The Thomas and Julia Saltz
Annual Adult Seminar Workshop 

Time: 9:00 am – 11: 30 am

Live Presentation

Where: University Club of Washington DC
1135 16th Street NW, Washington, DC 20036

2.5 CME/CE

Registration Link: HERE

Program Flyer: HERE

Registration Deadline: January 29, 2025

Presentation: 

Racial and other diversities-related enactments in psychoanalytic and other organizations that convene, and train, psychotherapists can be observed to occur regularly, exposing schisms that are carried and caused by personal, relational, and social-structural elements. Our collective good intentions and “diversity trainings” fail to avert this. This experiential presentation proposes a framework for being in dialogue about differences when such dialogue becomes difficult, and impasse seems inevitable.

Alertness to emergent enactment, and receptivity to the possibility of our unwitting, unconscious participation in such enactment—called “radical openness” by the presenter—is seen as key to finding our way out of oblivious, polarized, and entrenched, positions.

A framework is offered for understanding the challenges and promises of addressing enactments involving race, class, culture, sex, gender, and other forms of divisive difference. This will involve placing attention to security and self-esteem concerns (of self and other), and a corresponding need for openness to discovery of unconscious implication, at its center. We will use compelling, hypothetical vignettes derived from psychoanalytic institute life to explore the idea that setting out to lose what we already know could be a useful strategy for being in and tolerating the anxieties of “impossible” conversations.