Profile: Dorothy Evans Holmes: Psychoanalytic Visionary

is a groundbreaking examination of systemic racism within American psychoanalysis.The research and study at its core should hold a central place in psychoanalytic scholarship, education, and professional discourse.The commission was named for and chaired by psychoanalyst Dorothy Evans Holmes, yet many in the analytic world do not know about the scope and depth of her work.I first encountered the name Dorothy Holmes in June 2023, when the Holmes Commission Report was released.The timing for me was fortuitous; I was 3 months away from beginning analytic training.Upon reading the report, I felt tremendous relief.Psychoanalysis, a field I had long felt drawn to but had feared was too elitist, too removed from the problems of our time, and too inaccessible to far too many people, was examining its own biases, reflecting on deeply entrenched prejudices within the field and the world, and, I hoped, opening up.In preparation for this profile, I began to research Holmes's contributions to psychoanalysis.I quickly realized that Holmes had been incisively articulating challenges posed by racism and other forms of oppression for decades prior to the field-changing publication of the report of the eponymous commission.Initially writing under her maiden name of Evans, Holmes's work includes over 25 articles, one book, a number of book chapters, and innumerable presentations.At the outset of this project, I wondered if I, as a white 1 analyst in training, was the right person for the job.