In concert with ongoing, public demands for naming racism, and racist attitudes in society at large, and for the implementation of racial justice in established social structures, the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center hopes to create more diverse, equitable, and inclusive educational opportunities that will attract and encourage students representing the BIPoC community. We hope to deepen the interests of these students in the promise of relational psychoanalysis to interrogate and to transform the systematic racism that has plagued and limited both the theoretical and clinical contributions of our profession, the racism that has narrowed our racial diversity both in our professional community and in our patient population. In these critical moments of our lives, the Mitchell Center strives toward establishing an anti-racist psychoanalytic community.

In establishing this scholarship, we at the Mitchell Center, openly invite BIPoC-identified candidates to bring their diverse voices to our theory and practice. We anticipate benefiting from the unique understandings of human experience that these students will bring to our program and to the field in general, enabling relational psychoanalysis to play a broader and more useful role in addressing personal and interpersonal experiences of race, racism, Otherness, and the human struggles inflicted by these social constructs.