Here, there, and everywhere – now

On October 29, 2021, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued what was, for many, a memorable statement on the status of race and racism within the psychological establishment. Framed as an "apology to people of color," the statement began by bluntly acknowledging that it had "failed" as an institutional leader through its direct complicity with racism and had "hurt many through racism, racial discrimination, and denigration of people of color, thereby falling short on its mission to benefit society and improve lives." It apologized for its "actions and inactions" and affirmed its commitment to antiracist work in the future.[1] 

This document was one of many such progressively minded institutional declarations publicized in the wake of George Floyd's murder in May 2020. Psychological and psychoanalytic institutions aplenty - from the American Psychoanalytic Association (June 2, 2020), to the British Psychoanalytical Society (June 10, 2020), the British Psychoanalytic Council (June 20, 2020), and the International Psychoanalytic Association (August 2021) - issued a variety of statements on antiracism that ranged from cursory denunciations (such as the IPA's) to more thorough self-examinations and apologies (like the American Psychoanalytic Association's).[2] What made the APA's statement unique, however, was the depth of the research detailed in its unflinching account of how psychology (broadly) and the APA (specifically) have upheld white supremacy within their discipline. Over the course of five thousand words, and with a reference list two pages long, the APA outlined four "levels" of racism - structural, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized - and documented everything from its role in overt forms of extermination and exclusion to the cultural biases baked into its founding theories. From this, the APA pledged ongoing work on both institutional and clinical levels to reimagine psychological care along more progressive lines. 

Statements such as these, and the calls to action they include, speak to a broader trend among contemporary psychological and psychoanalytic practitioners wherein clinical practice is being reimagined as inseparably intertwined with political action. Although the documents do not state it explicitly, these apologies acknowledge the political nature of the praxis that institutions such as the British Psychoanalytical Society disseminate and legitimate. In a 2020s world saturated with apocalyptic narratives about climate change, reproductive justice, genocide, gun violence, pandemics, social media, racism, AI, poverty, transphobia, education, LGBTQ rights, and resurgent multinational Christo-fascism, there has been a growing public demand among many psychoanalytic patients and practitioners to account for the embeddedness of the clinic in culture and politics. At the same time, academics who had previously embraced psychoanalysis primarily as a paradigm for the analysis of art and culture are newly taking up the clinic as a site of potentially progressive theorizing and acting - a movement that I hailed in the introduction to my book as a new "clinical turn" in humanistic social theorizing. For both fields, a politicized clinic is ascendant. 

As with the institutional apologies, much of this recent work draws its imperative from the scene of antiracist activism, where, for instance, the subtle but powerful role of whiteness is identified as an unconscious backdrop for many clinical encounters. As Natasha Stovall writes in her recent think piece, "Whiteness on the Couch," "Despite the outsize drama that whiteness brings to the public scene, it is still not much more than a cognitive wisp in most white Americans' daily brainscape, including those of most, but not all, white therapists. The silence about whiteness in most therapies is deafening." "Whiteness," she appends, "is nothing if not unconscious."[3] For Stovall and many others like her, contesting white supremacy means putting whiteness itself on the couch: both reframing as "culture bound syndromes" particular to whiteness what have long been billed as social epidemics (mass school shootings; anorexia; malignant narcissism) while also reconsidering the extent to which clinical practice itself is structured by racialized norms. In fact, there has been a recent efflorescence of therapeutic and psychoanalytic writing about race, racism, and the clinic, with frequent calls for revised practice in the name, specifically, of antiracism.[4] 

But whiteness and (anti)racism more generally are just one aspect of a wider trend. Over the past eight years, especially, there has been a boom in clinical practices that position themselves as extensions of social justice movements. In 2016, for instance, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California inaugurated a new training track on Community Psychoanalysis that "challenges theformal definition and scope of psychoanalysis . . . by broadening how psychoanalysis is defined, who benefits from it, and what is deemedteachable at a psychoanalytic institute."[5] With clinical work directed toward refugees and asylum seekers, the incarcerated, and first responders, the CPT&C foregoes any understanding of the clinic as dyadic, privatized, or apolitical.[6] Similarly, The Red Clinic, a transnational collective of analysts working to combine communist politics with psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic practice, promises a low-fee and politically progressive alternative to what it implicitly diagnoses as the capitalist and neocolonialist design of much psychotherapy. By offering a "sustainable provision of psychotherapy for the working-class and the oppressed in the broadest senses of theterms," The Red Clinic addresses the psychic aspect of social organization and explicitly reimagines the clinic as part of a political projectfor the more just redistribution of wealth.[7] In São Paulo, three major psychoanalytic free clinics have been established since 2016: the Public Clinic of Vila Itororó and two Open Psychoanalysis Clinics on Casa de Povo and Praça Roosevelt, respectively. A major hub for revisionist psychoanalytic practice, Brazil is home to numerous clinical innovations like these, a swelling movement that has been dubbed "psychoanalysis in the streets"/"psicanálise na rua." Where once the idea of the clinic as a site of neutrality felt like a promise thatembodied one of psychoanalysis's most unique ideals - that of a realm of nonjudgmental free association - increasingly it has been reframed as a peril, a practical impossibility whose function masks hegemonic normative values as incontestable truth. 

These are just a few examples of the varieties of practice being innovated in multinational locations. Yet, as I discussed in the introduction, many of the lessons taken from these recent clinical programs have long been at play within psychoanalytic practice, especially when understood globally. Not only, as Elizabeth Danto showed, were the first generation of psychoanalysts across Europe someof the practitioners least wedded to the orthodoxies of the fee, the dyadic consulting room, or the analytic hour.[8] But, as psychoanalysis disseminated globally, practitioners throughout the Global South especially adapted their practices freely in order to address the different sociopolitical demands produced by the intersection of colonialism, racism, and capitalism. Rejecting the racist and colonialist split in the distribution of suffering - psychic, if white and from the Global North; physical, if Black, Brown, or from the Global South – decolonial clinicians throughout the Global South have long sought to mobilize the clinic as a sphere through which to contest oppression. This legacy is the subject of Raluca Soreanu's UKRI-funded research project, "Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for Our Times," where she consolidates the revitalized interest in the clinic to track the many contemporary initiatives around the world that experiment with and from the model of the free clinic.[9] More than simple treatment sites, these clinics "have set up alternative points of accumulation, principles of circulation and modes of redistribution, grounding an alternative economy of care" that takes "steps toward a psychosocial theory of value" where currency itself is reimaginedthrough the clinical frame.[10] As Ankhi Mukherjee discusses at length in her own study of free clinics in London, Bangalore, and New York, psychoanalytic free clinics can even be thought of as addressing mental health gaps resultant from global poverty given the much higher recorded instances of psychological diagnoses like depression and anxiety among the economically dispossessed.[11] Whether through the model of the free clinic or through an ever expanding range of adapted clinical techniques, the clinic is one of the leading sites for envisioning a humanistic mental health service that furthers the itinerary of contemporary justice movements. 

One way to understand the value of these clinical projects - beyond their potential for on-the-ground help to individual people and communities – is that they explicitly reject the spurious separation between practice and politics that has long haunted the Anglophone psychoanalytic tradition, especially. As I detail throughout this book, even clinical techniques that deny the political and position themselves as the height of orthodoxy (Kleinian reparation, Winnicottian good enough mothering, Bowlbian emotional security, etc.) take on necessarily political work – however much disavowal may mask and mystify that function. Ironically, psychoanalysis itself is perhaps the best cartographer of the dangers of disavowal since, through the perverse operation of simultaneous knowledge and denial, disavowal has an unparalleled power to bind potential transformation to conscious recognition, refusing change on the basis that knowledge is already both known and unknown and therefore not available for conscious assimilation. Ignorance is not a passive but an active epistemological stance. In the clinic, this can mean that the reputedly "apolitical" does its dirtiest – and most effective – work shoring up contingent and contestable values through the malleable practice of analytic interpretation. For instance, do we read a trans woman's persecutory dreams of penises as a phobic reaction to her own "unresolved" sexual differentiation? Or as a traumatic symptom indexing the patriarchal hypervaluation of this particular part of her anatomy? Does a woman's repeated engagement in so-called risky sex signify her openness to new experience and her autonomy over herown sexuality? Or is it attention-seeking behavior that points to long-standing abuse? Why is it that the diagnostic language of patient "seduction" accrues so asymmetrically to women? How respond to a student patient who says they can no longer afford the analytic fee? How decide which resistances require adjustment of the analyst's technique and which represent an unconscious defense of the patient? How treat – as in Fanon's famous case – a Black patient's dream of turning white? 

To some extent, these hypotheticals are falsely posed. Many clinicians working today would likely say that their work involves holding numerous possible interpretive truths in mind at once and that it seeks to broaden rather than narrow the range of narrativepossibilities available to patients. "Reality" for psychoanalysis is as much psychical as sociological, meaning that in an ideal situation it would always be the patient's narrative and perception that is given precedence. After all, one way of understanding many analysts' thoroughgoing commitment to an ideal like neutrality is to recall that it is typically intended as a safeguardfor the patient, as a method for keeping the clinical space free from the analyst's own values or judgments. To differing degrees depending on one's analytic orientation or school, then, the clinic and the analyst's interpretations and punctuations would all address the patient's unique constellation of unconscious signifiers. In this regard, it would be difficult (if not outright impossible) to imagine any possible interpretive range for the previous scenarios without the nuanced personal history afforded by the analysis itself. Very little can be done with a psychoanalytic interpretation imagined in the abstract. 

Yet for however much we might laud this ideal, one of the points I have maintained throughout this book is that there is still anunavoidable negotiation at play in any clinical situation when it comes to arbitrating between the analyst's interpretive epistemology and that of the patient. As Adam Phillips aptly queries, "Who, for example, decides what constitutes a problem for the patient? And by what criteria?"[12] As Phillips points out, interpretation is one of the most ethically and politically fraught aspects of the analytic situation since the process of determining what counts as a problem for the patient is always bound up with deciding who has the authority to adjudicate it. Any disavowal of this authority - or any refusal to acknowledge the politicality (which is to say, the contingency and contestability) of the values subtending it - runs the risk of simply exercising the analyst's own ideology rather than exorcising thepatient's unconscious. By casting subjective priorities as uncontested analytic truth, claims to the apolitical or politically neutral clinic exert a conformist demand all their own. 

Take the concept of clinical boundaries, for instance, which I discussed in chapter 3 and which many practicing analysts today still treat as one of the most necessary aspects of any professional treatment. As an especially sacrosanct buzzword of 2020s "therapy speak," it can feel difficult to contest the appeal to maintaining proper boundaries, particularly when they implicitly promise the alignment of psychological health with ethical professional conduct. Yet as the recent case of Jonah Hill has demonstrated with startling transparency, no "boundary" - personal or professional - is naturalized fact separable from questions of power and politics. In Hill's case, the demand for appropriate boundaries was leveraged as a rebranded form of patriarchal control and masculine sex right in relation to women. "Surfing with men," "modeling," "sexual pictures," and "friendships with women . . . in unstable places" were all, for Hill, boundary violations perpetrated by his ex-girlfriend. Although many clinical psychologists and therapists would testify that Hill misused (or even "weaponized") the concept of boundaries, contorting a framework for self-governance into a means for controlling others, I think the case actually provides a much deeper object lesson about the protean nature of boundaries themselves. Lily Scherlis has recently written on the subject and has described how boundaries "have a seductive moral authority as the dominant metaphor for how human relationships should work"; derived from a recognizably capitalistic property relation in an economy of scarcity, they provide a persuasive strategy for safeguarding precious resources and autonomy, encouraging you to relate "to yourself like a plot of land you own." Yet, writes Scherlis, there is no "deeper plane of existence where boundaries live . . . no substratum beneath the appearances of things where lines between people are etched: boundaries are just a wildly influential story about how people work."[13] 

For Scherlis, our current cultural fetish with boundaries emerges from decades of distilled self-help literature propagated during the Cold War, not from the "pure gold" of psychoanalysis proper, which she preserves as the one psychological realm committed to"muck[ing] up people's boundaries, to trouble[ing] their placement, their firmness, their brittleness."[14] This is a version of psychoanalysis that I too value and hope to see realized. However, I think this idealized characterization ultimately oversells the field's purity when it comes to many of these normative psychological shibboleths. Although Sigmund Freud and perhaps even Jacques Lacan may not have held much store by "good boundaries," psychoanalytic orientations today are incredibly diverse and varied with many trainings and practitioners keenly vested in defining and maintaining boundaries, particularly in the clinic. Beyond the routinepathologization of various forms of metapsychological and interpersonal boundary transgression and/or eroticization - something I have personally experienced in even Lacanian clinics, which typically imagine themselves as unbeholden to the more normative covenants of their object and ego-oriented kin - there are very few analysts today who would not, for instance, see an analyst showing up at a patient's house as a significant violation of boundaries, with this judgement likely made regardless of the effect it had on the patient. Indeed, it is primarily due to incidents like this that the significance of maverick analysts (such as Pakistani-British psychoanalyst Masud Khan) has been minimized or suppressed within the British Psychoanalytical Society.[15] Our difficulty in even imagining this scenario as anything other than damaging for the patient speaks to how ingrained many norms around professional boundaries are, and how allied they have come to be with a normative ethico-psychological notion of the good. Indeed, boundaries accrue their professional authority from the implicit moral claim that they stand on the side of patient welfare. But what if the analyst's arrival at the patient's house could be shown (leaving aside: How? By what criteria?) to be for the patient's own good? How respond if or when a boundary introduces harm? 

My advocacy here is not for doing away with clinical boundaries as though such an erasure would produce a situation any less arbitrary, conflicted, or potentially violent than that found in instances of their self-serving instantiation. Rather, I just want to identify that any aspect of a clinical situation, even one as seemingly self-evident as professional boundaries, is a consequence of interpretivejudgement about and contestation over the nature of the good, which is often taken, through various degrees of interpretive alchemy, to mean the patient's good. Ivan Ward, in his comments about social clinics, puts this well when he asks us to continually reflect on the power asserted in the process of creating, maintaining, and enforcing boundaries, both clinically and institutionally. 
We should question the way that psychoanalysts and others employ the notion of boundaries as if they were making universal and value-free claims. To my mind, the term is often used as a kind of fetish, and the 'boundary' is put in place not for rational reasons butin order to establish certain patterns of relationships which put the person drawing the boundary in a position of dominance. Psychotherapists may be discombobulated if you violate any of these precious - one might say sacred - boundaries, despite the fact that they are often arbitrarily chosen.[16] 

Such questioning is vital, for Ward and others, because the retooling of some of psychoanalysis's self-legitimating orthodoxies enables a greater diversity of practice, particularly when it comes to situations where psychoanalytic orthodoxy can be seen as its own form ofboundary keeping: a professional gatekeeping designed to secure the reproduction of like-for-like. To put a deconstructive spin on it, boundaries are a subtle yet effective means for reproducing social exclusion since only by delimiting the exterior, the "not-me," caninternal self-identity be maintained. 

I have therefore tried throughout this book to unpick the often surreptitious political work performed in twentieth-century clinics, both orthodox and heterodox, in the hopes of dispelling any refuge in the mythology of a neutral, apolitical, or benign clinic. Refusing any reading of the clinic as having a singular, consolidated, and predetermined effect - either for better or for worse - I consider instead how the clinic is a prime site for the elaboration of what Michel Foucault, in his discussion of ethics, has described as "pessimistic activism." 
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger.[17] 

Thought in terms of the clinic, which Foucault famously (if uncharitably) censured for its "confessional" imperative, this cautionary activism captures something of the historical variability that is necessarily at play when, each and every day, we must determine anew what constitutes the "main danger." Foucault's point here is that danger circulates because of the changeability of history itself; no clinic nor technique can be treated as an a priori good devoid of context. To embrace this uniquely pessimistic call to activism as an alternative ethos for the clinic is therefore to release any certainty we might hold about the universal value or efficacy of work that, however frequently or recently, met its intention. 

In this spirit, I want to close with my own final note of "pessimistic activism" concerning the polyvalent political capacity of those clinics that embrace an expressly social justice mission, fashioning themselves as bastions of progressive practice. We might easily be forgiven for a wholesale endorsement of these visions - not only because they seem to answer psychoanalysis's long-standing rhetorical foe ("But how is it political?") but also because they make a promise that many,in our era of intersecting crises, have felt is badly needed: that the amelioration of individual misery (even if just to Freud's famous"ordinary unhappiness") would contribute to political transformation. The fantasy here is an alignment of wills: as goes the clinic, so goes the patient - and, ideally, the larger social order. This is a fantasy I too find appealing, even if there are significant qualifications to consider when it comes to the highly particular arrangement of each individual practice. 

As I stated in the introduction, to acknowledge that the clinic is political is not to advocate for a politicized wave of analytic persuasion, which would likely be as just as structurally ineffective as it would be individually harmful. Moreover, as I have recognized time and again, there is much in clinical practice that operates under the capacious sign of social justice that itself bears further scrutiny. I would not be the first, for instance, to highlight the flatness of the "multicultural competency" trainings found in many clinical institutes, which embrace a familiar liberal celebration of "identity" and "diversity," presenting minoritized racial and ethnic groups as homogenous subfields for (implicitly white) specialization.[18] The assumed audience of such trainings (white, cis-gender, heterosexual, North American or European) is relevant if predictable, and it repeats a common trope in much of the literature on this topic wherein work intended to challenge racial, sexual, colonial, and gender hierarchy is implicitly addressed to those in privileged positions, thus offering the narrowest possible imaginary for change as a form of paternalist recognition while simultaneously reifying in the field's formative but implicit whiteness. This is what Tomiwa Owolade has recently described as the "narcissism of anti-racist therapy," a designation that speaks to both the popularity of this type of literature and its signature motifs.[19] Here, the problem is not the political-economicstructures that support and enforce cisheteropatriarchal white supremacy - neoliberal capitalism, policing, mass incarceration, compulsory heterosexuality, the devaluation of reproductive labor, and sexual domination - but the individual consciousness and emotional economies of (white) analysts who are positioned (and position themselves) as both problem and solution. Take this passage from Helen Morgan's recent book, The Work of Whiteness: A Psychoanalytic Perspective: 
The existence of those who publicly avow white supremacy and engage in overtly racist language and acts can allow "white liberals" to perpetuate the illusion that, being not like them, we are therefore not racist. Meanwhile our racism, which has the same roots as that of the white supremacist, goes underground to operate at the more invisible level of white privilege and white solipsism.[20] 

The rhetorical first person plural is difficult to ignore here - "we racists," "our racism" - given the performative, confessional, and invitational work it enacts, making absolutely clear that this is a book about whiteness for white readers. But so too is the status of "the liberal" conspicuous given how it is presented as both a position with which the reader is imagined to identify and as the only seemingalternative to the (white) supremacist. In this narrowing, not only do long and powerful histories of Leftist activism and critique, including those by Black radicals like Fanon (who is cited only five times throughout the entire text), disappear. But the scope of liberalism itself becomes unwieldy and difficult to define since it is used primarily to designate a nebulous constellation of individual affects and values, not a set of policies or party affiliations. 

Clinically, this absorption with the paradoxes of liberal consciousness under white supremacy produces mixed results. Morgan narrates the case of her patient, "Janet," who brought racist associations into the analysis only to then quickly pronounce them resolved, inviting Morgan to ignore them and move on in what she describes as an act of conspiratorial collusion and disavowal. While Morganastutely refuses this invitation, providing an instructive case study of clinical anti-racism motored primarily by the analyst's own political commitments, she nevertheless presents the ubiquity of internal racism (both Janet's and her own) as in conflict with their liberalism - rather than as what many scholars, including Charles W. Mills, have shown to be the basis of liberalism itself.[21] This is atension throughout Morgan's work, which could be characterized as both a dissection of the contradictions inherent in the psychic life ofliberalism (silence, colorblind thinking, self-reliance, etc) and a faith in its capacity to be reformed through individual consciousness, analysis, and intention. 

Part of what I am trying to draw out of this example is the wide variety of ways that contemporary clinicians position the work of social justice in the clinic. Although not all will share Morgan's fascination with liberalism, there is a broad preference among many justice-oriented clinical practices for the embrace of a humanistic epistemological schema that prioritizes conceptual frameworks of trauma, repair, critical consciousness/conscientização, mental health, and even liberation. This corresponds with what I see as a larger contemporary turn toward relational and interpersonal interpretive styles across the humanities and critical social sciences andaway from the self-undoing protocols of much poststructuralist thinking, including Jacques Lacan's. But such practices often entail implicit fantasies about psychic wholeness, well-being, and self-sovereignty that reproduce a quasi-adaptational or "curable" subject who is imagined to be both thoroughly self-conscious and potentially remedied of the mollifying injuries of late neoliberal, neoimperial capitalism. Even when it comes to the free clinic movement these concerns manifest since, if we take psychoanalysis's insights about the unconscious and internal conflict seriously, then it is difficult to understand in advance what the personal (or political) outcomes of even the most Left-leaning clinical projects might be. Although I do not subscribe to the view that the only way to secure the patient's investment in an analysis is through the instantiation of a fee - after all, the "cost" of an analysis can be variously located - it is nevertheless important to consider how such alternative economies of exchange sit within larger structures and institutions, where the free clinic could become nothing more than a paternalistic arm of the psychoanalytic institution's requisite charity capitalism. Or, where the free clinic functions as a panacea for the increasingly privatized, neoliberal health care system, supplementing and buttressing one of the most easily identifiable causes of social harm. Indeed, as Jordan Osserman has recently noted in conversation, it is typically the most institutionally precarious clinicians (including trainees, immigrants, genderqueer folks, and people of color) who take on the low-paid labor of free clinic work, meaning that the labor practices of clinicians themselves are implicated in the structural inequities they seek to redress. 

Thus, even as I find it vital to take up the clinic as a political space, I also think there is danger in treating psychoanalysis andthe clinic as if they constitute predictable, primary, or sufficient political action. As with my analysis of the historical case studies throughout this book, the political promise of the clinic as a site for revolutionary action and engagement is genuinely mixed. When I first began to think seriously about the clinic, I remember being inspired by Leo Bersani's exchange with Adam Phillips in their coauthored Intimacies. In response to Phillips's creative rethinking about the purpose of clinical psychoanalysis - where, in lieu of "normative health" or "personal growth," he instead proposes that the clinic, with its unique relational structure, might be one of the best places for the experimental realization of the "new relational modes" that Foucault was apt to call for in the latter years of his work - Bersani wonders if the clinic's most radical promise might only be realizable outside or beyond the clinic itself. He writes, "I will be considering psychoanalysis as an inspiration for modes of exchange that can only take place outside of psychoanalysis."[22] 

As I finish this book, my thinking has returned to this provocative speculation as encapsulating something enigmatic about the appeal of the clinic today. Given Foucault's call to pessimistic activism, I can offer no ready-made or surefire practices that allow the clinic to transcend danger or to realize any particular political mission assuredly. All I have are new ways to think about the peril - and promise - it affords. 

• Carolyn Laubender, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, where she is the founding Co-Director of the MA in Gender & Sexuality Studies.

• Excerpted from The Political Clinic by Carolyn Laubender.  Copyright (c) 2024 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

  Footnotes

1. American Psychological Association, "Apology to People of Color for APA's Role in Promoting, Perpetuating, and Failing to Challenge Racism, Racial Dis- crimination, and Human Hierarchy in U.S.," October 29, 2021, https://www.apa.org/about/policy/racism-apology.
2. The ApsA's statement has since become the lengthy Holmes Commission on Racial Equity in the Psychoanalytic Profession, released Juneteenth 2023. At over four hundred pages, and including two hundred pages of appendices that detail original qualitative research about the role of race and racism in the field, it is now the single most thorough report on the topic.
3. Natasha Stovall, "Whiteness on the Couch," Longreads, August 12, 2019, https://longreads.com/2019/08/12/whiteness-on-the-couch/.
4. Recent work in this genre runs the gamut from rather facile and white-catering "therapy talk" in the tradition of Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility to more rigorous and critical scholarship that moves beyond an imagined self-focused white audience assiduously trying to interrogate and secure their own anti/ racism. For a selection of this trend, see Michael O'Loughlin, "Whiteness and the Psychoanalytic Imagination," Contemporary Psychoanalysis 56, no. 4 (2020): 1–22; Alexandra Woods, "The Work Before Us: Whiteness and the Psychoanalytic Institute," Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 25, no. 1 (2020): 230–49; Donald Moss, "On Having Whiteness," Journal of the American Psy- choanalytic Association 69, no. 2 (2021): 355–71; Neil Altman, White Privilege: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2020); Helen Morgan, The Work of Whiteness: A Psychoanalytic Perspective (London: Routledge, 2021); Molly Merson, "The Whiteness Taboo: Interrogating Whiteness in Psychoanal- ysis," Psychoanalytic Dialogues 31, no. 1 (2021): 13–27; Fakhry Davids, "Race and Analytic Neutrality: Clinical and Theoretical Considerations," Psychoanalytic Quarterly 91 (2022): 371–93; Hannah Zeavin, "Unfree Associations: Parasitic Whiteness On and Off the Couch," n+1 Magazine 42 (2022), https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-42/essays/unfree-associations/; Tomiwa Owolade, "The Narcissism of Anti-Racist Therapy," New Statesman, January 25, 2023, https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2023/01/narcissism-anti-racist-therapy-helen-morgan-book. For older, foundational pieces, see Kimberlyn Leary, "Race, Self-Disclosure, and 'Forbidden Talk': Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Clinical Practice," Psychoanalytic Quarterly 66, no. 2 (1997): 163–89; Lynne Layton, Nancy Caro Hollander, and Susan Gutwill, Psychoanal- ysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Neil Altman, "Whiteness," Psychoanalytic Quarterly 75, no. 1 (2006): 45–72.
5. Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, "Overview," https://pinccptc.org/.
6. A few years later, following Floyd's murder, Tracey L. Sidesinger and Car- los Padrón founded the New York Center for Community Psychoanalysis (NYCCP), which was "developed to address longstanding systemic racial and class disparities in the provision of mental health care," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2fJRg7_dNM.
7. The Red Clinic, "Mission Statement," https://www.redclinic.org/statement.
8. Elizabeth Danto, Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
9. For this project's published outputs, see this special issue: "Psychoanalysis for the People: Free Clinics and the Social Mission of Psychoanalysis," Psycho- analysis and History 24, no. 3 (2022).
10. Matt ffytche, Joanna Ryan, and Raluca Soreanu, "Psychoanalysis for the People: Interrogations and Innovations," Psychoanalysis and History 24, no. 3 (2022): 258.
11. Ankhi Mukherjee, Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). To this, we could add the schol- arship and practices of contemporary decolonial clinical-intellectuals like Patricia Gherovici, Gohar Homayounpour, Lara Sheehi, Avgi Saketopoulou, and Daniel Gaztambide, who all foreground their political commitment to justice through their clinical work.
12. Adam Phillips, "Keeping It Moving: Commentary on Judith Butler's 'Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification,' " in Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 155.
13. Lily Scherlis, "Boundary Issues: How Boundaries Became the Rules for Mental Health—and Explain Everything," Parapraxis Magazine, https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/boundary-issues.
14. Scherlis, "Boundary Issues."
15. Within mainstream clinical trainings, Khan's work is rarely discussed—or, if it is, it is typically framed as exemplifying a dereliction of duty. Indeed, his entire archive held at the IPA was surreptitiously ordered to be destroyed in 2019 by Paul Crake (executive director), Virginia Ungar (president), Sergio Nick (vice president), and Andrew Brook (treasurer) without the consultation of the IPA's board.
16. Ivan Ward, "Social Clinics and Analytic Boundaries," Psychoanalysis and History 24, no. 3 (2022): 372.
17. Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Prog- ress," in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: New Press, 1994), 253–80.
18. For further reading on this, see the foundational piece D. W. Sue and D. Sue, "Barriers to Effective Cross-Cultural Counselling," Journal of Counselling Psychology 24, no. 5 (1977): 420–29.
19. Owolade, "The Narcissism of Anti-Racist Therapy."
20. Morgan, The Work of Whiteness, 3.
21. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
22. Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 4.