Dr. Vaughans has been at the forefront in helping white American psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to acknowledge and struggle to manage our racial bias. In this Lecture, Dr. Vaughans attempts to examine the findings of the Holmes Commission of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2023) through the lens of the Latin American psychoanalyst Jose Bleger and his notion of the psychoanalytic frame. The mission of the Holmes Commission was to assess systemic racism within psychoanalytic training and its entrenched impact on theory and practice. However, Bleger discredited the traditional focus on breaches and ruptures of the frame. Instead, he proposed scrutinizing the frame when everything is going smoothly, believing that absence of perceptible issues may obscure underlying tensions or that systemic problems may be going on unnoticed.

Kirkland Vaughans, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. A training and supervising analyst of IPTAR, he is also on faculty and founder of the…