Sexuality as Bedrock to Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Reading Freud through Fanon amidst Inequality and Genocide (and why sex is on your patient’s mind too)

• Speaker: Daniel José Gaztambide, PsyD

• Date: Friday, April 17, 2026

• Time: 7:00 PM ET

• Location: Virtual and In-Person NYC

• Source: William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology

“Freud’s conceptualization of sexuality has become outdated and irrelevant in contemporary psychoanalysis — or so they say. Despite reports of Freud’s “death,” the relevance of his ideas return again and again not only in the clinic but in how we understand our contemporary malaise, from the complexity of our interpersonal relationships to the inequality, war, and genocide we witness in our news feeds and in our streets. Drawing on a decolonial lens informed by the work of Frantz Fanon, this presentation re-reads Freud to better understand the centrality of sexuality in systems of oppression, from the militarized violence faced by people of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ people domestically, to the war and genocide visited upon racialized peoples globally. Given Fanon’s work not just as a revolutionary but a practicing psychoanalytic clinician, this theory of sexuality will be brought back to the intimacy of the consulting room to reveal the relevance of thinking about sexuality in routine clinical practice. Drawing on contemporary thinkers like Avgi Saketopoulou and Dominique Scarfone, decolonial feminists like Maria Lugones and Ochy Curiel, it will be shown that although interpersonal dynamics and societal oppression are “not all about sex,” they all have a “sexual lining.” Central to this sexual lining is the way constructions of threat and vulnerability are intimately bound up with pleasure and pain, both fearing and desiring the other—and the other’s gratuitous suffering and death. Clinical illustrations will be used to make the theoretical come alive in the realities of day-to-day practice."