It is with profound sorrow and deep love that the Black Psychoanalysts Speak (BPS) family announces the passing of Dr. Kathleen (“Kathy”)  Pogue White on March 11th, 2026. A psychoanalyst, psychologist, executive coach, internationally known organizational consultant, and Tavistock Group Relations Practitioner, Kathy was President of Pogue White Consultancy, LLC and a founding member of BPS. She was, in every sense of the word, a shero.

 

We are certainly going to miss her presence and her voice within our BPS family. We are fortunate that BPS will serve as a space for our reflections, our grief, our sense of loss, and our pleasure in the “good trouble” she got into over the many, many phases of her life and legacy.

 

A Force of Nature

Kathy was a brave, brilliant thinker, and heartwarming woman who was central to the formation of BPS from the very beginning. She was curious, direct, generous, and humorous, all at once. She served as co-director, focusing on governance, membership and outreach. She brought grace, gravitas, and generativity to those of us within BPS seeking a community and a sense of belonging so lacking in our psychoanalytic institutes. She was a  force of nature -  her grit, her unabashedness, her deep humanity, her remarkable analytic sensibilities applied so widely and deeply, and her visionary self. It made her singular among us. 

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Education and Scholarship

Kathy's stellar career had many highlights including her work as a distinguished educator and practitioner.  She held a PhD in Clinical Psychology from New York University and was a graduate of the psychoanalytic training program at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology (WAWI). She presented her paper "Surviving hating and being hated: Some personal thoughts about racism from a psychoanalytic perspective" at the WAWI’s Society meeting on October 18, 1992. After it was published in Contemporary Psychoanalysis in 2002, it became a classic and a reference for consulting in communities and organizations. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, there was renewed interest in understanding the dynamics of racism, and this paper was re-published in July 2024. 

 

In 2017, when the New York Psychoanalytic Institute held their first Diversity Panel, Kathy brought  her characteristic candor and warmth. One story she told from that panel has become legend: Kathy cancelled her analytic session to attend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral. She told her analyst that she would not be paying for that session - because he should have closed his office to attend as well. That was Kathy.

 

In 2023, Kathy received the WAWI Director’s Award both for her antiracism work and for her role as co-founder and co-director of WAWI’s Organizational Program. Through her membership and presence at WAWI, many benefitted from her wisdom, thoughtfulness, and perspective. She addressed anti-Black racism and polarization by designing and facilitating town halls, teaching electives such as "Race in the Clinical Space," and bringing a firm voice to WAWI's Anti-Racism Action Working Group and its Center for Public Mental Health.

 

Kathy was also a member and Fellow of the A. K. Rice Institute (AKRI) community and the broader Tavistock group relations and organizational consulting community. Beginning in the 1980s, she contributed in significant ways through her roles as consultant and/or board committee member for the Boston affiliate of AKRI, Center for the Study for Groups and Social Systems, and AKRI’s New York Affiliate, the New York Center. In 1999, Kathy directed the first Group Relations Conference at New York University’s campus. She was a professional associate of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR) in London, United Kingdom. She was the first American and African American to serve as the associate director of TIHR’s international flagship Leicester group relations conference.  She truly understood people and group dynamics.

 

She published and lectured widely on the consultative stance in organizational role consultation and on initiating race dialogue in the psychoanalytic dyad. She developed reflective practice skills in organizational consulting and, in recent years,  consulted on a New York City Borough Jails project. She worked globally with executives at leading institutions including Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP; Bloomberg LP; TEVA Pharmaceuticals; Goldman Sachs; Georgetown University; and The Audubon Society.

 

Legacy and Impact

Kathy’s impact on the psychoanalytic world, organizations, and on individual lives within it cannot be overstated. She was proud of her African American and Black roots. She was committed to the mission of Black Psychoanalysts Speak, which was formed “to enable the voices and ideas of Black psychoanalysts to be heard, in psychoanalysis and in the wider world, and to draw attention, within psychoanalysis and its related clinical and scholarly fields, to the concerns of Black people.” Inspired by Kathy, BPS’s reach extended into the national and international psychoanalytic governing bodies. In 2020, alongside her BPS colleagues, she recommended to the leaders of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) the naming and formation of APsA’s  Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis. This was a pivotal contribution to the field’s reckoning with race.

 

She was the driving force behind the establishment of several national and international organizations that brought psychoanalytic thinking into organizational life. She was a founding member and past director of Systems Psychodynamic Studies at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR). She helped found the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO), which applies psychoanalytic thinking to the understanding of organizations. Kathy was also instrumental in helping to launch CFAR’s (The Center for Applied Research, Inc.) Dynamics of Consulting Program. She collaborated closely with her peers there through consulting projects, including her work for the Leadership Development Fellowship at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Her fingerprints remain on what they do and how they do it today. 

 

She had a profound and sustaining impact on countless Black clinicians, encouraging them to step forward and share their voices in a wider psychoanalytic community that has not always been  welcoming.  In 2023, she worked with colleagues to start Chocolate Salon: Black Clinicians Connecting and Reflecting, a workshop for Black Clinicians, and developed its succession plan. Similarly, she mentored young group relations consultants to become directors resulting in her having many “children and grandchildren” in the group relations world.
 

Her contributions extended beyond mentorship and supervision at psychoanalytic institutes to founding and helping others launch leadership and consulting programs.  You can read her work as well as see and listen to her in the selected publications, videos, and podcasts below:

 

Selected Publications

• White, K. P. (2002). Surviving hating and being hated: Some personal thoughts about racism from a psychoanalytic perspective. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 38(3), 401–422.

• White, K. P. (2014). The price of the fear of fading: Some thoughts on women’s resistance to taking the role of Elder from a psychoanalytic perspective. Socio-analysis, 16, 7.

• White, K. P. (2018). Applying learning from experience: The intersection of psychoanalysis and organizational role consultation. In L. J. Gould, L. F. Stapley, & M. Stein (Eds.), The systems psychodynamics of organizations (pp. 17–43). Routledge.

 

Videos and Podcasts

• Black Psychoanalysts Speak. (2017). Black Psychoanalysts Speak trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHPz698AgGU    

• From Martin Luther King to Wall Street: Transitions in the life of a psychoanalyst: An interview with Kathleen Pogue White, PhD (No. 64). [Episode 64: From Martin Luther King to Wall Street: Transitions In the Life of a Psychoanalyst: An Interview with Kathleen Pogue White Ph.D. – IPA Off the Couch]. (2020, Sept 6). In IPA Off the Couch.

 

Kathy was a singular, generous, talented, and loving person -  a psychoanalyst who had a major impact. We have truly lost a shero and a true advocate for the human rights of all. We will forever be grateful that God allowed our paths to cross on this journey.  She was a warrior who made the world a better place for us all. She will be very much missed. May her memory be a blessing. May she rest in eternal peace. May perpetual Light shine upon her.

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