extreme modes of discourse that ultimately make clinical practice really hard. And it certainly me makes theorizing about these things infinitely difficult. Oftentimes, ⁓ like just last week I was at a ⁓ group therapy conference and I led a workshop that was basically about identity politics and the nature of our lived clinical experience. And it kind of allowed forgive me, a safe space where clinicians could talk about ⁓ the pressures that they feel that unless they're practicing and talking in a certain way, they're gonna get rejected by their psychoanalytic community. But unless they're talking in just a certain way, they're gonna get rejected by their more, let's call it broadly, multicultural psych, decolonial psych communities. Right. So there were clinicians of color, ⁓ clinicians of color who are LGBT talking aloud about how, well, wait a minute, I really do think the patient, there's something going on here we need to look at. It's not just everybody else. But then they'll get dinged like, don't you dare raise that question. Racist, sexist, queer phobic, et cetera. ⁓ and then really trying to work through the nuances of clinical practice. But they're getting kind of shut down by both extremes of this debate. And when I say extremes, I don't mean like, how do you say this? Sometimes people bring in the language of both sides are extreme to not articulate the truth, right? But when I use it in this context, I want to be precise about what I mean. ⁓ Fanun, who is kind of like the forerunner of what I would call the decolonial psycholytic perspective, stated it very plainly. When we think about psychic suffering, he writes, it's both the result of conflictual clusters arising in part out of the environment and in part out of the purely individual idiosyncratic ways. That we respond to that environment. And this debate basically takes that statement and rips it in two. Either it's all the environment or it's all the individual in their intimate interpersonal dynamics. Right. And what we're saying, right, if you just take this debate to the side and actually read and engage with what people like me and Lynn Layton and Larish Sheehe and Usha Tmalanar are saying, is that in clinical Practiced. It's not just there's systemic oppression. It's not just there's trauma. It's that there are ways that in trying to survive those things, we create patterns of relatedness, defenses, identity that do something for us. They're textured by pleasure, they serve a function, they help us survive, but at some point they start to not work so well and they create problems in living, problems in interpersonal relationships, problems in politics. And it's that nuance that gets lost. ⁓ my own kind of journey to getting there, right? Like I was trained in like a very relational theory, rupture repair, take ownership of your contribution, right? Be very empathic. And then I had a rotation in an on internship at the Center for the Intensive Treatment of Personality Disorders. And and my supervisor, ⁓ her name was Lucia Vail, she was more of a DBT person. And she would notice how I'd get stuck with my patients trying to constantly validate and constantly looking at what am I doing that's leading to this contribution to the enactment, right? And at some point she's like, you know, it's not just about caring for the poor, the widow, and the orphan. Like sometimes you gotta say no. Like sometimes you gotta say, in order for this to work, we gotta meet on time. In order for this to work.
speaker-0: With
speaker-1: We need to meet on a weekly basis because you're telling me you're self harming, your your substance use is really high and out of control. In order for me to help you, we got to meet. Right. So I had to like rediscover how to say no as a therapist, right? And that doing that didn't automatically mean a betrayal of my social justice commitments. If anything, and this was also a realization ⁓ when I was at ⁓ Mount Sinine. The realization that sometimes when people go into that mode of like the hypervalidating empathic stuff, that itself becomes a defense against really problematic shit, what I call a kind of empathic abandonment. I had a I was in a a consultation group and this clinician was talking about how the patient's not showing up, they come every other week at best, show up 30 minutes late. And ⁓ you know, I raise kind of the obvious question, like, ⁓ have you talked to your patient about what's going on there? What that what's that about? And the clinician says, Well, no, they're just so oppressed. They face so many adversities. How could I, as an XYZ person, possibly explore with this ABC person what might be contributing to these issues? And at that point, you know, I just kind of let the person talk. And without even noticing, they start to say, Yeah, you know, and I get so exhausted listening to their stories and their traumas and their experiences. And when they don't show up, I'm kind of relieved because I can catch up on paperwork. And I'm just like, like, do you think maybe this thing you're feeling could be the the thing, the reason why they're not coming? Right? That there's like this layer of pseudo empathy. Mm-hmm. That's masking all the stuff that's coming up around race, around class, right? So it's like performing a social justice, quote unquote.
speaker-0: But not engaging in a real relationship.
speaker-1: Right, right. It's not engaging in a real relationship. It masks all of these retaliatory feelings where like the not showing up is on the one hand, like the patient communicating, I don't feel welcomed here. I don't feel seen. And then the performance of the social justice stuff becomes I feel all sorts of like racial engendered resentment towards this patient self to see. So I cover it up with the pseudo empathy and then I'm relieved when they don't show up. So it's like the discourse itself can be used defensively.
speaker-0: The thing that also stood out to me in your story, I don't I don't really know what to make of it, but the fact that the place from the beginning of your life that you have found most comfortably can hold the tension between social justice and psychoanalysis is religion. Like that's just fascinating to me. It almost makes me wonder if if religion is much more open to psychoanalysis than psychoanalysis is to religion.
speaker-1: Huh. I mean, yeah, it's funny, right? 'Cause like I I I really do think my pastors, right, had they had that psychological mindedness, that curiosity about people's inner lives, that those inner lives were kind of impacted by this broader context of like, you know, gross income inequality and like intergenerational substance use and all these different things that like start in a very structural place but trickle down. into people's lives. And it's sort of like how how do you help people find a sense of meaning? Like when people feel makes me a little emotional thinking about it, because like when people feel so downtrodden and just forgotten. But here you're saying, right, here's this relationship that will never leave you feel abandoned. God, right? Your relationship with Jesus, or those things have a lot of they have a lot of meaning. When you have a community that says we're not gonna be Even if you're say that even if they say that like you're bad. Like that was a thing that like it's as much part of my research as it is my clinical practice, as it is my lived experience, where like in the colonial situation, the message is you're fundamentally lazy. That's why things don't get better for you. Right. You're fundamentally a criminal. That's why your society is broken. Right. And so when when there's this message that it's coming from this colonial situation, we internalize it. we repeat against each other, then it's sort of like, fuck, then are we like fundamentally lovable? Do we deserve care? So here you have a space that's saying, no, no, no, no, like you fundamentally deserve care. Because this community and this, you know, living, breathing God cares about you. Right? It's sort of like this where the liberation theology stuff comes in. Cause it's sort of like, you know, it's a it's a Yeah, literally a God of the oppressed. Within the Christian tradition, which is of course where I'm like born and raised in, it it's such a powerful narrative that like God made himself flesh and walks among, you know, the poor, the prostitute, the leper, everybody who's seen as like the outcast, right? There's something like very compelling there because what is that in a way, if not like the the fundamentals of the psychodynamic stance, right? Like I care less about what metaphor you use. You know, you call it neutrality, knock yourself out. I I call it like the psychodynamic stance because it's a mind in motion. Be able to entertain multitudes. You're remaining open to this other person. You don't have to agree with everything they say. You ain't even got to like half of their behavior. But there's still a Anton Hart calls it a radical openness. That you're you're you're fundamental humanity. Right, that matters. Yeah. Right. Doesn't mean that you're necessarily a quote unquote good person. Doesn't mean everything you do is great, but you matter. And I think there there's something, ⁓ there's something really beautiful that can be articulated in terms of like a psychoanalysis and religion discussion, with the caveat that ⁓ As Freud said in in Civilization is Discontents, which was a response to, you know, Alan Rowland's whole thing about, ⁓ but religion gives us meaning. He says, like, look, human beings are not gentle creatures simply looking to be loved. Right? That's the other side of this. It's like remaining open to the humanity of everyday people, despite of, maybe to an extent, because of the incredible brutality we can do to each other. Mm-hmm. And Freud doesn't mince words here. He's like, look at the history of programs, of persecution, of colonialism, of Genghis Khan. Look at the first world war we just rapped. Look at the second world war that's ramping up. Right? So I think there's a way of like entertaining all of that without being like Pollyannish about human nature. People are fucked, man. But even though people are fucked, they still kind of matter. That that's kind of
speaker-0: Yeah. I love that. And I I before we end, Daniel, I want to ask you a question about your scholarship because I think there's something that's really I feel like you occupy a very kind of amazingly radical place in the field. And I think it's very inspiring. And specifically, I think it could inspire students who want to be in academia but have absolutely no interest in replicating another randomized control trial of a 12-station treatment. Right. You know, and And I just wanted if you could just speak to just like a give us a little piece of of your work. And in particular, I'm interested in your work on, you know, ⁓ decolonizing psychoanalytic technique and theory. And you talked about this idea of the dyadic default. Could you just say a little bit about that and how you think about that?
speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, absolutely. I mean, the the basic default, whether we're talking about ⁓ classical Freudian, contemporary Freudian, ⁓ relational, interpersonal, object relational, self-psychological, the fundamental default is that you're theorizing about something happened once upon a time with a mommy and a baby, or there's some prototypical prototypical story about what should happen between a mommy and a baby, and however you configure that. is how you model the therapeutic relationship, right? Where therapist and patient, that relationship is like, it replicates, it enacts, it creates the opportunity for some kind of developmental striving to be rethought in a new way. Call it a collective corrective emotional experience or some new insight that's cultivated by the relationship, blah, blah, blah. And you know, like it has obvious explanatory value. But it's also limited in how it conceives of human subjectivity. And I made the argument in my books and ⁓ my academic papers as well, bringing together research and theory, that if you think about ⁓ human subjectivity in that way, then the scope of therapy is necessarily going to be narrow. Right. Like a lot of people like myself who are trying to think through how do you honor the kind of wisdom. Of developmental thinking and psychoanalysis, and also make room for exploring the social world in our clinical practice. It's like you're trying to fit two things that don't fit together. Because the general orientation of this dyadic thinking is two people oriented towards each other, right? You can think of Beatrice Beebe's wonderful research on the face-to-face relation and the microdynamics of that interaction, and that the ultimate product is the capacity to reflect on your mind and somebody else's mind. So where do you fit in? Questions of the social. I bring in ⁓ other research, some of which people like Peter Fonegy have talked about. And I often joke, you know, don't get mad at me, decolonial diva, Daniel José Gatambianunes, take it up with management. Take it up with Peter Phonegie. Because there's basically research that suggests that the dyadic mode we tend to privilege in our theories might be more reflective of a more middle class global north approach to attachment and development. That if we look at if we look outside of middle upper class populations, and if we look at the global south, there's this other mode of attachment that we might call alloparentic or collective. To make a long story short, the research suggests that in this mode of attachment, it's not baby and mommy oriented towards each other. The baby is oriented physically and metaphorically outward. So not facing towards the dyad. They're facing outward towards the community. And it's not just one mommy. It might be multiple mommies and aunts and uncles and dads who share a role in raising the kid. ⁓ Jessica Benjamin, by way of Daniel Stern, posed the question how do we get a sense that there's other minds out there? One answer is the dyadic mode, obviously. But the other answer is, well, if you take the kid and you face, you know, you have them facing outside, how do they get a sense that there's other minds out there? Because they observe those other minds in the community. What they're mentalizing is not their inner thoughts and feelings. They're mentalizing people's positions in the community, their status, and how that conveys collective modes of thinking, feeling, and believing. What I what I've argued recently is not that in the global north we do attachment like this, in the global south we do attachment like that. I argue instead that the research, right, and here I'm drawing on social psych and cognitive science, the research suggests that we have this interconnective, unconscious social cognitive system that operates on both a horizontal mode of closeness and distance that's very interpersonally attuned. But we have this other mode that's hierarchically organized. It's about figuring out not how do I get close to a significant other. It's figuring out what's my place here? ⁓ What's my place in this setting? What's my place in the community? I enter the classroom. I am Dr. Gastambide, award winning researcher, scholar, blah, blah, blah. Very clear hierarchy in relation to my students. They walk into the room as students, they they operate in a certain way. And we operate differently in the classroom than we do at home with our loved ones or in our houses of worship. We're constantly mapping what is our place in the world, how do we fit in in terms of class and race and gender and sexuality, all that good stuff. Therefore, I argue what we're trying to do in psycholytic therapy is ⁓ to try to kind of activate modes of reflection and modes of being with one another. It's simply that what we're reflecting on is both our interpersonal dynamics, apps a hundred fucking percent. But we're also opening space to reflect on our position in the room and in the world. Okay. All of that plays a role in transference, counter transference. And the research bears this out that it's not only negotiating closeness in psychotherapy that plays a role in therapeutic outcome. It's also negotiating identity roles and negotiating power in the relationship. All of that plays into what we call enactments, what we call rupture and repair. So it's not like replacing one mode of thinking with another. It's understanding that yes, we are grabbing different parts of the elephant. And these are, in effect, different parts of the elephant that we're just as much oriented. For intimacy and closeness as we are oriented towards deservingness, as we are oriented towards fairness, as we are oriented to wait a minute, what's my place in this world? We want to be loved. Of course we want to be loved, but we also want to feel that we're respected and valued in the community. Right? We can talk about it in terms of, say, theories of narcissism, but even that gets interpersonalized.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: If we go back to Kohat and Sullivan, Sullivan's very clear. It is about interpersonal relationships. It's also about a sense of status. But we lose that nuance when we interpersonalize, when we dyadisize human subjectivity. Right? I joke in my presentations when I do this, it's like, look, I'm not, I'm not trying to take away your diads. I'm not trying to take away your mom. If you love your mom,
speaker-0: Keep her face into her eyes all you want.
speaker-1: Talk about it with your therapist, right? But it's about expanding the frame using theory and research, expanding the frame of how this thing we call the mind works. That's when
speaker-0: I that feels to me to be the thread that's running through a lot of your work, which is like as you describe it, it's like, ⁓ right, like you're you're opening up a lens, right, that due to bias has been just like this on me, right? And and it through my training, through my upbringing, I haven't seen this larger picture. And you're sort of bringing that in. it feels, yeah, it feels very additive. Like we don't need to throw away other ideas and replace them with. Different ones, but is there a way to kind of just widen our scope so we're not missing things that do the biases we would have just left out of the picture?
speaker-1: 100%. I mean, if if I could ⁓ you know, add again that that layer of nuance that gets missing here, there are people who are gonna hear what I just said and they're like, ⁓ you're bringing politics into the psychotherapy. ⁓ my god. ⁓ you're ignoring the individual. They're they're gonna have that reaction. And I'm gonna say something th right now that's gonna both throw them a bone and potentially annoy some of my colleagues on my side of the eye. Being able to have this model lets us do two things. One of those things is certainly to embed human subjectivity in a broader social, cultural, and political context. What it also does is it helps us clarify how people can use those very contexts defensively. The payoff of this model is not to say to our patient, you are but a victim of racial capitalist patriarchy and colonialism. Let's call it a day being home in time for lunch and dinner. That that's not the payoff. Payoff is lets us see a little more clearly both how the social world impacts our patients. It lets us see more clearly how sometimes, in the interest of survival, they can craft modes of identity that can precisely get in the way of their being able to live and find joy and connect even within our broken system. What that means is that it provides a language.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: For both appreciating the nuances of identity, but also it makes a critique of the defensive ways that we can use identity. What often happens is that when people who say this is in interjecting politics, whatever, they'll take that critique of identity politics and then they'll say, and this is why racism doesn't exist. Here's why economic inequality doesn't exist. Here's why sexism doesn't exist, et cetera. Right? So they'll take something that's true. And they'll turn it in a very distorted direction. Just as much people sometimes on my side of the aisle will take the fact that oppression ⁓ absolutely exists, but sometimes use that to foreclose exploration. Right. Defensive patterns of operation. That I think is part of the enactment here. That certain realities get taken and then people run with it and it forecloses space. So suddenly we can't talk about social injustice. But then suddenly we can't talk about defenses either. And I think both of those become a kind of obvious clinical problem, as much as a theoretical political problem in turn.
speaker-0: Well, I I just want to thank you so much, Daniel, for speaking to me. I mean, this feels like such an enlivening conversation. And in some ways, it feels like we're just getting started. And I I think your work is really helpful to me as a teacher because I know a lot of, you know, the first year doctoral students I teach, they say things like, you know, well, I'm interested in psychoanalysis, but what about its sexism? Or what about its, you know, how white it is? And, you know, it in a way like having a way to to speak to students who are very concerned about an interest in social justice, but who also want to be open to psychoanalytic ideas. I just think you you have a way of ⁓ bringing those things together that I think young people in particular are really gonna be enthusiastic about. And ⁓ it was so wonderful to speak to you today.
speaker-1: Well th thank you so much. I I really appreciate the time to share with you and with your audience today.
speaker-0: Thank you so much. Okay, bye-bye. Thank you for listening to in-depth. Academics for the Advancement of Psychodynamic Psychology is a community-driven organization working to shape the future of psychoanalytic education, from undergraduate study through postdoctoral training. We have ongoing projects devoted to improving mentorship and educational resources, supporting psychoanalytic research, and changing the public discourse around psychoanalytic and psychodynamic training. Join one of our existing projects or suggest one of your own. We're actively looking for volunteers and we especially encourage students to get involved. If this work resonates with you, visit a2p2group.org or reach out to us at a squared p squared at group.org and take part in shaping what comes next.
