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.

06/02/2026

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?

Shame rarely enters the room announcing itself.It may arrive as silence.Compliance.Intellectualization.A patient who “un...
05/28/2026

Shame rarely enters the room announcing itself.

It may arrive as silence.
Compliance.
Intellectualization.
A patient who “understands” everything but cannot quite feel anything.
A clinician who hears the material, but not the retreat underneath it.

Helen Block Lewis insisted that shame deserved more clinical attention than psychoanalysis often gave it. Not because shame is rare, but because it is so easily bypassed.

Left unidentified, shame does not disappear.

It organizes what can be said.
It limits what can be heard.
It shapes the treatment from below.

This Saturday, Dr. Dorothy Holmes takes up shame as a clinical, racial, gendered, and technical question through the work and legacy of Marianne Goldberger.

The question is not only where shame appears.

It is what treatment becomes when shame remains unnamed.

What do we learn to hear when shame is not reduced to resistance, narcissism, or silence?

05/28/2026

History enters the consulting room because it enters the people in it.

In this excerpt from Reflections of Three Decades of Being a South Asian American Analyst, Dr. Aisha Abbasi discusses how her self-perception changed as a result of 9/11.

That is the center of the clip, and it should remain hers.

The clinical importance is not in turning her experience into a general lesson too quickly. It is in listening to what happens when identity, history, danger, visibility, and analytic work are no longer separable.

This video is excerpted from a longer talk Dr. Abbasi gave for BPSI, whose commitment to multiple perspectives and serious psychoanalytic inquiry makes room for clinical thought shaped by lived history.

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 changes when the analyst’s identity is no longer experienced as private?
What does history ask of analytic listening?

05/28/2026

Traditions, rituals, and celebrations give meaning to our lives. They give us time to pause, reflect , and gather in love.
Happy Eid ul Adha to all who celebrate this holiday !
🌙🕌❤️ 🎉

05/27/2026

Patients notice more than we think.

In this excerpt, Dr. Aisha Abbasi recalls an early clinical moment involving a patient who saw her stripped-down Nissan as evidence of professional failure. Later, when she got a new car, his perception changed.

It is funny on the surface. Clinically, it is not small.

The patient’s response opens questions about class, authority, fantasy, success, envy, and the analyst as an object in the patient’s mind. The car becomes more than a car because, in analysis, almost nothing stays only itself.

This video is excerpted from a longer talk Dr. Abbasi gave for BPSI, whose intellectual seriousness helps hold together the ordinary and the deeply clinical without flattening either one.

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 does the patient see before they know what they are seeing?
And what gets organized around the analyst’s visible life?

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