Expanding Our Seeing: A Reply to Levy-Warren and Gaztambide

ABSTRACT

In this piece we respond to the generous and generative commentaries by Marsha Levy Warren and Daniel Gaztambide. We reflect on Levy Warren’s appeal for greater theorization around the mechanism for how the sociocultural surround becomes internalized and propose Karim Dajani’s work to expand beyond the process of interpersonal internalization. We then respond to Gaztambide’s astute questioning of how our framework for “freedom” has been co-opted or colonized and begin to interrogate for ourselves a few registers on which this has occurred and why. We consider how this colonization has also contributed to our misattribution of the concept of freedom and autonomy to a white, global north value system and centering. We then revisit the issue of race in our article and address Gaztambide’s helpful offering of racial capitalism as a broader system in which we are implicated.

This article responds to:

Rediscovering Freedom and Responsibility through a Decolonial Psychoanalytic Lens: Discussion of Friedman & Nakash’s “Repetition Compulsion and Sociopolitical Trauma”

Musings About “Repetition Compulsion and Sociopolitical Trauma: A Neoliberal Artifact”

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Drs Levy Warren and Gaztambide for their generous, thought-provoking discussion pieces. It feels exciting and humbling that our ideas have been taken up and responded to with such careful attention. The opportunity to be in conversation with them expands our thinking in critical and generative ways. We will first address Dr. Levy Warren’s piece and then turn to Dr. Gaztambide’s response, hoping that our reply is the beginning of an ongoing dialogue and that we can continue to address some of the ideas we are not able to take up below.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne Friedman

Anne Friedman, Ph.D., LCSW is a social worker at a Federally Qualified Health Center in Oakland, CA, where she also maintains a private practice. Her research concerns power and identity in the workplace, and she has a particular interest in the impact of neoliberalism on public sector psychotherapy services.

Ora Nakash

Ora Nakash, Ph.D. is a Professor and Licensed Clinical Psychologist at the School for Social Work at Smith College, Northampton, MA. Her research focuses on the study of the effects of social and cultural factors on mental health with specific interest in mental health disparities with the goal of improving the access, equity and quality of these services for disadvantaged and minority populations. She has a private practice in Newton, MA.