From Freud to Fanon: How Daniel Gaztambide is Redefining Psychoanalytic Practice

Daniel José Gaztambide is an assistant professor of psychology at Queens College and the director of the Frantz Fanon Lab for Decolonial Psychology. His research and clinical work focus on Puerto Rican and Latinx populations, ethnic minority identity, psychotherapy, and the social determinants of health.

Daniel is the author of A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology and the newly published Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Technique: Putting Freud on Fanon’s Couch.

He earned his doctorate from Rutgers University, where he specialized in multicultural psychology, anxiety, and trauma. Beyond his clinical practice, Daniel is deeply committed to addressing racial injustice through his writing and activism. He has served as a liaison to the American Psychological Association (APA) on racial and ethnic minority issues and contributed to the APA’s 2020-2021 Taskforce on Strategies for the Elimination of Racism, Discrimination, and Hate.

In our conversation, Daniel highlights the importance of cultural humility and understanding the impact of marginalization across race, class, gender, and ability on psychotherapy. His latest book provides a blend of clinical techniques and political strategies to address these complex issues through a decolonial psychoanalytic lens.

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio of the interview here.

 

Micah Ingle: Please introduce yourself. Who are you, and how did you come to advocate for the liberation-oriented psychologies you focus on today?

Daniel Gaztambide: My name is Daniel José Gaztambide. I’m originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, and later moved to the U.S. for college. To be a bit tongue-in-cheek, I’d say my journey started with my childhood and my mother. My mom was the secretary at our church, where the pastors were either pursuing doctoral degrees in clinical psychology or trained in various forms of psychodynamic pastoral counseling.

This environment naturally intertwined psychology, psychoanalytic thinking, and community, so I grew up with a strong sense that psychology is something deeply experienced within community and in relationships with others.

However, when I moved to the U.S., I quickly realized that this wasn’t the typical way psychoanalysis was understood. In my undergraduate studies and even during my master’s program, I noticed a stark separation between social justice issues and psychoanalysis, which was often presented as a theory focused on the individual, isolated from their social context.

My perspective began to shift when I attended a lecture at Union Theological Seminary by Claude Barbre. He spoke about Ignacio Martín-Baró and liberation psychology, and it was a revelation for me. It was the first time I encountered a framework that articulated what I had always felt—that there was a language for this kind of work.

From there, I delved into the work of Martín-Baró, liberation psychology, and Paulo Freire, who founded critical pedagogy with his seminal book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. All of this eventually led me to Frantz Omar Fanon, who is, in many respects, a prototypical ancestor of both liberation and decolonial psychology.

In essence, the ideas that now drive my work were something I always sensed growing up, but only later did I find the language to express and explore how the psyche and society are intricately connected.

 

Ingle: I’ve been reading your most recent book, and I wanted to ask what motivated you to put these pieces together to write this book for therapists. I personally found your review of several psychoanalytic case studies and a lot of other information in the book extremely clear and insightful. I’d love to hear more about what went into that.

Gaztambide: When I went to Rutgers University at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, I experienced something that I think many people in graduate school experience: you’re exposed to some kind of basic theory or basic model of psychotherapy, whether that’s the basics of psychoanalytic therapy or humanistic-experiential psychotherapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, family systems therapy, emotion-focused therapy.

You learn the basics of those models, and then, maybe two or three years later, you’re exposed to something else—typically a single course called “cultural competence” or “diversity.”

I noticed that not only in my own work but also among many of my colleagues who write and think about social justice and psychotherapy, there was confusion about the actual mechanics and techniques of addressing social justice in the therapy room. This was true even though they could articulate all the ethical and moral reasons why we should address issues of identity in psychotherapy.

How does clinical technique tie back to a model of the mind or mental health? We would all kind of struggle to articulate what that was. In effect, the original book project that I was trying to work on was supposed to be a treatment guide for working with complex trauma and personality disorder among working-class communities of color.

As I tried to write that book, I realized that I really needed to go back to basics and start to theorize from the very foundations of psychotherapy, but in a way that introduced issues of social justice within the basic theory and technique in order to produce something much more integrated.

Part of my hope with this book is to provide both beginning clinicians and seasoned practitioners with a language for how issues of social justice are intrinsic to psychotherapeutic technique, regardless of the therapist’s or patient’s specific identities.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap that you only think about the “social” when you’re working with somebody who’s perceived as being different—so you only think about social context when you’re working with people of color or women or people who are poor or LGBT, but somehow, as if by magic, there is no social context if you’re working with a white patient or a patient who’s middle class.

How do you bridge those different discourses of what causes suffering in an integrated way? Neither just thinking about early child development nor just thinking about social and cultural context, but thinking about both in a way that makes theoretical and pragmatic sense.

 

Ingle: Can you explain how you understand psychoanalysis and also decolonization? You use a metaphor in the book of “broken circuits” to describe the relationship between psychoanalysis and decolonization that I thought was really interesting.

Gaztambide: If we look at the whole of psychoanalytic history, and I discussed a lot of this in my first book, we find that the early psychoanalysts developed very rich and very fascinating theories of how to think about race and culture, how to think about gender and sexuality, and how to understand how social forces take root within the individual mind.

For example, Sándor Ferenczi, a forerunner of interpersonal, humanistic, and relational psychotherapies, once wrote to Freud about how in psychoanalysis, we discover the real conditions of society as they are mirrored in the individual, cleansed of all hypocrisy and pretense.

In other words, there’s this awareness that psychoanalysis is not just a clinical technique but also a way of understanding society. The problem here is that this social critical theory was completely divorced from clinical practice.

Freud might write in The Future of an Illusion that society seems to be the product of a small group of people who control the means of production and wealth distribution but use religion and race to divide the populace to maintain their power.

He would then in no way tie that to any of his clinical papers or clinical techniques. Again, in the origins of psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic thought, the social was very much bifurcated from the clinical. This creates what I call a series of broken circuits in how we think about the human mind and how we think about society. In that respect, a big part of this work is to connect the circuits between the theory of mind, the clinical technique, and the social critical theory.

Part of how I do that with psychoanalysis is by focusing on three core theories. You have Freud, Ferenczi, a forerunner of humanistic, interpersonal, and relational psychoanalysis, and then the work of Jacques Lacan—Lacanian psychoanalysis is one of the most proliferated psychoanalytic theories used in practice worldwide.

In the book, I look through each of them and start connecting their theory of mind with their model of clinical technique and very interesting insights that they had about race, class, culture, and identity.

Now, from the other end of this discussion, I also focus a lot on the work of Frantz Fanon, who many people recognize as one of the founders of decolonial and liberation psychologies but who is often read more as a theorist of revolution. In fact, he was a practicing psychoanalytic therapist day in and day out.

Fanon was seeing patients on the couch, sometimes five to six days a week, using a very interesting synthesis of Freudian ideas along with relational Ferenczian ideas and, of course, Lacan. But again, here with Fanon, we almost have the opposite problem. We focus so much on his political theories in such a way that it bifurcates them from his theory of mind and his model of clinical practice.

I’m essentially working my way from the inside of the psychoanalytic canon to the outside of the canon through Fanon, almost like a Mobius strip where the inside becomes outside and inside again, to essentially redo the canon and redo the foundations of our field.

The book offers not only an account of a decolonial psychoanalytic technique but also a decolonial explanation for why this bifurcation exists.

Part of my answer to that question is that even though Freud, in public, very much wanted to be seen as a kind of erudite white enlightenment scientist, in private, he was very much concerned and very conscious of the fact that he was a Jewish man in an anti-Semitic racist world.

In that world, even though he had these social democratic values and even though his practice was much more flexible and relational than his public writings would show, he essentially hid those parts of himself in his public writing.

Part of what the book does is to excavate those aspects of Freud’s clinical work that were surprisingly attuned to culture and race, surprisingly attuned to gender and sexuality with his patients, based on first-person accounts by the patients themselves of Freud’s work.

We not only have to decolonize the canon, but we also have to decolonize how we understand these thinkers themselves in a way that gives us today a lot more freedom in how we can practice with our patients, both on the couch and when thinking about what our political action and ethics might be off the couch and in the streets.

 

Ingle: What did Freud get right, and what did he not get right?

Gaztambide: Part of what was really surprising to me in writing this book was seeing all the things that Freud said that were incredibly prescient, certainly from the point of view of contemporary science and contemporary psychological research. But I was also appreciating, in a more profound way, precisely some of the great blind spots that he had. If I were to start from the positive first, I would start with the theory of mind that he articulated.

Freud described the human mind as being not just partly unconscious but having an unconscious that is textured by associations, connections, and links between different experiences, and that those associations are organized around two things.

On the one hand, there is our need and desire to find connection, relate to others, and find intimacy and closeness. At the same time, we desire to find our position in the community, our status, and how we feel about our power and positionality in the world. Both of those things organize our behavior, our desires, and our motivations. There’s a lot there that he got quite right.

At the same time, he articulated a very interesting model of psychotherapy that has, in many respects, stood the test of time.

The idea that you have to build a therapeutic relationship with your patient, that you have to understand where they’re coming from, and that you have to try to essentially walk a fine line between joining them where they are and, at other times, challenging them to go beyond where they are in the direction of change is a fundamental tension that I think all psychotherapists can relate to.

He also articulated a very interesting theory of how we understand different kinds of identities and positionalities and how that ties back to his model of the mind. That’s part of what I reconstruct in the book: that different social forces, such as racism, classism, sexism, etc., cause us different types of harm but also provide different kinds of psychological compensations for that harm.

It’s out of this “compromise formation” that we develop attachments to systems that, even though they harm us, offer different privileges and pleasures that maintain our attachment to them. I discuss this in more detail in the book.

To my eyes, these are very foundational and very important components to any kind of decolonial psychoanalytic project, and certainly a clinical one. I discuss a lot of the research that supports these ideas.

The first thing we have to understand is that the way Freud dissociates the social context from his theories is itself an example of his own compromise formation. This was his attempt to survive the society of his time while also trying to find his place within it, including trying to pursue his own privileges within that society for his own ends and goals: essentially to be seen as an erudite white scientist of the establishment. Some specific examples of this include some ways that he participated in a kind of colonial racist anthropology.

To give a separate example, we could also talk about how, in the original 1905 edition of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he questioned in a revolutionary way how we understand homosexuality. He said that homosexuality is part and parcel of human beings and many biological organisms in nature. What we need to explain is heterosexuality.

That was a very revolutionary statement for the time, but it’s a statement he starts to walk back, given that every five years since the publication of that revolutionary paper, he starts to edit the paper to make it conform to more conventional accounts. He starts to edit them out of his own record in order to better fit himself into the white patriarchal scientific establishment of the time.

I think we need to be able to consider both of those things, both the things that are useful in Freud’s work and the things we need to resoundingly critique in order to create a more inclusive and open psychoanalysis for the future.

 

Ingle: You also offer a critique of relational and interpersonal approaches that may also apply to humanistic psychotherapy. What is it that broadly defined relational approaches might offer a decolonial approach, and also, what limitations do they have when it comes to socio-cultural issues?

Gaztambide: Let me start again with the positives and use that to springboard into some of the limitations of this kind of thinking.

I trace many of the foundational ideas of different relational, interpersonal, and humanistic approaches to Sándor Ferenczi’s work.

One of his major contributions was the idea that psychotherapy is not just an encounter in which the therapist does something to the patient to create change but that the psychotherapeutic process demands that both parties change. Something about the therapist needs to be reflected on as they engage with the patient. This could impede the process or be the vehicle for the change to occur.

Put simply, it’s not just that the patients examine themselves and work towards change. The therapist, as a kind of collaborator in that process, needs to look at themselves, too.

Part of Ferenczi’s insight is that the therapist can reflect on how they’re contributing to that impasse and openly acknowledge what they might be doing in relation to the patient, opening the possibility of rupture and repair.

Not only can there be tensions in the therapeutic relationship due to, say, unreflected attachment schemas on part of both patient and therapist, but that there can also be ruptures and impasses due to difference—difference in terms of race, gender, sexuality, or class.

If the therapist can remain open and reflect on their own positionality, maybe reflect on the ways in which their own biases are being enacted in relation to the patient, this can create a space where they can reflect not only on how race, class and culture, gender, and sexuality are being enacted in the relationship but can also use that as a springboard to talk about how the social context is impacting the therapeutic relationship.

Where do we get into trouble, though? Now, I have to switch over to the not-so-nice things I have to say about relational interpersonal theory. In the same way that Ferenczi was incredibly brilliant in his thought about the therapeutic relationship, there are some ways in which that very lens narrowed his ability to look at the social and cultural world.

He wrote many papers early in his career tracing how issues of class and race can trickle down into the intimacy of our relationships. However, later in his career, and specifically with the rise of the Nazis and fascism across Europe, Ferenczi retreated from the world of the social to an extent, understandably because Ferenczi was also a Jewish man.

In some respects, he, like Freud, is withdrawing and dissociating the social context in his theories as a way of protecting himself but also maintaining certain kinds of privilege in the world as somebody who can be read as white. What happens when he starts to narrow the scope of what psychoanalysis can do to two people in the room?

Does the therapist bring up race, gender, sexuality, and class, or do you wait for the patient to bring them up? The very structure of that question, because it’s so inherently interpersonal, does not allow room for other ways of thinking about how the social context is always already there.

It’s precisely this consideration that turns me from this appraisal of relational and interpersonal theories to bringing in Jacques Lacan’s ideas and the way Lacan’s ideas are used by Frantz Fanon.

In sum, it’s never just two people in the consulting room. The therapeutic relationship is always embedded within its broader social and political world, what Lacan and later Fanon referred to as a “third term.” There’s always a broader collective context between the two of us or between two of us or more.

It’s only if we can theorize from that perspective—that we’re never just two people alone in this room—that we can create some space for thinking about the social in a way that is deeply organic, that emerges in a way that’s relevant to the patient’s presenting problem, and that essentially decenters the question of who brings it up.

 

Ingle: What does Fanon have to say to Freud, to these other psychoanalysts we’re talking about here, and to the practice of psychoanalysis and psychology more generally today?

Gaztambide: For background, Frantz Fanon was an Afro-Caribbean man originally from the island of Martinique, which at the time was an unincorporated territory or colony of France. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he initially had this idyllic view of not only being a part of France as a nation but that we’re all part of this struggle together—we’re all part of this universal humanity and a strike against one is a strike against all. He used this as inspiration to join the side of the Allies to fight the Nazis and expel them from France.

But in very short order, after the Nazis are expelled, instead of being welcomed as a hero in France, he, like many other black men at the time from France’s colonies, is treated as second-class citizen and less than human.

That leads him to truly reflect on what it means to grow up in a colony. What does it mean to be positioned as lesser than and outside the category of what it means to be a human being?

That inspires him to pursue a career in psychiatry, and through his studies, he comes to be under the supervision of the Catalan Psychiatrist François Tosquelles. Tosquelles is himself an anti-fascist who was on the side of the left during the Spanish Civil War and who himself was trained, supervised, and analyzed by different people from different traditions.

Tosquelles was informed as much by Lacanian psychoanalysis as he was by Ferenczi’s relational ideas, and he exposed Fanon to this very interesting synthesis between relational and Lacanian ideas and different strands of Marxist thinking.

Fanon is also informed by some of the ways that Tosquelles applied those ideas clinically within the context of the inpatient unit. Tosquelles and Fanon expanded the relational notion of two people in a room working in an interactive, interpersonal way. They broadened it to say that it’s not just the therapist and the patient. It’s the therapist, the patient, and the inpatient unit.

The institution itself plays a role in the therapeutic process. Tosquelles wrote very candidly that there’s a way in which mental illness reflects an occupation of the mind—how social structures and social forces occupy the psyche and lead to psychopathology not just within the individual and not just between the individual and interpersonal others, but reflects a kind of societal collapse, a societal fracture or rupture in the social contract.

If mental illness reflects a kind of occupation of the mind, then psychological liberation must involve a process of disoccupation. Fanon was very much informed by these ideas in his clinical work later on in Algeria and Tunisia.

Although he believed it was very important for clinicians to reflect on their own biases, he also felt that this approach was too narrow a way of conceptualizing the problem.

It’s not simply, for example: oh, the patient is bad, they’re borderline, or they have too much trauma, or they’re not analyzable. But it’s also not enough to say that there’s a problem with the therapist: the therapist is prejudiced, or the therapist has unresolved trauma.

Instead, he asked how the institution, the broader system, and the broader context support the therapeutic relationship in being able to do its work.

To that end, he engaged in a number of systematic reforms, as well as ongoing supervision and consultation with the nursing staff, the clinicians, and the other psychiatrists on the unit, to support them in their work.

Again, he’s underscoring the role of what he calls the social or “systemic third.” It’s not just a patient, and it’s not just a therapist in relation to the patient. It’s also how that surrounding context supports the therapeutic relationship to be a tool for what he called disalienation—to be an experience and encounter between two freedoms, between two subjects who can engage in a novel experience with each other.

This applies as much to one-on-one psychotherapy as it does to institutions and broader policy reform.

In psychoanalysis, you have a debate between different perspectives. You have a “one-person psychology,” where everything is within the individual’s mind. You have a “two-person psychology” where things happen between two people.

In some respects, Fanon advocates for a “no-person” psychology. We’re not reducible to our relationships or individual minds. We are much more open and dynamic systems than we often recognize within psychology.

I explain what that means in great detail and cite extensive research supporting this conceptualization of the mind. I also examine the implications in the context of face-to-face interpersonal psychotherapy.

 

Ingle: You say that there would be two foundations for a decolonial psychoanalysis. There would be the primacy of the therapeutic relationship and then the fundamental role of free association. Could you expand on these in the context of therapeutic practice?

Gaztambide: When engaged in clinical work, we have some underlying theory of what we think causes the presenting problem.

Many of these theories focus on the individual in relation to their interpersonal relationships. If that’s how we listen to our patients, then it stands to reason that we would be listening to certain kinds of material—material centered around interpersonal relationships—and sometimes struggle to listen to other kinds of material that may not be inherently about interpersonal relationships. It may involve them but may also include the broader social, political, and cultural context.

Through this book, I’ve essentially attempted to articulate a theory of mind that gives us a broader conceptualization of the kinds of issues people come to therapy about.

As I mentioned earlier, there is a need for closeness, connection, and intimacy, particularly in interpersonal relationships. I call that the language of horizontality: how do we approach or create distance from other people in our interpersonal world?

We’re also organized around what our place is in the community. What is our position within different types of hierarchies? What’s our place in the world? How do we find value? Not only do we feel loved by other people, but do we feel that we’re engaging in meaningful work? Do we feel we’re recognized in our broader communities as having value?

I refer to this as a language of verticality, above and below. Am I somebody who is high up in the hierarchy and feels a sense of value, a sense of status? Am I somehow pushed all the way down to the bottom? Am I stuck in the middle, trying to make sure I don’t fall to the bottom but anxiously trying to find my way to the top?

Think of something very simple you might hear from patients in daily work. Somebody says, “You know, doc, I just feel like I’m not where I should be.” Just hearing that very simple phrase, “I’m not where I should be,” can be heard in many different ways. You could hear it through the lens of attachment: what kind of attachment dynamic might be playing out?

But another way to hear that statement, “I’m not where I should be,” is to hear its spatiality, which implies that the patient is in some position—perhaps a lower position than they feel they should be. They should be in some higher position.

Sometimes, by reflecting back those words and inviting the patient to elaborate, you can very quickly start digging into different dimensions of identity implicated in that verticality.

When you’re building a therapeutic relationship, and you’re trying to hear your clients, what you are attuned to makes a difference in how they speak and what they say. It is good to build a therapeutic relationship where you’re attending to multiple frequencies of the patient’s experience, absolutely and, of course, the relational dimension, which is what many of us are trained to listen to, but also attuned to those dimensions of the patient’s experience that are collective.

Attuning to dimensions organized around status and hierarchy can give us permission to talk about many of those issues quite organically.

This connects, in turn, to what we call in psychoanalytic therapy the “fundamental rule of free association.” In the book, I discuss how you could certainly offer the patient the invitation to say everything that comes to mind without censoring yourself, to try to be as free and open as possible. Part of my job will be to listen very closely and try to help you talk through the problems you’re bringing up.

But I also argue that, more often than not, we do not need to tell the patient to do that. The mind is always doing it, always associating, always making connections.

I mention this in the book as a central technique of a decolonial psychoanalytic approach because if we listen again on these multiple frequencies, we create opportunities for the patient to tell us a lot—not just about their relationships but also about how they see themselves in their community and how their community sees them.

It gets us talking without needing to raise the question, “Do I bring it up, or does the patient bring it up?” We can just start talking very organically about the kind of problems patients have and how those problems are nested in a broader world.

Essentially, I’m suggesting that when you understand the human mind as inherently textured by the social, you don’t need to get into these anxious deliberations about whether you talk about race, gender, or class.

We all exist in this world where race, class, gender, and sexuality texture our experience, regardless of our specific identities and positionalities.

However, if we can create a stance of openness precisely toward those topics, we can use different techniques and tools to invite them into the room in ways that are resoundingly psychoanalytic.

 

Ingle: Toward the end of your book, you discuss the limitations of psychotherapy. You talk about the importance of political action: fighting the injustices of racism, capitalism, patriarchy, and other forms of social injustice. Could you say more about this? Do you see a role for psychotherapy in relation to these broader political struggles?

Gaztambide: Let me answer that question with a metaphor. Let’s say I was a cardiologist, and I had access to the best available tools to treat patients with heart problems. After a while working at a mixed-income community neighborhood clinic or in a hospital with a very diverse population, I noticed a lot of folks showing up to my consulting room with broken hearts.

At a certain point, I might become curious about what is going on in the world that’s leading to so many heart problems. I may simultaneously continue doing my work, doing the best work that I can as a cardiologist, while also asking questions about what policies, structures, social contexts, and politics are leading to people having all sorts of heart conditions.

For example, they may not have access to good, healthy foods or be so stressed out that they cannot get good sleep. Can I think about the connection between the patients right in front of me and these broader social problems taking place in the world?

I borrow here a phrase that I always found very interesting from dialectical behavior therapy: helping the patient build a life worth living. I think this is all fine and dandy. Let’s totally help our patients live healthier, more fulfilling lives.

Let’s also wonder how we can build a world worth living in. To that end, I start to tie some of the clinical formulations in the book to a broader political formulation about what ails us. I state this in the introduction at the beginning of the book. I come back, and I revisit it in the conclusion. The basic formulation of the book is grounded in what Fanon called “sociogeny.”

Sociogeny involves the understanding that human psychology takes place in context. Human psychology is indelibly textured by what we might call political economy, or the ways in which resources are distributed in society along the axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

To make a long story short, we live in what we call a racial capitalist society. It’s a capitalist system that is punctured by incredible income inequality, and that income inequality is itself subtended by different forms of racist discourse and racialized oppression.

There’s a lot of thinking and research, going back to the black radical tradition, certainly the origins of decolonial psychoanalysis in turn, that suggests very strongly that one of the ways the system is maintained is through the use of racism. We could also add sexism and queerphobia as tools of “divide and conquer” that maintain the power of the wealthiest in our society.

The wealthiest in our society exploits these discourses to divide the populace and prevent any meaningful change in society. Even though you might be suffering because of the inequalities that we navigate within our world, this society also offers, as I mentioned earlier, different kinds of compensation to maintain your attachment to the way things are.

To give a very quotidian example, there’s a lot of research that shows that many liberal-minded people, often white but not exclusively white, change their politics and often become much more conservative when they experience either racial or economic threat.

In other words, the sense that someone else is going to threaten my lifestyle, my way of life. When that happens, people often become much more conservative, more right-wing, both socially and economically, in ways that ultimately wind up maintaining the way that the systems work.

What I suggest in the book is that given the ways in which the system operates to create division and how that division maintains the political economy of the system, we need to think about political strategies that help us address that division in order to build multiracial class solidarity.

We also need to think about what policies and procedures, what kinds of interventions will dismantle the power of economic elites, to create a society—as Freud said in The Future of an Illusion—in which civilization is oppressive to no one or where we can all avail ourselves of the fruits of our work. Essentially, a society that leaves no one consigned to the bottom or where we can all find our place to be in community with each other.

One fascinating implication of much of my research is the lovely way in which this model’s clinical ethics translate to its political ethics.

Here, I cite research on something called “deep canvassing.” Part of what the psychoanalytic model shows is that human psychology is incredibly diverse. People are of more than one mind, and people often have both very conservative and very progressive views—often within the same person.

However, when you have these right-wing, fear-based messages in play, it often tends to flip people in the direction of more conservative views.

Deep canvassing suggests the importance of being able to entertain an open dialogue. In this dialogue, you’re not trying to change the other person’s mind, but you’re actually trying to understand the fears that motivate their beliefs. This creates a space where both you and the other person can reflect on what’s really going on and create an opportunity for those beliefs to change.

I cite a very lovely example from this literature where a queer activist was canvassing against anti-LGBT laws. She knocks on the door of an older Latino gentleman. When you see the video, it’s fascinating because, at first, it seems that this is going to go off the rails very quickly because this older Latino gentleman is very anti-LGBT.

He has many different fears and anxieties about trans people. But the activist is able to engage him in a way that creates this kind of open, empathic dialogue. This ultimately leads them to reflect on their own biases and connect on some shared values.

This older gentleman is taking care of his wife, who’s struggling with a disability. The activist communicates to him: the reason I’m out here advocating for a stronger social safety net is because of my partner, who’s trans. They state that it seems like we are both ultimately trying to build a world where we can take care of each other and care for our loved ones.

It’s at that point that the older gentleman responds, ” Yeah because what affects them affects you too.”

They can have a different kind of dialogue than we often see on social media. Instead, we’re able to use many of these different tools and techniques to move the conversation in the direction of social change, moving us out of a zero-sum frame. That frame often gets us stuck in conversations that don’t lead toward progress and change.

Drawing on the work I reviewed in the book, I’ve truly come to believe that we need new ways of dialogue. This is true in psychotherapy as well as in politics if we want to create the kind of solidarity we need for true and substantive change.

 

Ingle: Your first book was on the relationship between psychoanalysis and liberation psychology. Your most recent is promoting this decolonial psychoanalysis that you’ve been talking about. What’s next for you?

Gaztambide: As I mentioned earlier, a lot of developmental theory tends to be inherently dyadic in nature in ways that exclude any consideration of the sociocultural context, let alone ways of thinking about attachment and child-rearing outside of just a twosome of parent and child.

The next leg of my work is imagining what it would mean to decolonize developmental theory. What would it mean to create a theory of development that appreciates attachment theory but also includes other types of research drawn from anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, research on attachment, and other cultures? From there, we could build a different developmental theory to inform clinical practice.

Because we’re talking about psychoanalysis, that also means revisiting psychoanalytic theories of gender and sexuality. Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini have produced a lot of recent work that engages different decolonial theories to rethink how we understand gender and sexuality.

I hope to combine their work with recent developments in decolonial feminism and other critical theories using psychoanalytic thought. I want to ask the question: What would a theory of gender and sexuality for 2024 look like? I want to consider new implications for clinical practice.

For me, all of this has to feed back into how we can do our work in a more inclusive and better way.

What would it mean to consider, when working with LGBT couples or even with heterosexual couples, how problematic patterns of relating take place against this broader social context that can turn people in their intimate relationships against one another?

 

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