Let’s Talk Psychoanalysis

Let’s Talk Psychoanalysis An online educational platform for all who’re interested in psychoanalytic ideas . Founded by Aisha Abbasi, M.D. , Psychoanalyst/ Educator/ Public Speaker.

06/09/2026

The analyst’s feelings are not outside the treatment.

They are in the room.

Countertransference can arrive as irritation, tenderness, fatigue, confusion, protectiveness, dread, urgency, or a wordless pressure in the body before the mind has caught up.

The clinical task is not to eliminate these responses.

It is to notice them carefully enough that they can become useful.

Dr. Aisha Abbasi puts it plainly: our emotions are not contamination. They are information.

That does not mean every feeling belongs to the patient.

It means the analyst’s inner life is part of the clinical field, and when attended to with discipline, it may reveal something about what has not yet become speakable.

Countertransference asks a difficult question:

What is being communicated through me before it can be said between us?

06/05/2026

Some things in the room remain invisible because both people have agreed not to see them.

Dorothy Evans Holmes describes a clinical “whiteout”: a condition in which whiteness is treated as diffuse light, undifferentiated, unmarked, and therefore unavailable for analysis.

Against that field, persons of color are made visible as “irregularities.”

The irregularity within whiteness is not observed. It is externalized.

That is the clinical force of the passage.

Holmes is not simply naming racism as a social fact. She is asking what happens when patient and analyst collude, implicitly, in protecting whiteness from differentiation.

What cannot be seen cannot be interpreted.

What cannot be interpreted may be enacted.

And what is enacted in the analytic space is never only outside the work.

This is the question Holmes brings to psychoanalysis: can the field bear to examine what it has historically organized itself not to see?

White privilege is not only an idea someone “has.”It may be something organized defensively before it can be thought.Dor...
06/04/2026

White privilege is not only an idea someone “has.”

It may be something organized defensively before it can be thought.

Dorothy Evans Holmes asks whether “internalization” may describe an achievement rather than a starting point: the capacity to tolerate awareness, to think, to symbolize what has otherwise been carried unexamined.

That distinction matters clinically.

Because what remains unsymbolized does not disappear. It can be discarded into the other. It can become distance, devaluation, and a refusal to know.

In the analytic situation, shame may not announce itself as shame. It may appear as defensiveness, blankness, superiority, dismissal, or the urgent need not to see.

Holmes’ work asks psychoanalysis to consider not only what is spoken, but what has been culturally lodged in the psyche without reflection.

What does treatment require when the problem is not simply repression, but inherited culture history living inside the room?

06/03/2026

The clinical problem begins when we decide too quickly what “counts” as psychoanalytic.

A patient’s race.
A patient’s gender.
A patient’s class position.
A patient’s history inside a culture that has already named, limited, or endangered them.

If those are treated as merely social, the analytic frame narrows before the work has even begun.

Dorothy Evans Holmes, PhD, puts the challenge plainly:

“Nowhere in metapsychology, clinical theory, or modes of practice is it writ that any aspect of one’s life experience is not to be examined or is to be relegated to being merely social and therefore not psychoanalytic. As we all know, and Michael Moskowitz (1996) has so beautifully written, psychoanalysis is ‘our only comprehensive theory of human liberation.’”

That sentence asks something serious of the clinician.

Not to abandon psychoanalysis.
Not to dilute it.
But to stop protecting it from the full complexity of psychic life.

If psychoanalysis is a theory of human liberation, then the social is not outside the room.

It is already speaking.

Join us this Saturday, June 6: https://www.letstalkpsychoanalysis.com/shop/p/considerations-of-shame

06/02/2026

Some titles do not simply name papers.

They mark an intervention.

“Come Hither, American Psychoanalysis.”

“The Fierce Urgency of Now.”

“Our Country ’tis of We and Them.”

“Neutral is Not Neutral.”

“Getting to Where We Need to Get.”

Taken together, they ask whether psychoanalysis can remain clinically serious if it refuses to examine the social realities entering the room with the patient, the analyst, and the treatment itself.

The author of these papers is Dr. Dorothy Holmes.

On June 6, Dr. Holmes will speak with Let’s Talk Psychoanalysis on “Considerations of Shame,” with particular attention to necessary innovations in psychoanalytic attitudes, concepts, and practices.

Shame is not only a feeling to be interpreted.

It can shape silence.
It can organize resistance.
It can protect the analyst from seeing what the treatment is asking to be seen.

This is the kind of conversation psychoanalysis needs not as a performance of relevance, but as a condition of clinical honesty.

Registration link in bio.

06/01/2026

Shame rarely enters the clinical space alone.

It brings silence.
Avoidance.
Defensiveness.
Compliance.
Retreat.

The patient may stop associating.
The analyst may stop pressing.
The room may remain polite while something essential disappears.

That is the clinical problem shame creates: it can organize the treatment without ever becoming the stated subject of the treatment.

Our animated video traces how shame moves through the room—not as one feeling among many, but as a force that can interrupt speech, narrow curiosity, and shape enactment.

On Saturday, June 6, Dr. Dorothy Holmes will take up this problem directly in Considerations of Shame, examining how shame affects psychoanalytic work, how it can obstruct the analysis of racialized reactions, and how clinical practice must sometimes change when inherited concepts no longer hold enough.

Saturday, June 6
10:30 AM–12:30 PM PT / 1:30–3:30 PM ET
2.0 CME credits
$65 course fee

For clinicians thinking seriously about shame, race, resistance, and the limits of technique, this is the conversation.

Registration link in bio.

💫 How Psychodynamic Therapists Use Expressive ➡️➡️ Supportive Interventions on a continuum : ✨ “Expressive and supporti...
05/31/2026

💫 How Psychodynamic Therapists Use Expressive ➡️➡️ Supportive Interventions on a continuum :

✨ “Expressive and supportive interventions are not competing methods. They are complementary instruments.

📍 The therapist’s task is to use them with tact, humility, and responsiveness, offering enough challenge to promote growth, and enough support to make that growth emotionally possible.”



🚨 All of the above ⬆️ quoted from the work of Dr. Alex Rowell. See the table below for more info :

Shame often enters treatment indirectly.Not as confession.Not as disclosure.Not as the thing the patient names.It may ap...
05/31/2026

Shame often enters treatment indirectly.

Not as confession.
Not as disclosure.
Not as the thing the patient names.

It may appear as the missing sentence.
The avoided detail.
The sudden shift in subject.
The laugh that cuts off feeling before it can be recognized.

A patient may describe what happened without speaking the humiliation. They may report the conflict without touching the exposure. They may explain the behavior while carefully avoiding the experience of being seen negatively.

That is part of what makes shame clinically difficult.

It does not simply hide content. It shapes what can be said, what can be heard, and what becomes too dangerous to bring into the room.

In Considerations of Shame, Dr. Dorothy Holmes examines shame as a clinical, racial, gendered, and technical question through the work and legacy of Marianne Goldberger.

This seminar is free for Let’s Talk Psychoanalysis members and $65 for non-members. Registration links for both are available in our Linktree bio.

Psychoanalysis has something vital to offer contemporary mental health care. But is our community doing enough to open t...
05/29/2026

Psychoanalysis has something vital to offer contemporary mental health care. But is our community doing enough to open the door?

Dr. Aisha Abbasi has some thoughts. Swipe through to get her take on the structural, cultural, and perceptual barriers standing in the way of a more engaged field.

Read the full essay on the APsA blog: https://apsa.org/why-institutional-engagement-matters-now/

05/29/2026

A patient’s prejudice can become part of the treatment before either person knows what will happen next.

In this excerpt, Dr. Aisha Abbasi recalls a moment when a Jewish patient who harbored anti-Muslim sentiment was astonished to discover that his analyst was Muslim.

The clinical difficulty is obvious. So is the clinical importance.

The moment asks what can be spoken, what has been assumed, and what becomes possible when the analyst is no longer protected by the patient’s fantasy of who she is.

This video is excerpted from a longer talk Dr. Abbasi gave for BPSI, an institution that continues to support psychoanalytic inquiry capable of engaging clinical life alongside cultural and social reality.

The full video is available for free from Let’s Talk Psychoanalysis:
https://www.letstalkpsychoanalysis.com/free-psychoanalysis-videos/reflections-of-three-decades-of-being-a-south-asian-american-analyst

What happens when the patient discovers the analyst is not who they imagined?
And how does the treatment hold what the world has taught the patient to fear?

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