speaker-0: was not just about your ideas, it was about being in community with other people. It was a way to be able to talk to and talk with and learn from a broader group of people than in my institute or in my university.
speaker-1: 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. Kimberlyn Leary is our first guest to have worked in two presidential administrations, an extraordinary distinction. Many of her listeners may already be familiar with her groundbreaking scholarship on race in the clinical encounter. Following an unplanned career pivot, she moved into the world of public policy. While her work has taken unexpected turns, a commitment to justice and equity As well as a belief that writing is a way of being in community with others, has remained a consistent thread connecting her diverse interests. In this interview, Dr. Leary explores how her psychoanalytic background shapes her thinking about leadership, organizations, and negotiation. She also reflects on the surprising parallels between the clinical encounter and public policy processes. If you've never considered a role for psychoanalysts in the policy arena, This conversation, along with Dr. Leary's practical insights, may expand your perspective. Dr. Kimberlyn Leary is a psychoanalyst trained at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, where she wrote a series of papers on race and psychoanalysis. She is now an Emma Bloomberg lecturer in policy and management at the Harvard Kennedy School and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. She has held two roles in federal service. in the Obama White House as an advisor to the Council on Women and Girls, as a senior advisor to the Biden White House domestic policy council, and as a fellow in the Office of Management and Budget. Okay, wonderful. Well Kim, thank you so much for joining us today.
speaker-0: My pleasure.
speaker-1: I wanted to start if you could just tell us a little bit about the trajectory of your career.
speaker-0: ⁓ well, that is such a such a question. So, you know, I'm a clinical psychologist. I trained at the University of Michigan. And as someone who had ⁓ moved around quite a bit as a child, almost every three years, I was so delighted that I had a chance to stay at Michigan on the Michigan faculty for a number of years after I completed my PhD. I also did my analytic training at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. And then over the course of my career, you know, I I largely had been focused on problems. What are the problems out there? And those problems have led me to do ⁓ wildly different things over the course of my career. What has been the common denominator has been ⁓ academics and teaching. I have always been a teacher and continue to be a teacher, and I have ⁓ redefined for me what clinical work. looks like. So my first part of my career was standard issue, working in my consulting room, mainly with individuals, occasionally with couples and sometimes with families, ⁓ now to thinking about the clinical as involving the social ecosystems in which we live, not just the social ecosystems of our ⁓ clinical consulting rooms.
speaker-1: I wanted to talk about that. I don't know if the best word for it is a pivot, but certainly you expanded your focus. And for those of you who are only familiar with your writing as it pertains to to clinical work, you know, I do want to say you obviously are now very involved in in policy, in organization, in in negotiation. And I'm I'm wondering if that was something you always were interested in. Did it was it a developing interest for you? Was it shaped by current events?
speaker-0: Yeah. ⁓ certainly wasn't part of the plan. You know, some of my students say, you know, how did you how did you map out your five-year plan? And I'm like, I don't have a five-year plan. I didn't then and I don't now. You know, when I started ⁓ doing clinical work, ⁓ I was ⁓ in Michigan, I was really and as a ⁓ you know a PhD student, I was really lucky that my supervisors were psychoanalysts and not all of them, but most of them analytically inclined. At that time, Michigan was a very psychoanalytic program. And we benefited from ⁓ thoughtful teachers, ⁓ and also those who were, I think, deeply invested in who we were as people. So as it became clear to me that the fact that I was an African American woman, offering clinical services in contexts that were often ⁓ Did did not have so many folks like me in them, they had some, but not ⁓ a lot, that that was an important, not just dynamic, but an important part of my experience. I was encouraged very early on to start writing. And writing was a a ⁓ hugely important part of my career. I figured out early on that ⁓ writing was not just about your ideas, it was about being in community with other people. It was a way to be able to talk to and talk with and learn from. a broader group of people than in my institute or in my university. So, you know, one thing led to another, ⁓ and I will jump ahead, when I took my first real senior executive role as chief psychologist at the Cambridge Health Alliance, which is a Harvard hospital, ⁓ it was just as Massachusetts health reform was being enacted and my hospital was accommodating to that. With lots of process and systems changes. So all of a sudden I went from, you know, thinking about the social out there to the social as the spreadsheets that told us what we could and couldn't do based on ⁓ the resources that we had. So I got interested at that point in policy, policy as it impinges upon organizations, and then got interested in where one might have opportunities to work on policy from the inside. out that took me to the Kennedy School to do a mid-career degree in public policy and public administration. And from there, you know, I had a chance to work in the Obama White House for a couple of years. And then ⁓ later the Biden White House a couple years ago, helping to implement that president's executive orders on equity.
speaker-1: I I would love to hear more about that experience because you're certainly the first ⁓ s person we've interviewed who has a psychoanalytic background, who's really, you know, gone into the world of policy and certainly at the level that you have in working with the administrations. And I I'm curious like what that what that was like for you having the background you have with maybe a more traditional psychoanalytic training to sort of be in the White House and to be working in that role.
speaker-0: So ⁓ at the Kennedy School, one of the wonderful things about being ⁓ taking on a learning stance explicitly ⁓ later in your career and something that's completely sort of outside of your you know knowledge base. I mean, I understood the impingement of policy, but I didn't understand what you do about it or ⁓ who does what and how this whole larger system works that we're embedded in. ⁓ So when I was at the Kennedy School, it was just as President Obama was candidate Obama and was in fact running for office. And I was surrounded by people who had every intention of going into this new administration. And my thought was, really? You just kind of decide that? And you know, you you think I'd like to do this? And then that happens somehow. ⁓ but indeed I watched it happen for many of my colleagues who, of course, decades younger than I I was at the time, even then. ⁓ And I realized that, you know, I had learned some things at the Kennedy School, and I really wanted a chance to kind of test those out. But you don't test things out precisely in the White House. You ⁓ you bring your expertise and then you learn new things. You do test things out, but it's not the place you go to test first stage ideas. ⁓ I was lucky enough to be invited first ⁓ to work at the Office of National Drug Control Policy. They needed someone who had a behavioral health background. And they asked, you know, what do you know about the opioid crisis? And I knew about this much about the opioid crisis, but certainly I had a passing vocabulary. So I was put, you know, to work on learning about neonatal abstinence syndrome and in particular how women who were born with substance ⁓ dependencies were treated in different state and local contexts. Sometimes as people who had public health challenges. and mental health substance abuse challenges and sometimes as those who had violated the criminal codes. And so just aggregating that information helped me to understand how our local systems, our state systems, and our federal systems work. It also helped me to appreciate the reach of the federal government because the second project I worked on was working with teams and everything at the White House is done it with teams, on guidelines for prescribers. Around ⁓ opioid medications. and so there I was working, you know, side by side with MDs and ⁓ policy professionals and trade organizations. But I had a chance to contribute how we might think about the person who is experiencing vulnerabilities at every turn. And I think that made its way into some of our our work with those guidelines.
speaker-1: When you think about I mean it it's i when I look at your career and hear you talk about it and I can see like the different subjects that have interested you and that you've done scholarship on. I'm curious if like as you look back in retrospect, do you see a through line in in what you've worked on, what you've been interested in, what you've been pulled towards, or does it feel like you've just sort of followed maybe more diverse interests?
speaker-0: Well, I do think that I have followed diverse interest, ⁓ and I also think there's a through line, although it wasn't a planful one, but there is intentionality behind it. So at the Office of National Drug Control Policy, I learned how government works, basically. Not from the classroom. I'd learned that at the Kennedy School, but how it works in actual practice and how different constituencies come together to layer their work to create ⁓ guidelines and public products and work that gets uploaded into other White House teams. And then, you know, later when I joined ⁓ another unit of the Obama White House, the Council on Women and Girls, I actually just happened to show up at a moment when my brother's keeper, the president's signature initiative on boys and young men of color, ⁓ had actually generated a little bit of heat from women. And women and women of color had been an important constituency for President Obama because it was focused on boys and young men. And quite reasonably, those women's ⁓ groups, advocate groups and ⁓ influentials said, you know, the same households that have sons and brothers ⁓ also have daughters and sisters. And so I was given the opportunity, along with a ton of talented people, to stand up a new initiative which we called. advancing equity for women and girls of color and their peers. So there I had a portfolio that ranged from school exclusion ⁓ to girls in the juvenile justice system, economic prosperity, TEM ⁓ STEM education, and so forth. And there I had a chance to work across agencies and with external groups to literally ⁓ try to create something that wasn't as developed as ⁓ the my brother's keeper. But it had similar architecture. And in the end, we were able to get commitments from external groups that ⁓ almost ⁓ reached the ⁓ investments that my brother's keeper had at the beginning of its tenure. So ⁓ that work, ⁓ because it was outside of government, was able to continue even after President Obama ⁓ left office. And the last thing I'll say is I had taken a leave of absence from the ⁓ ⁓ Harvard, which offers ⁓ public services leaves, to be the senior vice president and then the executive vice president of the Urban Institute, which is a DC-based think tank. And from there, in one of those ways that just happens every once in a while, I was able to daisy chain a leave from Urban to work at ⁓ the DP the Domestic Policy Council and the Office of Management and Budget. And that's where ⁓ really I think everything I'd accrued around change at scale. understanding some about how government works, being able to think about constituents constituencies that hadn't always been prioritized in policy. And my analytic interest in race and ⁓ racial ⁓ racial reasoning and racial enactments, ⁓ all of that could be sort of channeled into thinking about if we have a way to advance equity at scale, which an executive order allows, How do we need to think about that work, the people who are doing it in those equity ⁓ teams in agencies? How do we knit that work together? And what does it really mean to face history? That is in effect what we were doing with that work.
speaker-1: And it sounds like a lot that you had been building towards or a lot of experiences that you'd had sort of came together in that moment.
speaker-0: Yes, not necessarily again well, not at all planned, ⁓ because who knew there would be that executive order, who knew that opportunity would be there? But you know, we always say about policy that you have to keep working on policy ideas, and I would say in general scientific ideas, even when there isn't an immediate ⁓ place you can put them or an outlet for them. Because when the moment arrives, if you don't have something on a hard drive, if you don't have something in a desk drawer, if you don't have a coalition of people who are ready and primed, you miss the moment. So one of the things I've learned in across my career really is that if you follow your nose, if you follow problems, if you follow your heart, and if you keep iterating on ideas, which I did through the course of a set of programmatic papers that I wrote for ⁓ the analytic journals. ⁓ when and if you have a moment, you're able to advance that. And to the through line question, you know, a lot of my interest has been on, you know, equity, advancing equity in different ways, thinking ⁓ about ⁓ racial experiencing, but it's also focused on women and girls. And I ⁓ have noted that from You know, looking at neonatal abstinence syndrome to looking at ⁓ you know, advancing equity for women and girls to a role I have at McLean working with the Center of Excellence for Women's Mental Health, that's also been a through line. Again, not so much planned, but when I look back I can see it.
speaker-1: When you work in these policy roles, as as you mentioned, especially in government, you work as part of a team and I'm sure the team has sort of diverse backgrounds themselves. And I'm wondering what yeah, do you have a sense of what your training in and background in psychoanalysis offers to this experience? Do you feel like it gives you sort of an unique voice in this setting?
speaker-0: I I think I think it does actually. And let me see if I can put my thoughts together about this. I did a little bit ⁓ of thinking about this in preparation. You know, I would say that in policy and in the consulting room, what they share are high risk, high yield moments. They're different at different levels, but the experience of Recognizing when there's a high risk, high yield moment is, I think, one that clinicians in clinical practice share with people who are working in policy and for that matter organizational ⁓ context. I would say also that ⁓ you know, in all contexts, you're really looking for what what is the next possibility that could be advanced. And in order to do work. One has to have a tolerance for ambiguity, but not ambiguity just, you know, where you're honoring it alone, but ambiguity because you don't know, but you are striving to understand the next thing in order to leverage those high risk, high yield moments. That's not analytic language, but I would say that that is ultimately what happens in the consulting room as well.
speaker-1: Yeah, I I felt like I had sort of like a visceral sense of what you were talking about and thinking about moments with a patient, a client where you have the feeling like, ⁓ my response could make or break this treatment, right? What what is happening in this moment feels so important and I I could imagine that.
speaker-0: And in the consulting room and in policy, policy process, I would say, that not always, but sometimes you do have a chance to kind of circle back, you know, the next session or the next conversation. the other thing I have learned about policy that's just been helpful in like, you know, everyday life is that and comes from analytic training, of course, is that you know. People do things for reasons. We know that. And y y you might not think that an insight like that is all that important, but it really is, because in those high risk, high yield moments on teams and public settings, and especially where the stakes are very, very high for many people, you know, if someone is opposed to you, it it it it you know, the first ⁓ the first thing that you say is not usually, you know. Why? Why do they they need to believe that? But that's the question you need to ask. You need to remember that people are doing things for reasons, and if you understand their reasons, it may make it possible to come up with a new thing that ⁓ in this particular context on this particular issue you can advance forward, even if their reasons stay as they were and your reasons for being on ⁓ taking a different tack ⁓ are in fact quite different.
speaker-1: You you're sort of bringing us to something I wanted to ask about, which is your work with conflict resolution and negotiation. And I when I was reading ⁓ some of the things you've written, I found myself really interested. I I I I'm not sure if it's because I work a lot with couples, so I'm always talking about failed negotiations or because I have young children and I'm constantly negotiating with them. But I I wanted to see if I don't know if this would be easy to pare down, but what you sort of feel. feel are some of the most important things you've you've learned or uncovered or discovered about negotiation that, you know, if you had to sort of offer this up as like, here's, here's the essential wisdom I I have in this topic, what would it be?
speaker-0: Well, the essential wisdom would be to read the book Getting to Yes, which is the negotiation Bible and which has really stood the test of time. I read it ⁓ every couple of years. I used to keep copies in my office ⁓ w and do when I'm in executive roles because it helps to actually hand it to other people so that they have the same background you do. But ⁓ basically what I would say is a couple of things. There's negotiation proper. Which is what we think of with diplomacy or business. But then there's negotiation as a mindset. And I would say that the mindset of negotiation is really embedded in ⁓ processes. And in fact, my first exposure to negotiation was through work I did with ⁓ Bob Hatcher and colleagues at the University of Michigan's psychological clinic, where we looked at the therapeutic alliance as a negotiation. And the way we got to that, which is I won't tell you all the details back when we had audio tapes and we recorded things and we transcribed them long time ago. But we recognize that you know when you kind of abstract out what's happening as you listen to recording after recording, you know, everybody gave us their permission for us just for that. Just let me know that. Let let me let you know that. ⁓ but when you think about what it involves, essentially. A patient has an idea of the kind of therapist or analyst they want to work with. And the analyst has an idea of the kind of patient they want to work with. They want someone who's interested and curious about, you know, things they that are on the periphery of their awareness. And that may or may not be what the patient is interested in. Patient might want just someone who can talk to them in a more ⁓ everyday way. So they're busy trying to create each other ⁓ as the kind of relational partner that they need. And that's where enactments take place. It's where clinical learning takes place, and we moved into a relational or intersubjective understanding of this. And so it's where clinical theory progresses. When we see what patients in a particular epoch and social moment and time need and want. And clinicians who, as they continue to learn more and accrue knowledge, become able to give and able to ⁓ kind of iterate in real time. So from there I went to the program on negotiation and spent a couple of years as a visiting scholar and learned more about negotiation proper, started to do some teaching and negotiation. Essentially, negotiation is relational, collaborative problem solving. That's what it is. Where you have to distinguish Between what you say you want and your underlying interest, why you want it. And it turns out, more often than not, when you can make that clean distinction, or clean enough distinction, I would say, you know, kind of after Winnicott, clean enough distinction, you can come to see that there may be a variety of interest that or a variety of positions that can actually serve that interest. So if your interest is in being heard and you've insisted that you must have, you know, X role or 10 minutes on the agenda, maybe there are other ways that you can actually fulfill what you're really trying to achieve. That's a simple example. It's much harder when the stakes are higher and when ⁓ emotions are flying. But that's the basic idea. You know, how can I get more of what I want? by giving you more of what you want, and we can meet a common set of interests, and we can maybe back away from what we thought was the exact mechanism for realizing those interests through our positions.
speaker-1: Which also feels as you say, first of all, the way you describe negotiation, I could just feel like a sort of like a relief wash over me. Like it's such a less anxiety provoking way to think about it, even even than the word negotiation, but it's collaborative problem solving. And I think it's it seems to me the way I hear you say it so much of what we do with our patients in the consulting room, which is, you know, you have a need and you're you have a very maybe potentially narrow idea of how it's gonna get met. Yes. ⁓ and sometimes that can actually stop you from getting it met. but if we could expand your ideas of about what's possible, then maybe you we could actually meet your help you meet your needs.
speaker-0: And that then takes you into the territory ⁓ that we found, for example, ⁓ in trying to work with federal agencies to stand up these executive orders. So for example, ⁓ it's easy enough to say ⁓ on paper, you know, this is a kind of narrow slice of how you could move forward. ⁓ Here are seven other ideas. And most of us don't say, ⁓ wow, thank you for expanding my frame of reference. Because that narrow idea is laden with history, loyalty, hopes, fears. And so people don't give up those narrow ideas, ⁓ don't even recognize them as narrow because they actually aren't. They're replete with history. So that's why it takes time, it's not a technical endeavor to negotiate or solve problems collaboratively. It's why it takes time, whether you're in the consulting room, in an organization, or in a larger system. And certainly it takes a lot of time when we're trying to renegotiate cultural values and ⁓ expanded possibilities, or where we're trying to come back from narrowed possibilities and re-expand them.
speaker-1: I I wasn't planning on asking this, but I just thought of it and it made me wonder if you think there's something about your temperament that makes you particularly well suited for policy work. Cause I was imagining that w when I think about change in general, like and I and mostly my experience is working, you know, in the consulting room on change. You know, there's always such a sense sense of like having to to be patient and kind of meet people where they are and And I I'm imagining when you're working on a larger scale where change is much more challenging and ambiguous and fraught, that you like you would have to develop a real capac or have a real capacity for patience and fortitude. And I was just curious if you feel like there's something about your personality that felt like a good fit for approaching change at the scale you do.
speaker-0: I mean, again, not so much I felt it was a good fit. I have discovered that some of the skills I've learned as a clinician and frankly as a teacher are also really helpful. You know, one of the things about teaching large classes, which I've done throughout my career, I used to teach a class of 300 undergraduates at Michigan, which is a little like a three-ring circus, I have to say. And now I teach ⁓ classes of, you know, 75, 80 senior executives. And I do think that I what I've been told is that I'm able to hold a room, which I think what that means is be able to speak to a room, to be able to speak to a whole. And then, you know, in the consulting room, we have to be quite nimble for those high, you know, yield, high risk moments. And I'll just give you an example. I had ⁓ this past week I was teaching a ⁓ seventy-five person ⁓ executive ed program for ⁓ global leaders who were all working on cross boundary ⁓ challenges. And at one point someone in the room I said, you know, well, would you like to weigh in on this? And ⁓ the person said something like, ⁓ no, I would not. ⁓ I really don't have anything to say about this particular matter. And it was very clear that ⁓ this particular matter was not one that she ⁓ really thought much of, shall we say? What I was able to do, and I didn't think it through, was to figure out what was she trying to tell the whole group, right? And one of the things she was trying to tell the whole group was not the content. She was actually modeling something that's so essential in those large settings. She was modeling candor. And I said to her, I think what you've just offered us is an experience of candor. Which I turned to the whole group is critical for the kind of work we want to do together. She didn't plan on that and I didn't plan on it, but we used a moment for larger learning.
speaker-1: How i i since we're speaking about teaching, I'm curious if you have any cause you you do have a long, you know, a long history in teaching and I'm wondering do you have any perspectives on the classroom atmosphere, you know, in academia, how that's changed over the course of your teaching career, what you've noticed about that, what it's like now.
speaker-0: Yeah. I mean the best way to think about ⁓ a classroom is that it's a social space and that if you're teaching in a classroom that includes people who ⁓ are there for very different reasons, right? I mean we're all coming to class even an analytic classroom could people come in for very different reasons. Right. But I mean like really different reasons, you know. Like they're responsible for the health system in in some organization and these people are responsible for HR and these people are trying to solve, you know, the unhoused ⁓ issues connected to unhoused populations. I mean, those are really different. They overlap, but they're very, very different. I would say that people bring in the and you want them to, actually. They bring in ⁓ the ⁓ the power challenges. They bring in the different perspectives about, you know, what a social compact should include and what it shouldn't. They bring in politics in different ways. And it does make it more challenging to teach right now because for the same reason as we were talking about before, there are potential high yield moments, but there are also potential high-risk moments. And ⁓ I would say that ⁓ it's really important to know what you're trying to achieve when you're teaching. You know, you're trying to move people from A to C or D. You're not just seeing what they come up with, you know. ⁓ you're trying to move them from one place or another and use everything they have and everything they're willing to put into the mix towards that goal. So that might be a difference with clinical work where we're a little more oriented on Where does this person want to go? As a teacher, I have a plan. I have a syllabus. I have a place I need to take you. And I happen to have some ⁓ belief that it's a good place for you to go. So that's what I would say there.
speaker-1: I have place I need to take I would like to ask about your your early scholarship because I think most people listening probably, as I was, was first introduced to your writing, you know, through psychoanalytic journals where you wrote about clinical work, you wrote about race in the consulting room and racial enactments. And I know in a previous conversation you were telling me that, you know, you're you're writing everyone's writing I guess sort of takes on a life of its own. But I was curious about your own relationship to that writing now and how you think about those ideas, if they've evolved over the time since you've written them.
speaker-0: Yeah. Well, you know, thinking about this podcast ⁓ brought me back to ⁓ that ⁓ early set of papers, which, you know, ⁓ I haven't reread in quite some time. You know. ⁓ and so it was very interesting to look at that work as a little bit of an outsider to the inside work that produced it. ⁓ And you know, I am thinking about whether or not there's a next analytic paper I might have that kind of is a reflection and review. I'm not sure. You know, I did a plenary ⁓ and I was honored to give the plenary at the APSA meeting ⁓ recently, I guess last year. And I think folks were expecting that next paper then and they got something very different. They got what was on my mind at that moment, you know, which did not have to do with ⁓ many of these topics. But You know, ⁓ I I I would say that I am grateful to the teachers that I had, the editors that I had, the colleagues that I had, who just, you know, ⁓ it it's not that they encouraged me per se, but they pushed me on things. You know, whenever I gave a paper, the I was I always knew what the first three questions were gonna be. The first was a question of someone who ⁓ really didn't think this was an important analytic topic. ⁓ wow. So I learned over time that I just waited for the second and third question. And you learn those tricks after a while. You know, there's no reason to you know, peep things land where they land. I guess that's ⁓ the important message too. And so it was always helpful to see what people did and didn't think was an analytic topic. And it was also very moving to me
speaker-1: I love that.
speaker-0: ⁓ to hear from clinicians of color and students, ⁓ or those who otherwise felt that ⁓ they might not have a voice or or the voice they wanted to have in our analytic world and where that my work helped them to think about things that were considered forbidden or helped them to think about what enactments might help us to learn. Or helped us to understand what the social meanings are that are imposed upon us, regardless of our own upbringing or our own sense of ourselves, that we were sort of shaped by the social surround, helped us to think about open and closed systems, and helped us to think about what repair might look like. Those are the ideas that were in those cases, you know, brought by the patients that I was working with at the time. ⁓ And I I still think I've continued those themes. It's just that I'm I'm thinking about them now in a sort of ⁓ a a greater array, different set of venues. But you know, I'm on I've I've been involved with analytic institutions. I sit on the board of the Austin Riggs Center. ⁓ I've been on the board of the Boston Psychoanalytic ⁓ institute for a number of years. I still serve as a consultant there. So I I still am connected. But mainly now with organizational context. ⁓ and then most of my clinical work, if you will, is with city leaders and ⁓ with organizations.
speaker-1: It's clear that your career at this moment is, you know, really emphasizes leadership and various leadership roles you have. And I wonder, does your psychoanalytic training inform your feelings about leadership, who you are as a leader in any way?
speaker-0: Well, I think it helps me to realize that it's really hard to lead. It's hard to lead because most of the time people don't actually want you to lead. If if we understand leadership, and I wrote about this in one of my analytic papers, as an adapt as adaptive work, where you're trying to ⁓ engage people in a process of learning and a process of values consideration. And when you're asking them to work their way through ⁓ to actions for which there aren't immediate off-the-shelf answers. Instead, what people mainly look at leaders for is to be the authority in the room who can give them answers, right? Yes. And it's really easy to offer answers. You know, there are a lot of folks out there who will come with a PowerPoint deck or a book or a slogan that will say, Given this crisis, here's what we could do. And many crises involve having to step back and figure out what you will do. ⁓ There is a place for authority. We certainly know that in analytic writings about this. We also know that ⁓ authorities perform certain services, and if they don't perform those services, they get ousted in one way or another, right? Right. And leaders have to ⁓ and people who are practicing leadership have to exist in a space where they move in and out of authority, usually. and they have to hold difficult truths. The most difficult being that if we're gonna make progress on something that's a collective challenge, ⁓ it's gonna mean that, you know, my preferred solution ⁓ isn't gonna be the one very likely that's that will be realized. That we're all going to have to renegotiate our loyalties, and we're all going to have to figure out what we're willing to give up in service of what we can ⁓ receive as a community. These ideas aren't mine. They're part of the adaptive leadership curriculum and canon, Ronnie Heifetz's work. But I found that my own engagement with those ideas in the k in the context of psychoanalytic thinking and more broadly in change management work. Is what I bring to this challenge and I think what I bring to my leadership teaching.
speaker-1: Always a good reminder to me what you just said about how ⁓ it can be so tempting. Any I I mean, I'm thinking about teaching or running groups. Anytime some, you know, a group of people turns to you and really wants you to have all the answers, how tempting it is to occupy that position, even if it's not for the bet in the best interest of the group.
speaker-0: Because ⁓ they ⁓ the community will give you certain kinds of resources if you fulfill that desire for an answer until they discover that that answer actually isn't you know yielding what they expected. That's when they oust you. That's right. And that can happen in a classroom. You know, you can be tempted to offer something, you know, sage and
speaker-1: Be overthrowing.
speaker-0: They want that, right? But ⁓ they will oust you, ⁓ in the sense of ⁓ you lose the moment for really being able to mine those high risk, high yield moments.
speaker-1: So I typically ask my guests if they have any advice for someone who is really psychoanalytically inclined and wants to go in into academia. But I want to change the question for you and to ⁓ see if you have any advice for someone who has both an interest in academia, but maybe organizational psychology or policy, like what what advice would you give them?
speaker-0: Read things that are outside of your preferred curriculum, right? ⁓ so that would be the first. ⁓ and and read widely, right? ⁓ if you want to work in a policy world, I don't have this, so my ⁓ I wish I had. ⁓ you you need to know something about economics, actually. You need to understand economic reasoning. So I've taken as an adult learner a couple of classes, but I sure wish I had learned more about. About economics earlier on, because it's really intertwined with ⁓ policy. But the second I would say is to especially at this moment in time is to read history and read history outside of your context. If you're ⁓ in the US, read history outside of the US. If you're living somewhere else, read US history. Because you know, the kind of challenges that feel new to us or feel urgent to us are also not new. And we may have faster tools and tools that are ahead of us like AI. We may have faster ⁓ economic impacts because of ⁓ those same tools. ⁓ but ⁓ you know I f have found I had a wonderful opportunity a few years ago to be a Bellagio resident. I had four weeks just read and write. It was amazing. I'd never really had that since maybe forever. ⁓ and I started reading ⁓ about history or rereading history ⁓ post-Civil War in the US and really got much more ⁓ I I reminded myself of what I'd learned in high school and college and some new takes on it because a lot of what happened then is actually relevant now. And the specifics are important. The executive orders that were in play then are relevant to executive orders that are in play now. And being able to trace that arc and that history, just as in a person's life, across the life of an organization or a system is important.
speaker-1: Do you have looking back a a f a favorite piece of scholarship or writing or one you're the most proud of? I will say I I asked this question of ⁓ Paul Wacktel on an episode and he said it was like trying to choose your favorite child. So I understand it might be a hard question, but I'm just curious if one comes to mind.
speaker-0: It might be the paper on race as an adaptive challenge. Because I think it gave me a chance at that moment to kind of take the consulting room and think about it through the lens of this other model of change. And ⁓ in some ways, ⁓ that that was I think the last formal paper I wrote for the analytic ⁓ literature, at least to date. ⁓ and that I I guess it's the last one, so it's my favorite. ⁓ Right, that's right. Even though it was a while ago now.
speaker-1: I do want to ⁓ also ask just because we always like to, you know, use this podcast in part to sort of dispel myths or biases people might have about a life in academia. And I am curious if you could give us a little bit of a sense of a day in your life, especially as someone who you wear a lot of different hats and you want a lot of different things. How do you make time to write ⁓ for scholarship, for teaching? How do you sort of organize it all?
speaker-0: Yeah. So I know colleagues who just write, you know, that it's just what they do. That is not what I do. I have to write for something. ⁓ and I usually, even if it's a, you know, I decide I'm gonna write an article, and then that becomes a kind of structure and deadline to it. Because if I wait until I'm moved, I will be waiting a very long time. ⁓ I also ⁓ am always kind of keeping ⁓ different possibilities in mind. So right now I've been doing a lot of work ⁓ by happenstance on ⁓ youth climate action, which I've had to learn about. And I've been just blown away by what young people are doing and how they're thinking and the voices that the voice that they have right now. So I don't know what I'm gonna do with that. ⁓ actually I do know what I'm doing that. I'm working with a young colleague, a 20 year old college student Who is very interested in in young creatives. And he wants to give cameras to young creatives to think about public policy issues. So we're gonna run pilot this ⁓ this ⁓ summer. So I guess the best way I can say that a day in the life is I always have a long list of things that need to be done. I try to group them so I'm not just going from thing to thing. and ⁓ I try to figure out when I can write. Airplanes are not a bad time for me to write. And when I start a paper, it's almost always on a Friday ⁓ afternoon and evening. Start with a blank screen and by the end of the weekend have at least two or three pages, often not more than that. But I have a sense of an anchor. And that anchor is then helpful because I find it hard to write in, you know,
speaker-1: How interesting.
speaker-0: hour increments. I really have to have a couple of hours to get something get stuff done. And then teaching, I would just say, you know, ⁓ preparing for teaching takes way more time than people imagine. ⁓ It's not just the, you know, the reading of materials, which takes time. You have to reread them. It's also reading them in the context of the moment and in the context of the class that just happened. It's like looking at your process notes from, you know, the last session. So
speaker-1: Chunk of time.
speaker-0: And then with teaching, of course, there's what we talked about before that you want to get people somewhere. And if they take you somewhere else, that's okay. but then you have to figure out the next class. How are you going to bridge all that and put it together? So there's a lot of intellectual work that goes into, as we all know, these experiences of being with people and being in community with them.
speaker-1: Well, I just wanna thank you so much for being here and for speaking with me today. I think it's been a really rich conversation and I think people are really gonna get a lot out of it. And so thank you so much.
speaker-0: Thank you. You asked some really terrific questions and I ⁓ I I I I enjoyed this and appreciated the way in which you ⁓ created space for someone who's had a very different kind of career.
speaker-1: Thank you again. 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 squaredp squared at group.org and take part in shaping what comes next.
speaker-1: 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. Kimberlyn Leary is our first guest to have worked in two presidential administrations, an extraordinary distinction. Many of her listeners may already be familiar with her groundbreaking scholarship on race in the clinical encounter. Following an unplanned career pivot, she moved into the world of public policy. While her work has taken unexpected turns, a commitment to justice and equity As well as a belief that writing is a way of being in community with others, has remained a consistent thread connecting her diverse interests. In this interview, Dr. Leary explores how her psychoanalytic background shapes her thinking about leadership, organizations, and negotiation. She also reflects on the surprising parallels between the clinical encounter and public policy processes. If you've never considered a role for psychoanalysts in the policy arena, This conversation, along with Dr. Leary's practical insights, may expand your perspective. Dr. Kimberlyn Leary is a psychoanalyst trained at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, where she wrote a series of papers on race and psychoanalysis. She is now an Emma Bloomberg lecturer in policy and management at the Harvard Kennedy School and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. She has held two roles in federal service. in the Obama White House as an advisor to the Council on Women and Girls, as a senior advisor to the Biden White House domestic policy council, and as a fellow in the Office of Management and Budget. Okay, wonderful. Well Kim, thank you so much for joining us today.
speaker-0: My pleasure.
speaker-1: I wanted to start if you could just tell us a little bit about the trajectory of your career.
speaker-0: ⁓ well, that is such a such a question. So, you know, I'm a clinical psychologist. I trained at the University of Michigan. And as someone who had ⁓ moved around quite a bit as a child, almost every three years, I was so delighted that I had a chance to stay at Michigan on the Michigan faculty for a number of years after I completed my PhD. I also did my analytic training at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. And then over the course of my career, you know, I I largely had been focused on problems. What are the problems out there? And those problems have led me to do ⁓ wildly different things over the course of my career. What has been the common denominator has been ⁓ academics and teaching. I have always been a teacher and continue to be a teacher, and I have ⁓ redefined for me what clinical work. looks like. So my first part of my career was standard issue, working in my consulting room, mainly with individuals, occasionally with couples and sometimes with families, ⁓ now to thinking about the clinical as involving the social ecosystems in which we live, not just the social ecosystems of our ⁓ clinical consulting rooms.
speaker-1: I wanted to talk about that. I don't know if the best word for it is a pivot, but certainly you expanded your focus. And for those of you who are only familiar with your writing as it pertains to to clinical work, you know, I do want to say you obviously are now very involved in in policy, in organization, in in negotiation. And I'm I'm wondering if that was something you always were interested in. Did it was it a developing interest for you? Was it shaped by current events?
speaker-0: Yeah. ⁓ certainly wasn't part of the plan. You know, some of my students say, you know, how did you how did you map out your five-year plan? And I'm like, I don't have a five-year plan. I didn't then and I don't now. You know, when I started ⁓ doing clinical work, ⁓ I was ⁓ in Michigan, I was really and as a ⁓ you know a PhD student, I was really lucky that my supervisors were psychoanalysts and not all of them, but most of them analytically inclined. At that time, Michigan was a very psychoanalytic program. And we benefited from ⁓ thoughtful teachers, ⁓ and also those who were, I think, deeply invested in who we were as people. So as it became clear to me that the fact that I was an African American woman, offering clinical services in contexts that were often ⁓ Did did not have so many folks like me in them, they had some, but not ⁓ a lot, that that was an important, not just dynamic, but an important part of my experience. I was encouraged very early on to start writing. And writing was a a ⁓ hugely important part of my career. I figured out early on that ⁓ writing was not just about your ideas, it was about being in community with other people. It was a way to be able to talk to and talk with and learn from. a broader group of people than in my institute or in my university. So, you know, one thing led to another, ⁓ and I will jump ahead, when I took my first real senior executive role as chief psychologist at the Cambridge Health Alliance, which is a Harvard hospital, ⁓ it was just as Massachusetts health reform was being enacted and my hospital was accommodating to that. With lots of process and systems changes. So all of a sudden I went from, you know, thinking about the social out there to the social as the spreadsheets that told us what we could and couldn't do based on ⁓ the resources that we had. So I got interested at that point in policy, policy as it impinges upon organizations, and then got interested in where one might have opportunities to work on policy from the inside. out that took me to the Kennedy School to do a mid-career degree in public policy and public administration. And from there, you know, I had a chance to work in the Obama White House for a couple of years. And then ⁓ later the Biden White House a couple years ago, helping to implement that president's executive orders on equity.
speaker-1: I I would love to hear more about that experience because you're certainly the first ⁓ s person we've interviewed who has a psychoanalytic background, who's really, you know, gone into the world of policy and certainly at the level that you have in working with the administrations. And I I'm curious like what that what that was like for you having the background you have with maybe a more traditional psychoanalytic training to sort of be in the White House and to be working in that role.
speaker-0: So ⁓ at the Kennedy School, one of the wonderful things about being ⁓ taking on a learning stance explicitly ⁓ later in your career and something that's completely sort of outside of your you know knowledge base. I mean, I understood the impingement of policy, but I didn't understand what you do about it or ⁓ who does what and how this whole larger system works that we're embedded in. ⁓ So when I was at the Kennedy School, it was just as President Obama was candidate Obama and was in fact running for office. And I was surrounded by people who had every intention of going into this new administration. And my thought was, really? You just kind of decide that? And you know, you you think I'd like to do this? And then that happens somehow. ⁓ but indeed I watched it happen for many of my colleagues who, of course, decades younger than I I was at the time, even then. ⁓ And I realized that, you know, I had learned some things at the Kennedy School, and I really wanted a chance to kind of test those out. But you don't test things out precisely in the White House. You ⁓ you bring your expertise and then you learn new things. You do test things out, but it's not the place you go to test first stage ideas. ⁓ I was lucky enough to be invited first ⁓ to work at the Office of National Drug Control Policy. They needed someone who had a behavioral health background. And they asked, you know, what do you know about the opioid crisis? And I knew about this much about the opioid crisis, but certainly I had a passing vocabulary. So I was put, you know, to work on learning about neonatal abstinence syndrome and in particular how women who were born with substance ⁓ dependencies were treated in different state and local contexts. Sometimes as people who had public health challenges. and mental health substance abuse challenges and sometimes as those who had violated the criminal codes. And so just aggregating that information helped me to understand how our local systems, our state systems, and our federal systems work. It also helped me to appreciate the reach of the federal government because the second project I worked on was working with teams and everything at the White House is done it with teams, on guidelines for prescribers. Around ⁓ opioid medications. and so there I was working, you know, side by side with MDs and ⁓ policy professionals and trade organizations. But I had a chance to contribute how we might think about the person who is experiencing vulnerabilities at every turn. And I think that made its way into some of our our work with those guidelines.
speaker-1: When you think about I mean it it's i when I look at your career and hear you talk about it and I can see like the different subjects that have interested you and that you've done scholarship on. I'm curious if like as you look back in retrospect, do you see a through line in in what you've worked on, what you've been interested in, what you've been pulled towards, or does it feel like you've just sort of followed maybe more diverse interests?
speaker-0: Well, I do think that I have followed diverse interest, ⁓ and I also think there's a through line, although it wasn't a planful one, but there is intentionality behind it. So at the Office of National Drug Control Policy, I learned how government works, basically. Not from the classroom. I'd learned that at the Kennedy School, but how it works in actual practice and how different constituencies come together to layer their work to create ⁓ guidelines and public products and work that gets uploaded into other White House teams. And then, you know, later when I joined ⁓ another unit of the Obama White House, the Council on Women and Girls, I actually just happened to show up at a moment when my brother's keeper, the president's signature initiative on boys and young men of color, ⁓ had actually generated a little bit of heat from women. And women and women of color had been an important constituency for President Obama because it was focused on boys and young men. And quite reasonably, those women's ⁓ groups, advocate groups and ⁓ influentials said, you know, the same households that have sons and brothers ⁓ also have daughters and sisters. And so I was given the opportunity, along with a ton of talented people, to stand up a new initiative which we called. advancing equity for women and girls of color and their peers. So there I had a portfolio that ranged from school exclusion ⁓ to girls in the juvenile justice system, economic prosperity, TEM ⁓ STEM education, and so forth. And there I had a chance to work across agencies and with external groups to literally ⁓ try to create something that wasn't as developed as ⁓ the my brother's keeper. But it had similar architecture. And in the end, we were able to get commitments from external groups that ⁓ almost ⁓ reached the ⁓ investments that my brother's keeper had at the beginning of its tenure. So ⁓ that work, ⁓ because it was outside of government, was able to continue even after President Obama ⁓ left office. And the last thing I'll say is I had taken a leave of absence from the ⁓ ⁓ Harvard, which offers ⁓ public services leaves, to be the senior vice president and then the executive vice president of the Urban Institute, which is a DC-based think tank. And from there, in one of those ways that just happens every once in a while, I was able to daisy chain a leave from Urban to work at ⁓ the DP the Domestic Policy Council and the Office of Management and Budget. And that's where ⁓ really I think everything I'd accrued around change at scale. understanding some about how government works, being able to think about constituents constituencies that hadn't always been prioritized in policy. And my analytic interest in race and ⁓ racial ⁓ racial reasoning and racial enactments, ⁓ all of that could be sort of channeled into thinking about if we have a way to advance equity at scale, which an executive order allows, How do we need to think about that work, the people who are doing it in those equity ⁓ teams in agencies? How do we knit that work together? And what does it really mean to face history? That is in effect what we were doing with that work.
speaker-1: And it sounds like a lot that you had been building towards or a lot of experiences that you'd had sort of came together in that moment.
speaker-0: Yes, not necessarily again well, not at all planned, ⁓ because who knew there would be that executive order, who knew that opportunity would be there? But you know, we always say about policy that you have to keep working on policy ideas, and I would say in general scientific ideas, even when there isn't an immediate ⁓ place you can put them or an outlet for them. Because when the moment arrives, if you don't have something on a hard drive, if you don't have something in a desk drawer, if you don't have a coalition of people who are ready and primed, you miss the moment. So one of the things I've learned in across my career really is that if you follow your nose, if you follow problems, if you follow your heart, and if you keep iterating on ideas, which I did through the course of a set of programmatic papers that I wrote for ⁓ the analytic journals. ⁓ when and if you have a moment, you're able to advance that. And to the through line question, you know, a lot of my interest has been on, you know, equity, advancing equity in different ways, thinking ⁓ about ⁓ racial experiencing, but it's also focused on women and girls. And I ⁓ have noted that from You know, looking at neonatal abstinence syndrome to looking at ⁓ you know, advancing equity for women and girls to a role I have at McLean working with the Center of Excellence for Women's Mental Health, that's also been a through line. Again, not so much planned, but when I look back I can see it.
speaker-1: When you work in these policy roles, as as you mentioned, especially in government, you work as part of a team and I'm sure the team has sort of diverse backgrounds themselves. And I'm wondering what yeah, do you have a sense of what your training in and background in psychoanalysis offers to this experience? Do you feel like it gives you sort of an unique voice in this setting?
speaker-0: I I think I think it does actually. And let me see if I can put my thoughts together about this. I did a little bit ⁓ of thinking about this in preparation. You know, I would say that in policy and in the consulting room, what they share are high risk, high yield moments. They're different at different levels, but the experience of Recognizing when there's a high risk, high yield moment is, I think, one that clinicians in clinical practice share with people who are working in policy and for that matter organizational ⁓ context. I would say also that ⁓ you know, in all contexts, you're really looking for what what is the next possibility that could be advanced. And in order to do work. One has to have a tolerance for ambiguity, but not ambiguity just, you know, where you're honoring it alone, but ambiguity because you don't know, but you are striving to understand the next thing in order to leverage those high risk, high yield moments. That's not analytic language, but I would say that that is ultimately what happens in the consulting room as well.
speaker-1: Yeah, I I felt like I had sort of like a visceral sense of what you were talking about and thinking about moments with a patient, a client where you have the feeling like, ⁓ my response could make or break this treatment, right? What what is happening in this moment feels so important and I I could imagine that.
speaker-0: And in the consulting room and in policy, policy process, I would say, that not always, but sometimes you do have a chance to kind of circle back, you know, the next session or the next conversation. the other thing I have learned about policy that's just been helpful in like, you know, everyday life is that and comes from analytic training, of course, is that you know. People do things for reasons. We know that. And y y you might not think that an insight like that is all that important, but it really is, because in those high risk, high yield moments on teams and public settings, and especially where the stakes are very, very high for many people, you know, if someone is opposed to you, it it it it you know, the first ⁓ the first thing that you say is not usually, you know. Why? Why do they they need to believe that? But that's the question you need to ask. You need to remember that people are doing things for reasons, and if you understand their reasons, it may make it possible to come up with a new thing that ⁓ in this particular context on this particular issue you can advance forward, even if their reasons stay as they were and your reasons for being on ⁓ taking a different tack ⁓ are in fact quite different.
speaker-1: You you're sort of bringing us to something I wanted to ask about, which is your work with conflict resolution and negotiation. And I when I was reading ⁓ some of the things you've written, I found myself really interested. I I I I'm not sure if it's because I work a lot with couples, so I'm always talking about failed negotiations or because I have young children and I'm constantly negotiating with them. But I I wanted to see if I don't know if this would be easy to pare down, but what you sort of feel. feel are some of the most important things you've you've learned or uncovered or discovered about negotiation that, you know, if you had to sort of offer this up as like, here's, here's the essential wisdom I I have in this topic, what would it be?
speaker-0: Well, the essential wisdom would be to read the book Getting to Yes, which is the negotiation Bible and which has really stood the test of time. I read it ⁓ every couple of years. I used to keep copies in my office ⁓ w and do when I'm in executive roles because it helps to actually hand it to other people so that they have the same background you do. But ⁓ basically what I would say is a couple of things. There's negotiation proper. Which is what we think of with diplomacy or business. But then there's negotiation as a mindset. And I would say that the mindset of negotiation is really embedded in ⁓ processes. And in fact, my first exposure to negotiation was through work I did with ⁓ Bob Hatcher and colleagues at the University of Michigan's psychological clinic, where we looked at the therapeutic alliance as a negotiation. And the way we got to that, which is I won't tell you all the details back when we had audio tapes and we recorded things and we transcribed them long time ago. But we recognize that you know when you kind of abstract out what's happening as you listen to recording after recording, you know, everybody gave us their permission for us just for that. Just let me know that. Let let me let you know that. ⁓ but when you think about what it involves, essentially. A patient has an idea of the kind of therapist or analyst they want to work with. And the analyst has an idea of the kind of patient they want to work with. They want someone who's interested and curious about, you know, things they that are on the periphery of their awareness. And that may or may not be what the patient is interested in. Patient might want just someone who can talk to them in a more ⁓ everyday way. So they're busy trying to create each other ⁓ as the kind of relational partner that they need. And that's where enactments take place. It's where clinical learning takes place, and we moved into a relational or intersubjective understanding of this. And so it's where clinical theory progresses. When we see what patients in a particular epoch and social moment and time need and want. And clinicians who, as they continue to learn more and accrue knowledge, become able to give and able to ⁓ kind of iterate in real time. So from there I went to the program on negotiation and spent a couple of years as a visiting scholar and learned more about negotiation proper, started to do some teaching and negotiation. Essentially, negotiation is relational, collaborative problem solving. That's what it is. Where you have to distinguish Between what you say you want and your underlying interest, why you want it. And it turns out, more often than not, when you can make that clean distinction, or clean enough distinction, I would say, you know, kind of after Winnicott, clean enough distinction, you can come to see that there may be a variety of interest that or a variety of positions that can actually serve that interest. So if your interest is in being heard and you've insisted that you must have, you know, X role or 10 minutes on the agenda, maybe there are other ways that you can actually fulfill what you're really trying to achieve. That's a simple example. It's much harder when the stakes are higher and when ⁓ emotions are flying. But that's the basic idea. You know, how can I get more of what I want? by giving you more of what you want, and we can meet a common set of interests, and we can maybe back away from what we thought was the exact mechanism for realizing those interests through our positions.
speaker-1: Which also feels as you say, first of all, the way you describe negotiation, I could just feel like a sort of like a relief wash over me. Like it's such a less anxiety provoking way to think about it, even even than the word negotiation, but it's collaborative problem solving. And I think it's it seems to me the way I hear you say it so much of what we do with our patients in the consulting room, which is, you know, you have a need and you're you have a very maybe potentially narrow idea of how it's gonna get met. Yes. ⁓ and sometimes that can actually stop you from getting it met. but if we could expand your ideas of about what's possible, then maybe you we could actually meet your help you meet your needs.
speaker-0: And that then takes you into the territory ⁓ that we found, for example, ⁓ in trying to work with federal agencies to stand up these executive orders. So for example, ⁓ it's easy enough to say ⁓ on paper, you know, this is a kind of narrow slice of how you could move forward. ⁓ Here are seven other ideas. And most of us don't say, ⁓ wow, thank you for expanding my frame of reference. Because that narrow idea is laden with history, loyalty, hopes, fears. And so people don't give up those narrow ideas, ⁓ don't even recognize them as narrow because they actually aren't. They're replete with history. So that's why it takes time, it's not a technical endeavor to negotiate or solve problems collaboratively. It's why it takes time, whether you're in the consulting room, in an organization, or in a larger system. And certainly it takes a lot of time when we're trying to renegotiate cultural values and ⁓ expanded possibilities, or where we're trying to come back from narrowed possibilities and re-expand them.
speaker-1: I I wasn't planning on asking this, but I just thought of it and it made me wonder if you think there's something about your temperament that makes you particularly well suited for policy work. Cause I was imagining that w when I think about change in general, like and I and mostly my experience is working, you know, in the consulting room on change. You know, there's always such a sense sense of like having to to be patient and kind of meet people where they are and And I I'm imagining when you're working on a larger scale where change is much more challenging and ambiguous and fraught, that you like you would have to develop a real capac or have a real capacity for patience and fortitude. And I was just curious if you feel like there's something about your personality that felt like a good fit for approaching change at the scale you do.
speaker-0: I mean, again, not so much I felt it was a good fit. I have discovered that some of the skills I've learned as a clinician and frankly as a teacher are also really helpful. You know, one of the things about teaching large classes, which I've done throughout my career, I used to teach a class of 300 undergraduates at Michigan, which is a little like a three-ring circus, I have to say. And now I teach ⁓ classes of, you know, 75, 80 senior executives. And I do think that I what I've been told is that I'm able to hold a room, which I think what that means is be able to speak to a room, to be able to speak to a whole. And then, you know, in the consulting room, we have to be quite nimble for those high, you know, yield, high risk moments. And I'll just give you an example. I had ⁓ this past week I was teaching a ⁓ seventy-five person ⁓ executive ed program for ⁓ global leaders who were all working on cross boundary ⁓ challenges. And at one point someone in the room I said, you know, well, would you like to weigh in on this? And ⁓ the person said something like, ⁓ no, I would not. ⁓ I really don't have anything to say about this particular matter. And it was very clear that ⁓ this particular matter was not one that she ⁓ really thought much of, shall we say? What I was able to do, and I didn't think it through, was to figure out what was she trying to tell the whole group, right? And one of the things she was trying to tell the whole group was not the content. She was actually modeling something that's so essential in those large settings. She was modeling candor. And I said to her, I think what you've just offered us is an experience of candor. Which I turned to the whole group is critical for the kind of work we want to do together. She didn't plan on that and I didn't plan on it, but we used a moment for larger learning.
speaker-1: How i i since we're speaking about teaching, I'm curious if you have any cause you you do have a long, you know, a long history in teaching and I'm wondering do you have any perspectives on the classroom atmosphere, you know, in academia, how that's changed over the course of your teaching career, what you've noticed about that, what it's like now.
speaker-0: Yeah. I mean the best way to think about ⁓ a classroom is that it's a social space and that if you're teaching in a classroom that includes people who ⁓ are there for very different reasons, right? I mean we're all coming to class even an analytic classroom could people come in for very different reasons. Right. But I mean like really different reasons, you know. Like they're responsible for the health system in in some organization and these people are responsible for HR and these people are trying to solve, you know, the unhoused ⁓ issues connected to unhoused populations. I mean, those are really different. They overlap, but they're very, very different. I would say that people bring in the and you want them to, actually. They bring in ⁓ the ⁓ the power challenges. They bring in the different perspectives about, you know, what a social compact should include and what it shouldn't. They bring in politics in different ways. And it does make it more challenging to teach right now because for the same reason as we were talking about before, there are potential high yield moments, but there are also potential high-risk moments. And ⁓ I would say that ⁓ it's really important to know what you're trying to achieve when you're teaching. You know, you're trying to move people from A to C or D. You're not just seeing what they come up with, you know. ⁓ you're trying to move them from one place or another and use everything they have and everything they're willing to put into the mix towards that goal. So that might be a difference with clinical work where we're a little more oriented on Where does this person want to go? As a teacher, I have a plan. I have a syllabus. I have a place I need to take you. And I happen to have some ⁓ belief that it's a good place for you to go. So that's what I would say there.
speaker-1: I have place I need to take I would like to ask about your your early scholarship because I think most people listening probably, as I was, was first introduced to your writing, you know, through psychoanalytic journals where you wrote about clinical work, you wrote about race in the consulting room and racial enactments. And I know in a previous conversation you were telling me that, you know, you're you're writing everyone's writing I guess sort of takes on a life of its own. But I was curious about your own relationship to that writing now and how you think about those ideas, if they've evolved over the time since you've written them.
speaker-0: Yeah. Well, you know, thinking about this podcast ⁓ brought me back to ⁓ that ⁓ early set of papers, which, you know, ⁓ I haven't reread in quite some time. You know. ⁓ and so it was very interesting to look at that work as a little bit of an outsider to the inside work that produced it. ⁓ And you know, I am thinking about whether or not there's a next analytic paper I might have that kind of is a reflection and review. I'm not sure. You know, I did a plenary ⁓ and I was honored to give the plenary at the APSA meeting ⁓ recently, I guess last year. And I think folks were expecting that next paper then and they got something very different. They got what was on my mind at that moment, you know, which did not have to do with ⁓ many of these topics. But You know, ⁓ I I I would say that I am grateful to the teachers that I had, the editors that I had, the colleagues that I had, who just, you know, ⁓ it it's not that they encouraged me per se, but they pushed me on things. You know, whenever I gave a paper, the I was I always knew what the first three questions were gonna be. The first was a question of someone who ⁓ really didn't think this was an important analytic topic. ⁓ wow. So I learned over time that I just waited for the second and third question. And you learn those tricks after a while. You know, there's no reason to you know, peep things land where they land. I guess that's ⁓ the important message too. And so it was always helpful to see what people did and didn't think was an analytic topic. And it was also very moving to me
speaker-1: I love that.
speaker-0: ⁓ to hear from clinicians of color and students, ⁓ or those who otherwise felt that ⁓ they might not have a voice or or the voice they wanted to have in our analytic world and where that my work helped them to think about things that were considered forbidden or helped them to think about what enactments might help us to learn. Or helped us to understand what the social meanings are that are imposed upon us, regardless of our own upbringing or our own sense of ourselves, that we were sort of shaped by the social surround, helped us to think about open and closed systems, and helped us to think about what repair might look like. Those are the ideas that were in those cases, you know, brought by the patients that I was working with at the time. ⁓ And I I still think I've continued those themes. It's just that I'm I'm thinking about them now in a sort of ⁓ a a greater array, different set of venues. But you know, I'm on I've I've been involved with analytic institutions. I sit on the board of the Austin Riggs Center. ⁓ I've been on the board of the Boston Psychoanalytic ⁓ institute for a number of years. I still serve as a consultant there. So I I still am connected. But mainly now with organizational context. ⁓ and then most of my clinical work, if you will, is with city leaders and ⁓ with organizations.
speaker-1: It's clear that your career at this moment is, you know, really emphasizes leadership and various leadership roles you have. And I wonder, does your psychoanalytic training inform your feelings about leadership, who you are as a leader in any way?
speaker-0: Well, I think it helps me to realize that it's really hard to lead. It's hard to lead because most of the time people don't actually want you to lead. If if we understand leadership, and I wrote about this in one of my analytic papers, as an adapt as adaptive work, where you're trying to ⁓ engage people in a process of learning and a process of values consideration. And when you're asking them to work their way through ⁓ to actions for which there aren't immediate off-the-shelf answers. Instead, what people mainly look at leaders for is to be the authority in the room who can give them answers, right? Yes. And it's really easy to offer answers. You know, there are a lot of folks out there who will come with a PowerPoint deck or a book or a slogan that will say, Given this crisis, here's what we could do. And many crises involve having to step back and figure out what you will do. ⁓ There is a place for authority. We certainly know that in analytic writings about this. We also know that ⁓ authorities perform certain services, and if they don't perform those services, they get ousted in one way or another, right? Right. And leaders have to ⁓ and people who are practicing leadership have to exist in a space where they move in and out of authority, usually. and they have to hold difficult truths. The most difficult being that if we're gonna make progress on something that's a collective challenge, ⁓ it's gonna mean that, you know, my preferred solution ⁓ isn't gonna be the one very likely that's that will be realized. That we're all going to have to renegotiate our loyalties, and we're all going to have to figure out what we're willing to give up in service of what we can ⁓ receive as a community. These ideas aren't mine. They're part of the adaptive leadership curriculum and canon, Ronnie Heifetz's work. But I found that my own engagement with those ideas in the k in the context of psychoanalytic thinking and more broadly in change management work. Is what I bring to this challenge and I think what I bring to my leadership teaching.
speaker-1: Always a good reminder to me what you just said about how ⁓ it can be so tempting. Any I I mean, I'm thinking about teaching or running groups. Anytime some, you know, a group of people turns to you and really wants you to have all the answers, how tempting it is to occupy that position, even if it's not for the bet in the best interest of the group.
speaker-0: Because ⁓ they ⁓ the community will give you certain kinds of resources if you fulfill that desire for an answer until they discover that that answer actually isn't you know yielding what they expected. That's when they oust you. That's right. And that can happen in a classroom. You know, you can be tempted to offer something, you know, sage and
speaker-1: Be overthrowing.
speaker-0: They want that, right? But ⁓ they will oust you, ⁓ in the sense of ⁓ you lose the moment for really being able to mine those high risk, high yield moments.
speaker-1: So I typically ask my guests if they have any advice for someone who is really psychoanalytically inclined and wants to go in into academia. But I want to change the question for you and to ⁓ see if you have any advice for someone who has both an interest in academia, but maybe organizational psychology or policy, like what what advice would you give them?
speaker-0: Read things that are outside of your preferred curriculum, right? ⁓ so that would be the first. ⁓ and and read widely, right? ⁓ if you want to work in a policy world, I don't have this, so my ⁓ I wish I had. ⁓ you you need to know something about economics, actually. You need to understand economic reasoning. So I've taken as an adult learner a couple of classes, but I sure wish I had learned more about. About economics earlier on, because it's really intertwined with ⁓ policy. But the second I would say is to especially at this moment in time is to read history and read history outside of your context. If you're ⁓ in the US, read history outside of the US. If you're living somewhere else, read US history. Because you know, the kind of challenges that feel new to us or feel urgent to us are also not new. And we may have faster tools and tools that are ahead of us like AI. We may have faster ⁓ economic impacts because of ⁓ those same tools. ⁓ but ⁓ you know I f have found I had a wonderful opportunity a few years ago to be a Bellagio resident. I had four weeks just read and write. It was amazing. I'd never really had that since maybe forever. ⁓ and I started reading ⁓ about history or rereading history ⁓ post-Civil War in the US and really got much more ⁓ I I reminded myself of what I'd learned in high school and college and some new takes on it because a lot of what happened then is actually relevant now. And the specifics are important. The executive orders that were in play then are relevant to executive orders that are in play now. And being able to trace that arc and that history, just as in a person's life, across the life of an organization or a system is important.
speaker-1: Do you have looking back a a f a favorite piece of scholarship or writing or one you're the most proud of? I will say I I asked this question of ⁓ Paul Wacktel on an episode and he said it was like trying to choose your favorite child. So I understand it might be a hard question, but I'm just curious if one comes to mind.
speaker-0: It might be the paper on race as an adaptive challenge. Because I think it gave me a chance at that moment to kind of take the consulting room and think about it through the lens of this other model of change. And ⁓ in some ways, ⁓ that that was I think the last formal paper I wrote for the analytic ⁓ literature, at least to date. ⁓ and that I I guess it's the last one, so it's my favorite. ⁓ Right, that's right. Even though it was a while ago now.
speaker-1: I do want to ⁓ also ask just because we always like to, you know, use this podcast in part to sort of dispel myths or biases people might have about a life in academia. And I am curious if you could give us a little bit of a sense of a day in your life, especially as someone who you wear a lot of different hats and you want a lot of different things. How do you make time to write ⁓ for scholarship, for teaching? How do you sort of organize it all?
speaker-0: Yeah. So I know colleagues who just write, you know, that it's just what they do. That is not what I do. I have to write for something. ⁓ and I usually, even if it's a, you know, I decide I'm gonna write an article, and then that becomes a kind of structure and deadline to it. Because if I wait until I'm moved, I will be waiting a very long time. ⁓ I also ⁓ am always kind of keeping ⁓ different possibilities in mind. So right now I've been doing a lot of work ⁓ by happenstance on ⁓ youth climate action, which I've had to learn about. And I've been just blown away by what young people are doing and how they're thinking and the voices that the voice that they have right now. So I don't know what I'm gonna do with that. ⁓ actually I do know what I'm doing that. I'm working with a young colleague, a 20 year old college student Who is very interested in in young creatives. And he wants to give cameras to young creatives to think about public policy issues. So we're gonna run pilot this ⁓ this ⁓ summer. So I guess the best way I can say that a day in the life is I always have a long list of things that need to be done. I try to group them so I'm not just going from thing to thing. and ⁓ I try to figure out when I can write. Airplanes are not a bad time for me to write. And when I start a paper, it's almost always on a Friday ⁓ afternoon and evening. Start with a blank screen and by the end of the weekend have at least two or three pages, often not more than that. But I have a sense of an anchor. And that anchor is then helpful because I find it hard to write in, you know,
speaker-1: How interesting.
speaker-0: hour increments. I really have to have a couple of hours to get something get stuff done. And then teaching, I would just say, you know, ⁓ preparing for teaching takes way more time than people imagine. ⁓ It's not just the, you know, the reading of materials, which takes time. You have to reread them. It's also reading them in the context of the moment and in the context of the class that just happened. It's like looking at your process notes from, you know, the last session. So
speaker-1: Chunk of time.
speaker-0: And then with teaching, of course, there's what we talked about before that you want to get people somewhere. And if they take you somewhere else, that's okay. but then you have to figure out the next class. How are you going to bridge all that and put it together? So there's a lot of intellectual work that goes into, as we all know, these experiences of being with people and being in community with them.
speaker-1: Well, I just wanna thank you so much for being here and for speaking with me today. I think it's been a really rich conversation and I think people are really gonna get a lot out of it. And so thank you so much.
speaker-0: Thank you. You asked some really terrific questions and I ⁓ I I I I enjoyed this and appreciated the way in which you ⁓ created space for someone who's had a very different kind of career.
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