Upcoming Events

Presenter: Tee Landman
Topic: Privilege and Its Selfobjects: Empathy, Power, and the Therapist’s Self
Date: Thursday evening 18th June
Time: 19h30 – 21h10
Where: Zoom

Free to all CTPSPG Members

Abstract: Beginning with Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power, I consider how we are formed by the very powers that also make suffering possible. If power does not merely act upon the subject but helps produce the subject, then privilege cannot be understood solely as conscious bias, social advantage, or positionality. It may also function psychically as a stabilising self object. The title, Privilege and Its Self objects, reflects the central question I want to explore: What psychic work does privilege perform for the therapist, particularly when the therapist’s self object needs are frustrated by the patient’s reality? Rather than focusing primarily on what it means for a White therapist to work with a Black patient, a cisgender therapist to work with a transgender patient, or a neurotypical therapist to work with an autistic patient, I am interested in what whiteness, cisness, neurotypicality, class position, professional authority, and other privileged locations mean to the therapist themselves. What forms of coherence, goodness, belonging, competence, or survivability are secured through these positions? What happens when a patient’s experience disrupts those arrangements?

The ethical challenge that I introduce is not just whether we can understand the client’s experience, but whether we can bear what their reality reveals about our own investments, dependencies, and forms of psychic organisation in privilege. If we are to become a tether of psychic vitality through supporting their self object needs, we may need to begin undoing our privileges. But what would this actually look like? Perhaps we cannot fully know in advance. Perhaps this uncertainty, this ongoing effort to loosen the psychic arrangements through which privilege secures itself, is part of the work of decoloniality.

Tee Bio: Tee Landman (pronouns: they/them) is a queer-gendered, white, middle class Counselling Psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in Pretoria, South Africa. Their clinical work is grounded in relational psychoanalytic traditions, with particular interest in gender-affirming care, neurodivergence, queer and trans subjectivity, psychosexuality, trauma, and the social life of psychic pain. Tee works with adults, couples, and polycules. Their current theoretical work (unpublished – watch this space) engages decolonial  psychoanalysis, placing Fanon in conversation with Laplanche, with a focus on autistic and transgender subjectivities.

Tee is affiliated with various psychoanalytic and professional communities including SAPI, IARPP, IAPSP, CTPSPG, Queering Psychoanalysis, and Johannesburg Relational Therapeutic Alliance.

Readings:

• Layton, L. (2019). Transgenerational hauntings: Toward a social psychoanalysis and an ethic of dis-illusionment. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 29(2), 105–121.  (https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2019.1587992)
• Koshkarian, L. (2023). The case for bearing psychic pain as social and clinical action. Psychoanalytic Social Work, 30(2), 132–152.  (https://doi.org/10.1080/15228878.2022.2075231)