Dorothy Evans Holmes, PhD
In Pursuit of Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis:
Findings and Recommendations of the Holmes Commission
December 13, 2024
December 13, 2024, 4-5:15 (16:00-17:15) pm London time [11:00 AM – 12:15 PM Eastern US Time]
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.
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.
Paper
Holmes, D.E. (in press). In pursuit of racial equality in American psychoanalysis: Findings and recommendations of the Holmes Commission. JAPA.
Abstract
In the summer of 2020, following the wanton murders of George Floyd and other unarmed African Americans, The Holmes Commission answered the call of APsA’s President, William Glover, to identify, explore, and evaluate systemic racism within the institutions, policies, and institutional practices of psychoanalytic organizations within North America, in APsaA and other independent organizations.
The Commission's evaluative study used questionnaires and interviews and found varied and widespread evidence of systemic racism within and across psychoanalytic institutions, irrespective of governing body. Systemic racism was often manifested in racial enactments at many levels of institutional life (administration, teaching, supervision, and on the analytic couch) that went unattended and lowered the morale of white and BIPOC members, in BIPOC wariness about entering or finishing analytic training, and in wariness among BIPOC and white graduates about staying involved in psychoanalytic organizations.
Recommendations for necessary change including strong leadership, were offered. Multiple resistances to change included a focus on methodological issues rather than on consideration of the new knowledge provided by the study findings, and a focus on sensitivity to being identified as an individual racist which was not the subject of the study, rather than on systemic racism which was the study's subject.
The IPA Journal Club would like to thank the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA) and its publisher, SAGE, for giving permission to share this paper with attendees.
Bio
Dorothy Evans Holmes, PhD, ABPP, FABP, is a Teaching, Training, and Supervising Analyst in the Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas and at IPTAR, Professor and PsyD Program Director Emerita at the George Washington University, and Teaching, Training and Supervising Analyst Emerita at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. Dr. Holmes is widely recognized for her examination of the impact of race and gender on the psychoanalytic treatment process. Her most recent of many refereed journal articles includes two papers on whiteness in the spring, 2021 issue of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and “Hatred: A traumatizing underpinning of racism” (in press), Psychoanalytic Inquiry. Dr. Holmes has served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In 2021, she received a JAPA Prize and in 2022, a Sigourney Award. Dr. Holmes continues to be involved in national psychoanalytic organization leadership, including that she served as the eponymous Chair of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis (2020-2024). She is also a member, emerita, of Black Psychoanalysts Speak. Dr. Holmes practices psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Bluffton, SC.
The regular moderator of the Journal Club is Jack Drescher, MD
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 as well. 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.