Join us for this lyrical yet sobering conversation between psychoanalyst, film maker, and professor, Dr. Ricardo (Rico) Ainslie and anthropologist, professor and author, Dr. Angela Garcia. Through offering us an intimate look into the communities they work with and belong to, our guests bring us into the lives of those impacted by the historical trauma of land loss, displacement, and suffering. Using an ethnographic approach that is rooted in subject-centered ethics, our guests share clinical wisdom rooted in identifying the absence of institutional recovery programs as the site of community care.

About Our Guests

Ricardo Ainslie
A native of Mexico City, Ricardo Ainslie uses books, documentary films, and photographic exhibits to capture and depict subjects of social and cultural interest. He holds the M.K. Hage Centennial Professorship in Education at the University of Texas at Austin and is Director for Research and Education for AMPATH Mexico at Dell Medical School. He has lectured at psychoanalytic institutes across the country and is a founding member and past president of Austin Psychoanalytic. He serves on the editorial boards of “Psychoanalytic Psychology,” “JAPA” and “Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society.” His honors and awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Bellagio Residency, APA Division 39 Science Award, and the National Multicultural Conference and Summit’s Lifetime Achievement Community Engagement Award, and, most recently, a Fulbright Scholar Award at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, Austria.

Angela Garcia
Angela Garcia is an anthropologist and writer. Her first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande, received the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and the Pen Center USA Award for Exceptional First Book. Angela received her PhD from Harvard University and is a professor of anthropology at Stanford University. Her forthcoming book, The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in Spring 2024. In addition to her academic and literary career, she has worked as a baker, hotel maid, corset model, dishwasher, phone banker, record store clerk, HIV activist, waitress, among other jobs. Angela was born in New Mexico and now lives in San Francisco with her two children.

Join us for this profoundly moving conversation between colleagues and close friends, Dr. Judith Butler and Dr. Ken Corbett, as they engage with and reflect on the altered landscape of our world since the COVID-19 pandemic. Our guests share personally impactful insights and clinical wisdom rooted in phenomenology and psychoanalysis.

About Our Guests

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, and author of several books, most recently What World is This, A Pandemic Phenomenology; The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind; Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning; Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?; Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism; and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, among many others books and articles.

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.

Join us for this intimate and intellectual conversation between Dr. Gail Lewis and Dr. Lara Sheehi, both of whom are esteemed authors, activists, psychoanalytic therapists, and professors as they engage each others’ stories about how their commitments to the decolonization of psychoanalytic discourses evolved. Our guests offer cogent social and clinical critiques that offer a way through painful lived experiences of otherness and alienation.

About Our Guests

Lara Sheehi
Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program where she is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. She is the co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022). Lara is the president-elect of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), the Chair of the Teachers’ Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara is also a contributing editor to the Psychosocial Foundation’s Parapraxis Magazine and on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network.

Gail Lewis
Gail Lewis is Presidential Visiting Professor at Yale University (2021-22) and Reader Emerita in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Gender Studies, LSE. She trained, first, as a Psychodynamic Psychotherapist and then as a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic. Her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of black feminist and anti-racist struggle and through a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. She was a member of the
Brixton Black Women’s Group and one of the founder members of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, Britain’s first national organisation for black and other women of colour. She is currently writing a book on Black feminism in Britain and has written on feminism, intersectionality, the welfare state and citizenship, psychoanalysis and Black feminism, as well as the psychosocial dynamics of racialised-gendered experience.
Her publications include ‘Race, Gender and Social Welfare: encounters in a postcolonial society’ (2000), Polity Press; ‘Citizenship: personal lives and social policy’ (2004), ed. Polity Press; ‘Birthing Racial Difference: conversations with my mother and others’ (2009) Studies in the Maternal; ‘Where Might I Find You’: Popular Music and the Internal Space of the Father’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society (2012); and ‘In the Absence of Truth, At Least Not the Lie: travels towards self, other, relatedness’, BPS, Psychology of Women Section Review
(2012), among several other publications. Whilst at Yale in 2021, she presented a paper entitled Black Feminisms and the Psychotherapeutic
Moment to the Connecticut Society of Psychoanalytic Psychology. She works alongside artists and other creative practitioners to explore, disrupt and offer
alternatives to the violent and violating representations of black and queer lives. She and Foluke Taylor were in conversation, discussing ‘Black Feminisms in the Consulting Room’ as part of Confer’s module Women on the Couch (2020). She, along with Barby Asante, Foluke Taylor and others, recorded a reading of M. NourbeSe Philip’s essay ‘Caribana: African Roots and Continuities’ for the podcast Dipsaus (first available to coincide with the
on-line version of London’s annual Nottinghill Carnival in 2020). She also participated in NourbeSe Philips Zong! Global 2020. She believes that intergenerational conversations, as part of process of ancestral connection and guidance, are among the most urgent in these times. She is also a season ticket holder for Arsenal soccer club.

Join us for this hard-hitting conversation between Kathryn “Kitty” Kolbert, distinguished attorney who defended reproductive rights in the U.S. Supreme Court, and Dr. Katie Gentile, esteemed psychoanalyst, professor, and author, as they tackle the current assault on womens’ freedom. Our guests put forth both a cultural critique and propose necessary actions for this time of crisis. Listeners will connect a newly nuanced understanding to more effective action.

About Our Guests

Kathryn Kolbert
Kathryn Kolbert is the co-author with Julie F. Kay of Controlling Women: What We Must Do Now to Save Reproductive Freedom (available from Hachette Books 7.13.2021) where they share the story of one of the most divisive issues in American politics through behind-the-scenes personal narratives and moving accounts of women and health care providers at the heart of nearly five decades of legal battles.
A public-interest attorney, journalist, and executive in the non-profit world, Kolbert has had a long and distinguished career advancing women’s rights. A co-founder of the Center for Reproductive Rights, she has been recognized by The National Law Journal as one of the “100 Most Influential Lawyers in America.” In 1992, Kolbert argued the landmark case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey before the U.S. Supreme Court and has been widely credited with saving Roe v. Wade.
For nine years, Kolbert served as the Constance Hess Williams ’66 Director of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College, which she founded in 2009.  During her time at Barnard she also co-founded the Athena Film Festival. Before joining Barnard, Kolbert was the President and CEO of People For the American Way and its foundation and was the creator and executive producer of NPR’s Justice Talking, an award-winning public radio program. Kolbert has lectured at colleges and universities and organizations across the nation and is a frequent commentator on leadership, constitutional, and women’s rights issues in the national media.

Katie Gentile
Katie Gentile, Ph.D. is Professor and Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York). She is the author of Creating bodies: Eating disorders as self-destructive survival and the 2017 Gradiva Award winning The Business of being made: The temporalities of reproductive technologies, in psychoanalysis and cultures, both from Routledge. She is editor of the journal, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and on the editorial boards of Women’s Studies Quarterly and Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She is on the faculty of New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and the Psychoanalysis and the Critical Social Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has also taught classes on eco-psychoanalysis through human exceptionalism and critical race theory at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She is in private practice in New York City. She is also a recording musician who has toured and plays violin with a number of bands.

Join us for this inspiring conversation between Ken Corbett, psychoanalyst and author, and Maggie Nelson, MacArthur Genius Award-winning writer, as they grapple with our efforts to find middle-ground in a contentious world. Our guests guide us toward a more nuanced engagement with the many fights for freedom we face in our daily lives. Listeners will find creative perspectives on sex, parenting, and climate activism, among others topics.

About Our Guests

Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including, most recently, the New York Times best seller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner, The Argonauts. She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from the Creative Capital Foundation, and an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She is currently a professor of English at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

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.