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Exposing Transphobic Legacies, Embracing Trans Life

Join us for this riveting conversation between Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson, author and distinguished professor of transgender history and history of sexuality, and Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou, esteemed psychoanalyst and author, as they put forth a cogent analysis of the history of transphobia and the current onslaught of assaults on trans children. Our guests offer incisive social and clinical critiques while proposing new visions for understanding the multiplicity of trans experience.

 

About Our Guests

Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson
Jules Gill-Peterson is an associate professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), the first book to shatter the widespread myth that transgender children are a brand new generation in the twenty-first century. Uncovering a surprising archive dating from the 1920s through 1970s, Histories of the Transgender Child shows how the concept of gender relies on the medicalization of children’s presumed racial plasticity, challenging the very terms of how we talk about today’s medical model. The book was awarded a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and the Children’s Literature Association Book Award.
https://www.jgillpeterson.com

 

Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou
Originally from Greece and from Cyprus, Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou is a NY-based psychoanalyst. She is on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program, where she also trained, and teaches in several other psychoanalytic institutes. Her published work has received the Ruth Stein Prize, the Annual JAPA Essay Prize, APsaA’s Ralph Roughton Award, and the Symonds Prize. In 2021, the International Psychoanalytic Association awarded her co-written essay the first Tiresias prize. Avgi co-chaired the first US-based conference dedicated to the work of Jean Laplanche and she is the 2022 recipient of Division 39’s Scholarship Award. Her interview on relational psychoanalysis is part of the Freud Museum’s permanent collection in Vienna and her book, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia is forthcoming in February 2023 from the Sexual Cultures Series, NYU Press.
https://www.avgisaketopoulou.com

 

 

 

What’s Repaired in Reparations: A Conversation among Psychoanalytic and Social Activists

Join us for this vital conversation featuring psychologists, scholars, and community activists working to further efforts toward reparations in both the United States and South Africa. The discussion was recorded live at the 2021 Spring Meeting of Division 39 of the American Psychological Association. Our guests discuss how reparations includes both psychological and social engagement in order to help communities begin to heal from mass trauma.

About Our Guests

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University, where she holds the South African National Research Foundation Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma and the Research Chair in Historical Trauma and Transformation. She is the 2020-2021 Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her research interest is in historical trauma and its intergenerational repercussions and exploring what the “repair” of these transgenerational effects might mean. She has published extensively on victims and perpetrators of gross human rights violations, and on forgiveness and remorse. Her books include the critically acclaimed A Human Being Died that Night: A Story of Forgiveness, published in seven languages. She is editor and co-author of several other academic publications including, Narrating our Healing: Perspectives on Healing Trauma, Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journeys of the Past, Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory, Post-Conflict Hauntings: Transforming Memories of Historical Trauma,  and her recently published edited collection on Jewish-German dialogue, History, Trauma and Shame: Engaging the Past Through Second Generation Dialogue.
 
Lynne Layton
Lynne Layton is a member of the Grassroots Reparations Campaign organizing committee. She is a psychoanalyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and part-time faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She teaches Social Psychoanalysis in the Community, Liberation, Indigenous and Eco-Psychologies specialization at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is Past-President of Section IX, Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility, and the author of Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes (Routledge, 2020, with Marianna Leavy-Sperounis).

 
 

Dr. Bryan Nichols
Dr. Bryan Nichols is a Los Angeles-based Clinical Psychologist with a practice focusing on teens, families, adults & couples.  He was also a long-time consultant with a Community Based Organization where he was the Supervising Psychologist for an L. A. City gang prevention and intervention program.  His work in both his practice and the community has led to the recent development of societal, “macro-level” ideas about how to remediate persistent issues of bias that infect and undermine interracial relationships and the multi-disciplinary collaborations required to effectively implement community-based psycho-educational interventions.

Dr. Nichols received his Doctorate from UCLA after completing his undergraduate studies at Howard University.  His early professional experiences included being a Trainer, and Trainer of Trainers in for the “Effective Black Parenting Program”, and conducting numerous trainings in the “Dealing with Anger Program” designed for African-American youth.

Medria Connolly
Medria Connolly is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Santa Monica, California. She has been in practice for more than 30 years working with adolescents, adults and couples. In addition to her private practice, Dr. Connolly worked for many years as a consultant to a Los Angeles-based treatment program for adolescents in the juvenile justice system and in a high school-based health clinic in Watts. Her long-time work in these community settings, plus frequent contemporary encounters with implicit bias in professional groups, contributed to her recognition that individual, family and small group interventions are too limited in scope to alter the structural inequities confronting historically victimized groups, especially African Americans. This recognition led to the embrace of a prospective national intervention, i.e.
reparations, to address the underlying psychosocial challenges and promote racial healing. She considers these challenges, more often than not, to be an embodiment of the injustices encoded in U.S. history. Dr. Connolly received her PhD from Columbia University, an MSSW in Social Work from San Diego State University, and a BS from SUNY College Buffalo. In addition to her clinical training,

Dr. Connolly also trained in the Tavistock model of group relations work which focuses on the study of authority, the dynamics of social systems, and the overt and covert processes that occur in groups. Using this model as her theoretical orientation, Dr. Connolly also works as an organizational consultant to facilitate leadership, team building, communication and collaboration within diverse groups.

What’s Repaired in Reparations: A Conversation among Psychoanalytic and Social Activists

Live Event

March 13, 2021, 9:45 – 11:00am EST

Featuring hosts Drs. Billie Pivnick and Romy Reading with guest panelists Drs. Medria Connolly, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Lynne Layton, and Bryan Nichols.

In this panel, Couched podcast hosts a live recording featuring a roundtable addressing reparations in both the United States and South Africa. Panelists will consider how reparations includes both psychological and procedural engagement in order to foster community healing from mass trauma and genocide.

To register for Conference go to https://division39springmeeting.net/

About Our Guests

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University, where she holds the South African National Research Foundation Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma and the Research Chair in Historical Trauma and Transformation. She is the 2020-2021 Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her research interest is in historical trauma and its intergenerational repercussions and exploring what the “repair” of these transgenerational effects might mean. She has published extensively on victims and perpetrators of gross human rights violations, and on forgiveness and remorse. Her books include the critically acclaimed A Human Being Died that Night: A Story of Forgiveness, published in seven languages. She is editor and co-author of several other academic publications including, Narrating our Healing: Perspectives on Healing Trauma, Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journeys of the Past, Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory, Post-Conflict Hauntings: Transforming Memories of Historical Trauma,  and her recently published edited collection on Jewish-German dialogue, History, Trauma and Shame: Engaging the Past Through Second Generation Dialogue.
 
Lynne Layton
Lynne Layton is a member of the Grassroots Reparations Campaign organizing committee. She is a psychoanalyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and part-time faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She teaches Social Psychoanalysis in the Community, Liberation, Indigenous and Eco-Psychologies specialization at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is Past-President of Section IX, Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility, and the author of Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes (Routledge, 2020, with Marianna Leavy-Sperounis).

 
 

Dr. Bryan Nichols
Dr. Bryan Nichols is a Los Angeles-based Clinical Psychologist with a practice focusing on teens, families, adults & couples.  He was also a long-time consultant with a Community Based Organization where he was the Supervising Psychologist for an L. A. City gang prevention and intervention program.  His work in both his practice and the community has led to the recent development of societal, “macro-level” ideas about how to remediate persistent issues of bias that infect and undermine interracial relationships and the multi-disciplinary collaborations required to effectively implement community-based psycho-educational interventions.

Dr. Nichols received his Doctorate from UCLA after completing his undergraduate studies at Howard University.  His early professional experiences included being a Trainer, and Trainer of Trainers in for the “Effective Black Parenting Program”, and conducting numerous trainings in the “Dealing with Anger Program” designed for African-American youth.

Medria Connolly
Medria Connolly is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Santa Monica, California. She has been in practice for more than 30 years working with adolescents, adults and couples. In addition to her private practice, Dr. Connolly worked for many years as a consultant to a Los Angeles-based treatment program for adolescents in the juvenile justice system and in a high school-based health clinic in Watts. Her long-time work in these community settings, plus frequent contemporary encounters with implicit bias in professional groups, contributed to her recognition that individual, family and small group interventions are too limited in scope to alter the structural inequities confronting historically victimized groups, especially African Americans. This recognition led to the embrace of a prospective national intervention, i.e.
reparations, to address the underlying psychosocial challenges and promote racial healing. She considers these challenges, more often than not, to be an embodiment of the injustices encoded in U.S. history. Dr. Connolly received her PhD from Columbia University, an MSSW in Social Work from San Diego State University, and a BS from SUNY College Buffalo. In addition to her clinical training,

Dr. Connolly also trained in the Tavistock model of group relations work which focuses on the study of authority, the dynamics of social systems, and the overt and covert processes that occur in groups. Using this model as her theoretical orientation, Dr. Connolly also works as an organizational consultant to facilitate leadership, team building, communication and collaboration within diverse groups.

Remembering Winnicott: A Graphic Memoirist and a Psychoanalyst Discuss Creativity in Writing and Psychotherapy

Join us for this inspiring conversation with Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow and award-winning graphic novelist Alison Bechdel and esteemed psychologist, psychoanalyst, and writer, Dr. Ken Corbett, as they discuss their personal reflections on the work of renowned British psychoanalyst, Donald. W. Winnicott. Our guests consider how co-creating meaning can help us feel vitality in living and as we face death. Through personal reflection and playful interaction, they share with us the lived experience of creative work.

About Our Guests

Ken Corbett

 

Ken Corbett is Clinical Assistant Professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is the author of Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities and A Murder Over a Girl: Gender, Justice, Junior High. Dr. Corbett has a private practice in New York City.

Learn more about Dr. Corbett.

 

 


Alison Bechdel is a cartoonist. She is the creator of the Bechdel test, and her work includes the long-running comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For”, as well as the graphic memoirs “Fun Home”, which has been adapted into a Tony award-winning Broadway play, and “Are You My Mother?” Bechdel is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her latest book, “The Secret to Superhuman Strength,” will be out in May.
Learn more about Alison Bechdel.

Facing Fossil Fuels’ Effects: Confronting the Climate Crisis

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Listen in on this eye-opening conversation with internationally renowned author and climate activist, Bill McKibben, and esteemed psychologist, psychoanalyst, and scholar, Dr. Donna Orange, as they discuss the urgency of awakening to the realities of climate change. Our guests wrestle with the stark uncertainties of our planet’s future and encourage us to bravely face the shocking effects of climate change. While bringing to light sobering realities, they also offer a sense of hope, purpose, and next steps.

About our Guests

 

Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and the Schumann Distinguished Professor in Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. He was a 2014 recipient of the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel,’ and the Gandhi Peace Award. He has written over a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature, published 30 years ago, and his most recent, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

 

 

 

Donna Orange, PhD
Educated in philosophy, clinical psychology and psychoanalysis, Donna Orange, PhD, PsyD teaches at NYU Postdoc (New York); IPSS (Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York); and in private study groups. She also offers clinical consultation/supervision in these institutes and beyond. Recent books are Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies (2010), and The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice (2011), Nourishing the Inner Life of Clinicians and Humanitarians: The Ethical Turn in Psychoanalysis, and Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics (2016), and most recently, Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics: Learning to Hear (2020).

Moving Conversations: What Can Psychoanalysts and Choreographers Learn from One Another?

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Listen in on this enlivening conversation with internationally renowned choreographer, Bill T. Jones, and esteemed psychoanalyst, Professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies, and Dean of Humanities at Rutgers University, Dr. Michelle Stephens, as they discuss the role of the social world in their work. Our guests tackle a range of topics related to race, trauma, and the pandemic while shedding light on how they navigate the tension between respect for “the canon” while invoking the political. In the process they offer passionate insights into our experience as humans.

About our Guests

Michelle Stephens, Ph.D.
Michelle Stephens, Ph.D., is a licensed psychoanalyst in New York, a professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies, and currently the Dean of the Humanities at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. On November 1st, she begins a new role as the Founding Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers, New Brunswick, an institute sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is a graduate of the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology, and the author most recently of:  Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and The Black Male Performer, (Duke, 2014); essays on race and psychoanalysis in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA), Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, and Contemporary Psychoanalysis; and three co-edited collections in archipelagic studies: Archipelagic American Studies with Brian Russell Roberts (Duke 2017); Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago with Tatiana Flores (Duke 2017); and Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking with Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020).

 

BILL T. JONES (Artistic Director/Co-Founder/Choreographer
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company; Artistic Director: New York Live Arts) is the Associate Artist of the 2020 Holland Festival and recipient of the 2014 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award; the 2013 National Medal of Arts; the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors; a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography of the critically acclaimed FELA!; a 2007 Tony Award, 2007 Obie Award, and 2006 Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation CALLAWAY Award for his choreography for Spring Awakening; the 2010 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award; the 2007 USA Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship; the 2006 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreography for The Seven; the 2005 Wexner Prize; the 2005 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement; the 2005 Harlem Renaissance Award; the 2003 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize; and the 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award. In 2010, Mr. Jones was recognized as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and in 2000, The Dance Heritage Coalition named Mr. Jones “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure.”

Mr. Jones choreographed and performed worldwide with his late partner, Arnie Zane, before forming the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1982. He has created more than 140 works for his company. Mr. Jones is the Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, an organization that strives to create a robust framework in support of the nation’s dance and movement-based artists through new approaches to producing, presenting and educating. For more information visit www.newyorklivearts.org.

Braving the U.S. Election 

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Listen in on this conversation with renowned psychohistorian, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, and esteemed psychoanalyst/political commentator, Dr. Andrew Samuels, as they discuss the upcoming U.S. election. Our guests tackle a range of topics related to the current political storms. They call attention to the ways that human psychology and passion inform and intersect with the political. Their insights provide steady ground for turbulent times.

About our Guests

Dr. Robert J. Lifton
Robert Jay Lifton is a psychiatrist and writer who has taught at Yale, Harvard, The City University of New York, and is currently at Columbia University. His books include Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima which won a National Book Award, and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. And most recently Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry, and The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival.

Learn more about Robert Jay Lifton and read his statement on Trump.

Dr. Andrew Samuels

Andrew Samuels is recognized internationally as a political commentator working in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and depth psychology. He draws on a wide range of approaches, including post-Jungian, relational psychoanalytic, and humanistic ideas. Andrew is a Training Analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology, in private practice in London, and former Professor of Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex. He was Chair of the UK Council for Psychotherapy and co-founded Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility. He works as a consultant with political leaders, parties and activist groups in several countries, including the United States. He also consults to Britain’s National Health Service.

His many books have been translated into 21 languages, and include: Jung and the Post-Jungians (1985); A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis (1986); The Father (1986); Psychopathology (1989); The Plural Psyche (1989); The Political Psyche (1993); Politics on the Couch (2001); Persons, Passions, Psychotherapy, Politics (2014); Relational Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Counselling: Appraisals and Reappraisals (edited with Del Loewenthal, 2014). His latest books are A New Therapy for Politics? (2015) and Analysis and Activism: Social and Political Contributions of Jungian Analysis (edited with Emilija Kiehl and Mark Saban, 2016). A number of his articles, lectures and videos are available on: www.andrewsamuels.com

 

What’s Systemic About Racism?

Listen in on this enlightening conversation with internationally-renowned philosopher and professor, Dr. Judith Butler, and esteemed critical social theorist/psychoanalyst, Dr. Patricia Clough as they discuss systemic racism. Our guests offer a clear and understandable explanation of what differentiates systemic racism from individual prejudice. They also call attention to the ways that COVID has disproportionately impacted people of color and placed a powerful demand on us to begin a process of mourning. This episode is sure to raise listeners’ awareness and understanding of this pressing issue.

Dr. Judith Butler
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.  She is the author of several books, including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997), , Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), co-editor, Vulnerability in Resistance (2016) and The Force of Non-Violence, (2020).

 

Dr. Patricia Clough
Patricia Ticineto Clough is Professor of Sociology and Women Studies and a practicing psychoanalyst in NYC. She is faculty at the Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and on the training committee at ICP. She is author of a number of articles and books, Autoaffection, Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology, The User Unconscious, On Affect, Media and Measure and editor of Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death.

 


 
 

Border Crisis: A Psychoanalyst and Filmmaker Confront Family Separations

Listen in to the inspiring conversation with psychologist/psychoanalyst, Dr. Spyros Orfanos, and
award-winning documentary filmmaker, Ellen Goosenberg Kent. Our guests explore the
intersections of their work with refugees, asylum seekers, and those enduring family
separation. Both take you into the heart of their encounters with this difficult issue. This
episode is sure to evoke empathy and desire for action in the face of brutal injustice.


Ellen Goosenberg Kent
Academy Award-winning Filmmaker, Torn Apart 

 

 

Spyros D. Orfanos, PhD, ABPP
Past President of Division 39
Interim Director of NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy
 
 
 

Adolescents Falling: What Grownups Don’t See

Episode Description

Listen in to our continuing conversation with psychologist/psychoanalyst, Dr. Ken Corbett, and award-winning literary fiction writer, Susan Choi. Our guests take us behind the scenes of the stories told in their recent books. Through spirited discussion, they expand our perspectives on the ways in which adults can and do fail adolescents in their attempts to navigate the complexities of sexuality, race, gender, and aggression. This episode is sure to evoke timely reflections about the politics of identity and psychological struggle.
 

About Our Guests

Ken Corbett

Ken Corbett is Clinical Assistant Professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is the author of Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities and A Murder Over a Girl: Gender, Justice, Junior High. Dr. Corbett has a private practice in New York City.

Learn more about Dr. Corbett.

 

 

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010, she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, and Camp Tiger, her first book for children, came out in 2019. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn.

Learn more about Susan Choi.