This will be a 2 hour virtual event, held on Tuesday 4/15/25.

A psychoanalytic stance offers a unique orientation for addressing the universal problem encountered when people try to talk to each other across the borders of race, culture and and other discrimination-laden domains. A psychoanalytic orientation involves attempting to facilitate articulation of both difference and commonality. Dr. Hart’s work on radical openness, one that draws on interpersonal, relational, phenomenological, and hermeneutic theories in conceiving of a psychoanalytic orientation to listening that emphasizes the therapist’s own unconsciousness and the need for humility, will be described. Radical openness will be conceptualized as an alternative to self-protective adherences to a transference-based way of listening in the clinical situation. 

Objectives:

1) Describe the concept of “radical openness” and its purpose for enriching diversity-related exchanges in the clinical process.

2) Identify two primary limitations of a competency-based orientation to addressing diversity issues. 

3) Distinguish between radical openness and self-disclosure.

Anton Hart, PhD, FABP, FIPA is Training and Supervising Analyst and Faculty of the William Alanson White Institute. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalytic Psychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He has published articles and book chapters on a variety of subjects including psychoanalytic safety and mutuality, issues of racial, sexual and other diversities, and psychoanalytic pedagogy.  He is a member of the group, Black Psychoanalysts Speak and, also, Co-produced and was featured in the documentary film of the same name. He teaches at The Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, Mt. Sinai Hospital, New York Presbyterian Hospital, the National Institute for the Psychotherapies National Training Program, the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, and the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. He recently served as Co-Chair of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis. He is completing a book for Routledge entitled, Beyond Oaths or Codes: Toward a Relational Psychoanalytic Ethics. He is in full-time private practice in New York.

References

Hart, A. (2022). Radical Openness, Part II. Room: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, Issue 13, pp. 20-33. 

Hart, A. (2021). Radical Openness, Part I. Room: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, Issue 12, pp. 5-18. 

Hart, A. (2022). Neutrality as a “White Lie.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 70(1), 320-341.

Hart, A. (2020). From Multicultural Competence to Radical Openness: A Psychoanalytic Engagement of Otherness. The Trauma of Racism (1st ed.). Routledge. 

Gadamer, H.-G. (1975). Truth and Method (2nd revised ed., revised English translation). Continuum.