Racial Socialization and Thwarted Mentalization

Advanced Seminar in Child and Adolescent Analysis:

“Racial Socialization and Thwarted Mentalization: Reflections of a psychoanalyst from the lived experience of James Baldwin’s America”

Paper Awarded the 2018 Rieger Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Award –
A Distinguished Member Award from The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Thursday, March 21, 2019

8:00 pm – 10:00 pm

Presenter: Beverly J. Stoute, M.D.

A contemporary psychoanalytic perspective recognizes that the discussion of race will occur at the intersection of the intrapsychic and the social.   Framing this discussion with clinical examples, Dr. Stoute traces and explores the developmental evolution of race awareness from childhood and adolescence into adulthood, and reformulates the research on race awareness with a rare analytic interpretation of James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew, first published in 1962 in The Progressive, later in his acclaimed The Fire Next Time and revived as the literary forerunner of Between the World and Me  in 2015 by Ta-Nehisi Coates.   In this discussion, enriched with analytic data on mentalization and trans-generational trauma, Dr. Stoute integrates the theoretical, the clinical, the literary and the developmental perspectives to demonstrate the invaluable importance of psychodynamic understanding in deconstructing how we process racial difference in treatment situations and help clinicians recognize and discuss their own conscious and unconscious racial and cultural bias in working with patients.

2 CME/ CE credits offered. 

Beverly J. Stoute, M.D., is a graduate of Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Stoute went on to complete her psychiatry residency and fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at Payne Whitney Clinic—New York Hospital, part of Cornell Medical Center. She completed psychoanalytic training in child, adolescent, and adult psychoanalysis at The New York Psychoanalytic Institute. She serves as a training and supervising analyst at Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute and a child and adolescent supervising analyst at New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Dr. Stoute is a faculty member of the Southeast Child Analytic Consortium and an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences of Emory University School of Medicine. She emphasizes clinician education and training in recognizing and discussing racial bias. Dr. Stoute co-edited the 2016–2017 series in The American Psychoanalyst entitled Conversations on Psychoanalysis and Race, featuring her ground-breaking review paper “Race and Racism in Psychoanalytic Thought: The Ghosts in our Nursery,” now required reading in race and diversity courses at psychoanalytic institutes across the country. Dr. Stoute treats children, adolescents, and adults in her private practice. Her book, with co-editor Michael Slevin, MSW, entitled Race in the Therapeutic Encounter is due out in 2019.

Educational Objectives: Upon completion of this activity, participants will be able to:

1. identify the developmental nodal points in the process of race awareness in childhood, and the factors that affect how attitudes around race are shaped into adulthood.
2. identity the technical challenges of how issues around race arise in clinical situations and how their own attitudes and countertransference are factors in the process of mentalization.
3. identify the utility of using psychoanalytic principles to understand how to understand and work with race in the consultation room.