Free Association, Racial Slurs, and Social Justice: A Psychoanalytic Collision Course
Emily S. Frank, Ed.D. will elucidate the dilemmas that can arise when a clinician seeks to promote free association and simultaneously attaches pejorative value to racial slurs, silently deeming some words unspeakable because of a conscious desire to embody social justice values. The judgment of a patient’s words as unspeakable may have innumerable unconscious meanings for the clinician as well as the patient. The author examines potential dynamic meanings of patients’ use of racial slurs in white clinician/white patient dyads and also considers how the clinician’s social justice values can operate as a tension–potentially expansive or constricting–within psychoanalytic treatment.
Emily S. Frank, Ed.D. is a psychologist in private practice in Boston and a candidate in the Adult Psychoanalysis Program at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute (BPSI). Her article, “Profile: Dorothy Evans Holmes: Psychoanalytic Visionary” has been published online in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and will be in print in an upcoming issue of the journal.
Dorothy Evans Holmes, PhD, is a Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas and Teaching and Training Analyst Emerita at the same Center. Dr. Holmes is widely published on the psychoanalytic understanding of race, class, and gender. Her most recent peer-reviewed article is: Evans Holmes, D. (2026). Hatred: A Traumatizing Underpinning of Racism. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 46(8), 828–832. She currently serves in several capacities on the Editorial Board for the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA): on the Board on Race in Psychoanalysis, the Advisory Board, and the Book Review Advisory Board. Formerly, she has served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and JAPA. She is a recipient of the JAPA Prize (2021), the Sigourney Award (2022) and the Hans W. Loewald Memorial Award (2025). She was the eponymous chair of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis (2020-2024). Dr. Holmes lives and works in Bluffton, SC.