Celia Brickman

Celia Brickman, Ph.D., L.C.P.C., is a Chicago-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist and scholar whose work sits at the intersection of psychoanalysis, race, and religion. She holds institutional affiliations with the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, as well as the Center for Religion & Psychotherapy of Chicago, where she has served as Director of Education.

Brickman is the author of two landmark works in the field. Her book 'Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Primitivity in Psychoanalysis' — described as a classic by scholars including Daniel Gaztambide and Romy Reading — examines the intimate concern with race in Freud's work and the illusory gap dividing White European and non-White subjectivities. Her subsequent work, 'Race in Psychoanalysis,' has been praised by leading figures including Lewis Aron, Jessica Benjamin, Annie Lee Jones, and Stephen Sheehi as essential, transformative reading that applies post-colonial theory to the unconscious racial assumptions embedded in psychoanalytic thought.

Through her scholarship and clinical practice, Brickman illuminates how colonialist and enslaving histories continue to reverberate within psychoanalytic theory and practice, and advocates for a genuinely critical, multicultural, and racially diverse psychoanalysis. Her office is located in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.