Spearker Series with Leticia Cantú Alvarado

DECOLONIZING:

On a Verb, its Grammar and Episteme

When: June 07th, 2025 10 AM (PST) / 11 AM (CDMX)

Where: Online Zoom. Free event. Register here.

Those who come to the consultation rooms where psychoanalysis is practiced are not exempt from material realities and contemporary political and social issues. As analysts, we listen to the singular, to that which cannot deny the mark of this contemporaneity, undoubtedly political, and which configures subjective realities. To practice psychoanalysis today, conceiving it as a finished theory that we would have to assume as dogma is frankly an absurdity, especially if we consider a number of ideas and theories with which we can establish a crossing, a border, or perhaps a community. 

Psychoanalysis, as it emerges and is produced primarily in Europe, often falls short in analyzing the “Open Veins” that concretely traverse Our America. In other words, the colonial wound and the patriarchal mark appear in our analytic practice. How can we turn a deaf ear to such subjective discomforts? How can we not be interested in theoretical bodies that can help sharpen our listening? 

Is it possible to free psychoanalysis from its Eurocentric and patriarchal prison? How can we not venture a way of listening that calls for its decolonization? 

This is an invitation to discuss a psychoanalysis that allows itself to be challenged by the decolonial turn and by decolonial feminisms; and invitation to think together about how these other-knowledges can be helpful in our practice.

Leticia Cantú Alvarado has practiced psychoanalysis for over 20 years in Mexico City. She has a master’s degree in Psychoanalytic Theory from Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Psicoanalíticos, and a specialization in Psychoanalytic Clinic from Red Analítica Lacaniana. 

She has participated in international conferences in México, Cuba, Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica. 

She participated in Taller de Escritura Sur and Comunidad Cooperativa de Psicoanálisis, and founded Taller de Mujeres Practicando Psicoanálisis.