Professor Ankhi Mukherjee will be delivering the Robert S. Leibert Memorial Lecture on March 7, 2023, associated with the eponymous award she won for Unseen City. Hosted by the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine and Columbia University, it will start at 8 pm EST. Please register to receive the zoom link.
https://mailchi.mp/cumc/apm-presents-psychoanalysis-of-the-oppressed-march-7-2023?e=04b777078d
In this talk, Professor Ankhi Mukherjee draws on her decade-long work, in Unseen City, with free- and sliding-fee clinics which deliver psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy in the slums, interstices, and dusty margins of global cities. Framed by a reading of Paulo Freire's libertarian pedagogy, it asks what revolutionary leadership, mobilized within and across class lines, might look like when it comes to the relay of psychoanalytic training from supervisor to lay therapist. Drawing on psychotherapeutic initiatives in Kolkata, Chennai, London, and NYC, the talk dwells on the figure of the community mobilizer and "vulnerable" expert (Sudhir Kakar's term), a cornerstone of the historical free clinic movement which started with a speech act by Sigmund Freud in 1918. Dr. Mukherjee will present these vigilante mental health activists as guardians of the psychic life of urban poverty and the dream of a psychoanalytic commons.
