Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Technique: Rethinking Our Foundations from Developmental Theory to Clinical Practice

With Daniel Gaztambide, PsyD

• Oct 26, 2025

• 9:00am - 1:00pm ET

• Location: Virtual

• Source/ Event Link: Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

“Contemporary Psychoanalysis finds itself at a crossroads, with clinicians and scholars debating the centrality of attachment and the therapeutic relationship versus the relevance of culture, identity, and politics in psychoanalytic treatment. This "confusion of tongues," notable across psychoanalytic training, scholarship, and social media, has resulted in heated debates on the role of the cultural and political in psychotherapy.

This presentation will bridge this gap between "the relational" and the "sociocultural" by reviewing theory, research, and practice from a decolonial psychoanalytic point of view. Drawing on Fanonian conceptions of development, traditional attachment and relational theory based accounts of development will be challenged and of necessity repositioned to better account for a broader conception of human subjectivity. This integrative, sociogenic theory of development posits two core unconscious systems with attendant motivations—a "horizontal" system of attachment, affiliation, and closeness, and a "vertical" system of status, hierarchy, and positionality.

Using case illustrations and extant research, the presentation will outline how we can better listen to different dimensions of the patient's experience in ways that do not require us "choose" between the relational and "the political," but understand human subjectivity as organized by both. Implications for integrating these dimensions in case formulation and treatment will be discussed, with examples from the presenter's practice.”