16-331c The Unconscious is Like Baltimore in the Morning": Working with Race,
Violence, and Community– 6 Hour Seminar
Daniel Buccino, M.A., M.S.W. & Teresa Mendez, M.S.W.
Saturday, July 23, 2016 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Course Description
Working as psychotherapists has necessitated confronting the difficult and intertwined dynamics of race,
violence, and community, and the way they are (mis)represented in the media. The recent upsurge of violence
nationwide, along with sustained attention to race relations, police violence, and economic disparities, has
spilled into the consulting room. Meanwhile, our work in the consulting room inevitably informs our
understanding of these social issues. Through history, case study, and discussion, grounded in the sociocultural
realities of our time, this workshop will endeavor to capture something of “the psychology of place,” where
trauma reproduces itself so deeply. Yet even as trauma fractures, it also constitutes a person and a place.
Alternately tender and tough, wounded and resilient, swaggering and fearful, trauma survivors are greater than
the sum of their many affective parts. This class will draw on psychoanalytic concepts to explore and trouble
the tensions of trauma, class, race, the street, and the clinic, while considering what racial unrest and urban
uprisings might have to teach the practice of psychotherapy. Using Baltimore as a case example, participants
will be able to reflect on their own clinical work around these often fraught issues.
Faculty: Daniel Buccino, L.C.S.W.-C., B.C.D. is clinical supervisor, student coordinator, and clinical director
of the Mood Disorders Clinic in the Adult Outpatient Community Psychiatry Program at the Johns Hopkins
Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland. Mr. Buccino is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Clinical
Associate Professor at the Smith College School for Social Work and the University of Maryland School of
Social Work. Mr. Buccino has published and presented widely on issues of psychoanalysis and contemporary
culture, effective and ethical psychotherapy, and civility and healthcare
Teresa Mendez, L.I.C.S.W., L.C.S.W.-C., is a graduate of Princeton University and the Smith College School
for Social Work. She is a clinical social worker at The Retreat at Shepard Pratt in Baltimore and maintains a
private practice in Washington, DC. A former journalist and Fellow of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, she has edited and contributed to "Inside Out and Outside In” and "Falling through the Cracks.”
Learning Objectives
1. Develop strategies to manage the anger and displacements brought about by violent and racist current events;
2. Recognize and describe how trauma is reproduced by the "psychology of place";
3. Understand the importance of Baltimore for the history of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the USA;
4. Offer possibilities about how to consider one's personal reflections on city, trauma, race, place, and time in
treatment.
Bibliography

Brickman, C. (2003). Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis. NY: Columbia
UP.

Coates, T. (2015). Between the World and Me. NY: Spiegel & Grau.

Watkins, D.(2015). The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America. NY: Hot Books.