Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Technique: Putting Freud on Fanon's Couch

Both new and seasoned psychotherapists wrestle with the relationship between psychological distress and inequality across race, class, gender, and sexuality. How does one address this organically in psychotherapy? What role does it play in therapeutic action? Who brings it up, the therapist or the patient?

Daniel José Gaztambide addresses these questions by offering a rigorous decolonial approach that rethinks theory and technique from the ground up, providing an accessible, evidence-informed reintroduction to psychoanalytic practice. He re-examines foundational thinkers from three traditions--Freudian, relational-interpersonal, and Lacanian--through the lens of revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, and offers a detailed analysis of Fanon's psychoanalytic practice.

Drawing on rich yet grounded discussions of theory and research, Gaztambide presents a clinical model that facilitates exploration of the social in the clinical space in a manner intimately related to the patient's presenting problem. In doing so, this book demonstrates that clinicians no longer have to choose between attending to the personal, interpersonal, or sociopolitical. It is a guide to therapeutic action "on the couch," which envisions political action "off the couch" and in the streets. Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Technique provides a comprehensive, practice-oriented and compelling guide for students, practitioners, and scholars of critical, multicultural and decolonial approaches to psychotherapy.

Daniel José Gaztambide, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Director of the Frantz Fanon Lab for Decolonial Psychology at Queens College-CUNY, USA. He is the author of A People's History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology (2019), and the recipient of a presidential citation from the American Psychological Association as part of the Presidential Taskforce on Strategies for the Elimination of Racism, Discrimination, and Hate. Gaztambide is the recipient of a Mellon Foundation Fellowship and a Miranda Family Fellowship to support his research and analytic training at the NYU Post-Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is a practitioner in private practice, and an active artist and member of the Puerto Rican poetry troupe, the Titere Poets.