Tasting the "Blood of Recognition" in Racial Melancholia and Mixed-Race Identities

Experiences of feeling haunted and of being in the presence of ghosts are prominent in narratives of patients/people of color in the United States and of mixed-race identity. A creative reading of Hans Loewald’s evocative statement on therapeutic action, the process of transforming “ghosts into ancestors,” is used to explore a way of being with and healing patients with mixed-race identities who are imprisoned in melancholic states. An extended case vignette of an Indian American psychoanalyst working with a patient with a mixed racial identity highlights racialized components of melancholia and illuminates specific countertransference states and enactments that can both impede and allow for the gradual and partial witnessing of racialized ghosts and their transformation into ancestors.

Presenter:
Dhwani Shah, MD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst currently practicing in Princeton, NJ. He is a clinical associate faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a supervising analyst and faculty member at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. He completed his residency in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine where he also completed a fellowship in treatment resistant mood disorders at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He has authored articles on topics ranging from neuroscience, mood disorders, and psychoanalysis. Dr Shah’s book entitled The Analyst’s Torment: Unbearable Mental States in Countertransference – was recently published by Phoenix Publishing House in November of 2022.

• 2 CE's offered 
• Attendees must attend the live program in its entirety to receive CE's. 
• This program will be recorded but is only available to those who register for the event. CE's can only be awarded to those who attend the live Zoom event.

Learning Objectives:
Upon completion of the program, participants will be able to:

1. Describe how our collective fantasies of racial purity and assumptions of white privilege impact mixed race individuals, and how our culture’s disengagement with racial multiplicity leads to individuals of mixed race feeling a threat to their sense of racial existence.
2. Apply their personal reactions to race and identity in the clinical material and understand how this can be a valuable guide in understanding what is happening in the here and now of the therapeutic process.
3. Explain and apply therapeutic processes of the mourning processes of patients with mixed race and racial identity, which is conceptualized as an ongoing process of coming to terms with loss, psychic pain, and vulnerability with our internalized objects and relationships.

ICP Pricing:
Early Registration through September 7th/Late Registration from September 8th:

• Licensed Professional non-ICP member: $100/115
• ICP member: $85/100
• Candidate: $45/60
• Pre-licensed: $25/40

Above ICP prices do not include non-refundable servicing/processing/booking fees. 
The ICP Refund Policy can be honored on the above ICP pricing only! 
Additional servicing/processing/booking fees are non-refundable at the time of purchase.