IPA Journal Club: Dionne Powell MD

Date: Friday September 26, 2025
 


The IPA Journal Club (JC) is a project of the IPA Communications Committee. It meets 6 times per academic year (September-June) on Fridays at 4 PM (16:00-17:15) London time [11:00 AM – 12:15 PM US Eastern Time] for 75 minutes. Each meeting, in webinar format, is in English and features a guest author who discusses with registrants an article or chapter they have published. The meetings are recorded and later posted online at the IPA website and on the IPA YouTube channel for viewing by the general public.


The JC’s next meeting, featuring Dionne Powell, MD, will be on Friday, September 26, 2025, at 4 p.m. London time, 11 a.m. US Eastern Time. Registration, which is free of charge, is open to IPA members and candidates, other interested mental health professionals, scholars and academics. A downloadable copy of the paper is available to registrants.

Ideally, all registrants will have read the paper beforehand and have an opportunity to ask questions or make comments to the guest author. At the registration site, you can also submit questions to the moderators to share with the author(s).

Download reading:
Powell, D.R. (2018). Race, African Americans, and psychoanalysis: Collective silence in the therapeutic conversation. J. American Psychoanalytic Association, 66(6):1021-1049.

We are grateful to JAPA and SAGE publications for giving the IPA Journal Club permission to distribute a copy of the paper to our registrants.

Abstract
Both historically and currently, assaults on the black body and mind have been ubiquitous in American society, posing a counterargument to America as a postracial, color-blind society. Yet the collective silence of psychoanalysts on this societal reality limits our ability to explore, teach, and treat the effects, both interpersonal and intrapsychic, of race, racism, racialized trauma, and implicit bias and privilege. This silence, which challenges our relevance as a profession, must be explored in the context of America’s racialized identity as an outgrowth of slavery and institutional racism. Racial identifications that maintain whiteness as a construct privileged over otherness are an obstacle to conducting analytic work.

Examples of work with racial tensions and biases illustrate its therapeutic potential. The challenge for us as clinicians is to acknowledge and explore our racial bias, ignorance, blind spots, and privilege, along with identifications with the oppressed and the oppressor, as contributors to our silence.

Bios

Dionne Powell, MD, serves on the IPA Board as North American Representative and is the first African-descended psychoanalyst to sit on the IPA Board since its founding in 1910. She is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (NY), and the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY-NYU affiliated) and Chairs PANY’s Education Committee. She is an Adjunct Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at The New York Presbyterian Hospital, Columbia University in New York, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Assistant Attending Psychiatrist at The New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. she is Co-Chair of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equity in American Psychoanalysis and Vice-President of the American Association for Psychoanalytic Education, is a founding member of Black Psychoanalysts Speak (BPS), and is in full-time private practice in NYC. She has written and presented extensively with recent contributions including:

· Powell, D.R. (2025). Becoming Raced: Psychic Consequences of Transgenerational Racial Trauma. International Journal of Psychoanalysis (in press)

· In Pursuit of Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis Findings and Recommendations from the Holmes Commission. Holmes, Hart, Powell, Stoute, et. al. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Vol 72, No. 3, June 2024


The moderators of the Journal Club are Jack Drescher, MD & Christopher G. Walling, PsyD

Jack Drescher, MD, a member of IPA’s Communications Committee, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in New York City. A recipient of the 2022 Mary S. Sigourney Award for his international work on gender and sexuality, Dr. Drescher is on the faculties of the William Alanson White Institute, the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the

Florida Psychoanalytic Center. He is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia and a member of the Board of Trustees of the WA White Institute. He is an elected Director-at-Large of the American Psychoanalytic Association. His publications have been translated into numerous languages. He is author of Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man (Routledge) and Emeritus Editor of the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health.


Christopher G. Walling, Psy.D., MBA, FIPA, is Associate Professor and Chair of Research Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Faculty Chair of Adult Psychoanalytic Training at the New Center for Psychoanalysis, and a licensed clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. Dr. Walling is a Clinical Research Fellow and International Advisory Council member at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute, serves on the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Committee on Gender & Sexuality, and is past president of the United States Association for Body Psychotherapy. His work appears in American Psychological Association’s Journal, Psychotherapy and the International Body Psychotherapy Journal. Recent honors include the 2026 Ernst & Gertrude Ticho Award and being named the 2024 Gina Ogden Scholarship prize in Integrative Sex Therapy Research. He maintains a private practice in Brentwood, California.