What Do We Want to Build Together? Discussion of Sadek

ABSTRACT

In calling for both honest, engaged conversation and structural, material change, including redistribution of power and resources, Sadek offers an orienting vision for racial justice within psychoanalytic communities. Engaging with these ideas, this paper considers how dialogue and structural change, as well as integration in both an intrapsychic and a social, structural sense, might be linked with, and build on, each other. Drawing in part from personal experience, I also reflect on the role that sustained, collaborative work across racial difference – with a pragmatic focus on building something new together at an institutional level, as well as an attentiveness to process at an internal and interpersonal level – might play in fostering the kinds of integration and change Sadek advocates.

Acknowledgments

For what we have built together, and learned about ourselves and each other in the process, I would like to thank the members of the ITF, CERCCL, and ForAll; and Han Yu.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ See Woods (2020) for further suggestions for institutes seeking to change their systems of power and distribution.

² See Connolly et al. (2022) for a rich illustration of different perspectives on reparations from within and outside psychoanalysis.

³ I would also like to thank Cyrus (2020) for her critique of this use of a white “we,” which I came to understand differently and more deeply over the past few years.

⁴ See Jones (2020) for an illustration of the high stakes of respecting autonomy in this way.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jane Caflisch

Jane Caflisch, Ph.D., is a candidate at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where she is a member of the Committee for Ethnicity, Race, Culture, Class and Language (CERCCL), and former member of ForAll and the Intersectional Task Force. She is a former fellow of the American Psychoanalytic Association and of the Melanie Klein Trust, has written and presented on issues related to sexuality, gender, race, and whiteness, and is in private practice in New York.