Scientific Meeting | Joachim Sehrbrock | Social Justice on the Couch: Collapse and Repair of Social Thirdness | September 26, 2020

WBCPS presents Quarterly Scientific Meeting #3

Joachim Sehrbrock: “Social Justice on the Couch: Collapse and Repair of Social Thirdness”

Saturday September 26, 2020
9:30am – 11:30am

How have the white, middle-class, Euro-centric ideologies and practices that pervade the Western psychoanalytic canon prepared us to make meaning of and respond to the complexities of our pluralistic world? Although the early psychoanalytic movement was replete with attention to and concern about social and political dimensions of life, these dimensionalities eventually gave way to predominantly decontextualized and depoliticized theories and techniques that were geared towards understanding and treating universal intrapsychic unconscious dynamics.

In the context of a socio-politically critical view of psychoanalytic theory and practice, Joachim Sehrbrock will reflect on what it means to keep conducting “business as usual” in an era where movements like Black Lives Matter, #metoo, and Time’s Up are clear warning signs that our world is deeply troubled by injustice, prejudice, and discrimination. Sehrbrock argues that psychoanalytic theory and practice is not immune from this injustice. He reflects on how psychoanalytic methodology can be applied to psychoanalytic thinking itself to interrogate the social unthought knowns that tend to exacerbate the wounds of injustice it endeavours to heal.

Sehrbrock contemplates aspects of a socially just psychoanalytic vision that may reverse decontextualizing, depoliticizing, and prejudicial trends using principles that take into account the inevitable sociopolitical threads that weave through clinical encounters. Most centrally among these presented principles is social thirdness, which expands the traditional views of thirdness to include the patient’s and therapist’s embeddedness in the larger sociopolitical currents that inform and shape their engagement with each other. Both the collapse and repair of social thirdness will be described and illustrated with relevant clinical examples.

Dr. Sehrbrock is a registered psychologist in private practice in Vancouver. He is Clinical Instructor in the Department of Psychiatry and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of British Columbia, as well as regular faculty at Douglas College. Dr. Sehrbrock has a long-standing interest in psychoanalytic theory and practice. He completed pre- and post-doctoral residencies in several psychoanalytically informed outpatient settings in the San Francisco Bay Area. He obtained a post-graduate certificate in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (ICP) Los Angeles. Dr. Sehrbrock has worked clinically with members from LGBTQ communities for nearly 15 years and has written and lectured on the topic of LGBTQ clinical competency.

In addition to the presentation of a paper, the program will also include an opportunity for discussion and exchange about the presented ideas and their relevance for participants in their own clinical experience and practice.

Learning Objectives:

1. Understand and recognize how psychoanalytic practice without an eye to social justice may perpetuate sociopolitical factors and dynamics that may exacerbate the trauma of oppressed populations.
2.  Envision aspects and principles of a socially just vision for psychoanalytic practice.
3. Apply the concept of social thirdness, as well as its collapse and repair, to the formulation of clinical material.