Principles For Teaching Issues Of Diversity In A Psychoanalytic Context

Abstract

This article presents an annotated collection of principles for teaching the subject of diversity from a psychoanalytic perspective, within psychoanalytic training and other pedagogical contexts as well. Employing an experiential, process-oriented, and hermeneutic-dialogic approach, the author emphasizes the importance of openness and humility over competence and mastery, on the part of both teachers and learners. The goal is to promote curiosity and to increase awareness of its curtailment when addressing issues of diversity, difference and otherness.

Keywords:

• diversity
• diversities
• hermeneutics
• radical openness
• discrimination
• curiosity

Notes

1 In this article, the term “diversity” is used in both its singular and plural forms, depending on context. My general preference is to use the plural, “diversities,” because it draws attention to the plurality of the forms of difference and otherness that might be considered when attempting to understand varieties of mental experience determined by one form of group membership and another. While this article and the conference proceedings with which it is associated (Petrucelli et al., 2019) focused on the diversity category of race in particular, the principles described herein pertain to all of the diversities. These include race, ethnicity, gender, religious status, sexual orientation, physical ability status, age status, socioeconomic status, nationality, recovery status, relationship status, immigration status, education status, incarceration status, attractiveness status, employment status, and others.

2 Please see my two-part summary and critique of the multicultural competency movement for a concise account of this trend and its limitations (Hart, 2017b, 2019).

3 I use “un-engagement” rather than “disengagement” because it captures a dissociation-based process of staying away, rather than moving away. Disengagement implies that engagement was once there to begin with.

4 Here I am talking about the threat of losing one’s previous sense of what is known about both self and other, thereby losing the sense of predictability of life.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anton Hart

Anton Hart, Ph.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst and on the Faculty of the William Alanson White Institute in New York City. He supervises at the Derner Institute of Adelphi University. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of Psychoanalytic Psychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He teaches in the Department of Psychology at Mt. Sinai Hospital, at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, at the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute, and at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies National Program, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia. He serves as Chair of the Diversities Section of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Department of Psychoanalytic Education. He is in full-time private practice of psychoanalysis, individual, family and couple therapy, psychotherapy supervision and consultation, and organizational consultation, in New York City.