That’s a very incisive question. Let’s situate Neil Altman’s The Analyst in the Inner City in relation to Decolonial Psychotherapy.
1. What Altman Was Doing
Altman’s project in The Analyst in the Inner City (first edition 1995, revised 2009):
- He brought psychoanalysis—often associated with white, upper-middle-class patients—into the context of inner-city communities marked by poverty, racial oppression, and social marginalization.
- He explicitly engaged issues of race, class, and culture, showing how psychoanalytic work cannot be separated from the social and political forces shaping psychic life.
- He described the analyst’s position not as neutral, but as situated—implicated in structures of privilege and inequality.
In this sense, the book was a pioneering attempt at socially contextualized psychoanalysis.
2. Decolonial Resonances
Decolonial psychotherapy (as it has been theorized more explicitly in the 2010s–2020s by scholars like Daniel José Gaztambide, Lara Sheehi & Stephen Sheehi, etc.) emphasizes:
- The need to critique Eurocentric assumptions of the analytic tradition.
- The insistence that colonial histories and racialized power relations are internalized in psychic life.
- A praxis that is not only therapeutic but also politically liberatory, opening space for voices silenced by colonial/imperial hegemony.
Altman’s work resonates strongly with these aims:
- By focusing on marginalized Black and Latino communities in New York City, he exposed how racism and poverty shape subjectivity.
- He challenged the implicit coloniality of psychoanalysis as a “universal” theory while actually rooted in white bourgeois contexts.
- He positioned the analyst as responsible for acknowledging structural inequalities, not only intrapsychic dynamics.
3. Limits of Calling It “Decolonial”
That said, it’s important to notice:
- Altman himself did not frame his work in explicitly decolonial language; he was more within the relational/critical psychoanalysis tradition.
- He focused on race and class within the U.S. rather than linking directly to the broader colonial histories of empire and global South struggles, which are central to decolonial thought.
- In short, his project was proto-decolonial or aligned with decolonial impulses, but not fully articulated in the framework that later thinkers (Gaztambide, Sheehi, etc.) developed.
4. Conclusion
So, to answer directly:
- We can regard The Analyst in the Inner City as a precursor or companion to Decolonial Psychotherapy—an early, pioneering attempt to bring psychoanalysis into dialogue with race, class, and culture, and to resist its Eurocentric neutrality.
- But strictly speaking, it is more accurate to call it critical or socially contextual psychoanalysis with decolonial resonances, rather than a fully formed decolonial psychotherapy text.
👉 Would you like me to sketch a genealogical line (Altman → Gaztambide → Sheehi, etc.) showing how The Analyst in the Inner City can be positioned as an ancestor in the broader arc leading to today’s decolonial psychotherapy? That way it could be directly woven into your seminar’s Decolonial Path alongside the Balint–Decolonial “mutual co-regression” model we discussed earlier.
