From Freud to Issues of Race, Class & Culture in Psychotherapy | Dr. Daniel Gaztambide

so maybe introduce yourself and just talk a little bit about what you do and what your interests are okay awesome do I look at camera One camera two camera two just hangs out there doing things out there all right so hi I'm Daniel Jose I'm assistant professor of psychology and Department of psychology at the new school for social research and I'm assistant director of clinical training and the clinical PhD program as well as director of the France fund lab for intersectional psychology a lot of my work focuses on Liberation psychology critical race Theory and decolonial perspectives on mental health and issues of race and identity more broadly do to go into analytic training is that the trajectory that it took oh well for that we must go back to my mother it's a very long story of childhood uh no in all seriousness I I got into psychology well I kind of saw psychology and psychoanalysis the same thing when I was a kid um I grew up in a church where the the three pastors there was a head Pastor a youth pastor and a business pastor and they all had some level of kind of exposure to psychoanalytic ideas through their Seminary training and my mom was a secretary for the church and for the pastor so she would always bring back all these books on psychology diagnosis psychoanalysis and she would um she would read them to me and tell me about the ideas and them which would make for very interesting bedtime stories so she would like you know psychoanalyze Puerto Rican politics me or family our people in our church and it just got me interested you know like she had maybe like an eighth grade education but she always had this desire to become a forensic psychologist so in some ways it's like she was trying to you know live through me a little bit like pass on that dream of becoming a psychologist and then of course I go to school and I you know learn different things and start teasing apart that psychology is not the same as psychoanalysis there's a whole range of fields from experimental developmental you know including clinical but those clearly being separate and different so I was kind of always in that way you know into Freud and then I came Stateside and the story that I then got exposed to was you know Freud is just kind of old news you know old bad European white man he has nothing to offer and uh you know I very much took to that story at the time but because of the things I was interested in studying like around colonialism racism Etc in a very circuitous way it all not only brought me back to Freud but it led me to really rethink who Freud was in a more complex way not in the way that whitewashes or cleans up the things he did and said that were problematic but that makes room for a more complex reading of Freud and the ways in which to kind of sum it up that he gave us like a really powerful set of tools not just for understanding like individual psychology but for understanding society and political systems and at the same time he did some pretty bad stuff that kind of enacted those very same problems where you could almost read him as a you know as a Jewish man in an anti-semitic World both trying to understand how it is that people come to hate each other and how it is people collectively come to hit each other well at the same time wanting to be kind of the quintessential European white scientist so both identifying with his background with his identity even identifying with marginalized people while also wanting to no longer be marginal by becoming like the powerful right so that for me is a more complex and more interesting story than just Freud is all bad or Freud is all good which also isn't accurate the desire desire sort of be that person that prototypical successful integrated in society person that Freud also seem to want of that's such a hard desire to upend no matter who you are I can't imagine because of the world we live in how you would be able to see any way out but in and through and then gain power if the system didn't depend on that it wouldn't have the the power that it has over us right so I'll start from like a kind of a clinical place and then I'll tie it kind of to the macro you know political place like I work with for example um you know people of color who come to therapy and they might talk about dealing with you know racism in their Community or at school or at work whatever it might be and we might talk about and process you know all the ways it impacts their lives and how they cope with it Etc and then the following might happen and particularly with non-black people of color also with you know black patients as well but I notice it more with non-black people of color we're at a certain point they may start to articulate the fact that because they are not black they kind of they sort of know that they're treated differently compared to say they're you know black friends colleagues peers even partners and that in some ways they may want to um you know they may like genuinely want to help with support say like black lives matter and create situations where there's greater Racial equality um but then have this fear that if things get better for black people they don't necessarily means that they have to get worse for them I've heard it in some variety across communities if things get better for whoever I perceive as like below me then that means that's got to pull me down in some way so that I can't keep climbing up to the next wrong and succeed and do well and all those things and at a certain point I might you know raise with my client you know you know it's interesting that you've told me about all these different ways you've experience racism and at the same time you also experience racism towards ex-group whether it's you know an immigrant population whether it's African-Americans Etc and just wondering hello like how do you make sense of that how do you make sense of the fact that on the one hand you don't want to catch it right like you don't want to catch this kind of racialized violence but then the sense that if if you want to move up then that means other people have to be pushed down and that in order to succeed in our society then necessarily you have to kind of you know almost climb over other people or push other people down right it's this kind of zero-sum game and that logic Keeps Us trapped in the logic of this system it makes it really difficult to actually come together to solve problems collectively because of this entrenched logic so in a clinical context much like a political one the goal would be is there a way of seeing how actually the thing that is impacting me is also impacting this other person or group and that to the extent that we can see that our survival is intimately bound up with the survival and well-being of other people in other groups then we can come together to address problems collectively where we can create a world or we can at least imagine a world where none of us has to be left at the mercy of precarity nobody has to be left at the bottom of some hierarchy maybe we don't need those kind of extreme hierarchies and can make sure that everybody's taken care of right now that's scary because when you're attached to a given mode of hierarchy and when you're attached to a given place on that hierarchy the idea of letting that go is terrifying because the fear becomes if I let this go I'm just going to slip all the way back down to the bottom and what we're trying to articulate a number of us both clinically as well as politically is that if we can imagine a world where there is no there's no Heights to climb up to there's no bottom to fall into but where we can all be taken care of then maybe we can let go of this world in order to dream and enact a new one so when you're working with someone who's expressing that anxiety what becomes this sort of clinical management of that problem this might be too abstract no no I think I think I hear where your question is going I mean let me um pull back to something non-political so I can then kind of kind of explain how how it would work so in general something that leads people to like struggle with you know mental health issues relationship issues problems at work whatever um oftentimes it's tied to some fundamental avoidance of some kind like in the psychoanalytic world we talk about defenses in the cognitive behavioral world we might talk about experiential avoidance like people may avoid um painful experiences like for example you know I want to connect with someone and find intimacy but I'm afraid that if I try to get too close they'll leave me they'll reject me and so I you know maybe I leave them before they leave me or maybe I you know pull back a little bit because being vulnerable is really scary right there's something about that avoidance that's protective right that keeps the person from harm but at the same time it could also keep them from the thing they actually want which is the closeness and the relationship right and at a certain point in treatment you not only communicate you know given the context it makes sense where you have this fear but look at all these things that the fear is keeping you from to what extent would it be worth to explore a different not only a different set of behaviors but a different possibility that actually maybe if somebody you know really got to know you they would actually realize oh this is a person that I want to get close to right so it's that kind of uh dialectic but um between you know acceptance and change now how do I relate that to this question of political change or the ambivalence about in a sense to use this jargon like let go of one's privilege or want to like make changes in an institution or society that will benefit all of us it's kind of a similar thing when you live in a world like ours where the logic is you know work really hard the harder you work the more you'll be rewarded you'll get to keep moving up even if other people are pulled down right um well the more you get into that logic well the more stressed out you get because there's no place that you can reach to where that fear that you're going to slip back down goes away right like the fear of somebody who is kind of scrambling to try to make sure that they have enough for themselves and their family is not the same fear as somebody who's middle upper class and is able to get all the food that they need and yet they are anxious as if they didn't have those resources as if they could lose all those resources tomorrow right so it's it's totally different social positions but they wind up having the shared anxiety because of the society that we live in right and so in a clinical sense it might be talking through with someone let's let's say to go to back to my earlier example somebody who relates to me the ways that they suffer from racism but they also might be racist to other people it might be talking about how this helps them what purpose does it serve in their life does this somehow feed into precisely the kind of racism they themselves are experiencing so then we have to talk about well could there be a different way um in whatever context they're in a different way of relating to people where it doesn't have to be if others move up that means I move down but that there's something about being in solidarity with another that's not just helpful for them but it'll be helpful for you too so if people of color were to come together to address issues of racism in a given institution as opposed to being pitted against each other in some way then that would be much more likely to lead to change and to have a sense of collective action that would make us depend more on each other than depend on protecting our place in the hierarchy and this is something that more often than not winds up being more salubrious I would argue not just in the political context but in a clinical context as well that we don't have to fear one another that we can actually find our future and our Survival by depending on one another and collectively is that fear that you're talking about is that just sort of being more comfortable being able to split right isn't that is that what's psychologically structurally at yeah in that instance yeah totally I mean if we think about it in those kind of psychologic terms it's it's definitely splitting if you're cognitive behavioral you can think of black and white thinking and whatever but it's like these basic you know psychological processes that you know lo and behold get activated when we feel threatened if you think about it in attachment terms you can feel threatened by the idea that you'll lose the object right like some caregiver you'll lose a relationship right that's threatening this person that I care about and that I want to be with might disappear Etc but there's another kind of threat that um we could call broadly status threat which is the threat that I'm gonna either lose my position or I'm going to be kept down in some other position and when you're hit with that that's also gonna not only trigger all those different avoidance mechanisms that one can talk about the fences or cognitive distortions whatever but splitting in particular is so it's so accessible to that kind of stuff whether it's losing a relationship or losing your status because it's so intrinsic to the self right like who are you like it's one thing if you know Bob doesn't like you it's a whole other order of business when a whole Community or Society it's not just that they don't like you but are they able to see you as a full human being who deserves to be taken care of who deserves to have certain basic rights who deserves to have housing Etc and when we say in this very arbitrary way these people over here they should have things these people are there they shouldn't and then you rationalize it by saying it's because they don't work hard or they're culturally deficient then that's just rationalizing what's a fundamental split in our sense of reality and who's human and who's not

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Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 07 2023