The Psychoanalytic Clinical Encounter, the Political, and the Production of Difference

Instructor: Carlos Padrón, MA, MPhil, LP

• Sept 17 - Dec 3, 2025 (12 classes)

• 4:00 - 5:30pm ET

• Location: Virtual

• Source/ Event Link: Center for Critical and Clinical Analysis

“This course critically and clinically explores psychoanalysis through the lenses of race, class, gender, sexuality, migration, ‘madness’, and coloniality, among others. It foregrounds the ways in which power and difference shape both psychic life and the socio-political realm, emphasizing the complex interactions these forces have within the psychoanalytic encounter. Students will engage with foundational and contemporary texts to explore psychoanalysis as a praxis with political potentiality, particularly in working with those whom Fanon called the “wretched of the earth.”

Topics include Blackness and racialization; internalized oppression; class relations, Capitalism, and clinical practice; colonial (object) relations; intersectionality in the psychoanalytic field; gender and sexual identities; institutional psychotherapy and the critique of ‘madness’, among others. Through interdisciplinary readings and psychoanalytic theory, the course seeks to reimagine the possibilities of psychoanalytic thinking and practice in a world marked by profound social/psychic disparities and violence.”