Below is the JEA statement I've been using during my attempt to execute a late-career switch from clinical work back to academia and teaching. I include it here because it ends with a discussion of how my music has always reflected my commitment to justice, equity, antiracism (JEA), and LGBTQ+ inclusion, especially evidenced by our song "Won't Live it Down" from American Bardo.
My Teaching Philosophy and Approach to Justice, Equity, Antiracism (JEA), and LGBTQ+ Inclusion
Justice, equity, antiracism (JEA), and LGBTQ+ inclusion are foundational to my teaching. I aim to create a learning environment that respects and empowers all students, particularly those from marginalized communities. Guided by critical pedagogy and years of experience teaching the humanities, psychoanalysis, and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, I encourage dialogues about power, privilege, and the systems shaping our society. My approach fosters an ethic of care for both the consulting room and classroom, centering openness to difference, relationality, inclusivity, and mutual respect.
Developing My Ethics of Care: An Ontology of Mitsein
My ethics of care is deeply informed by my work as both a clinician and a philosopher of ethics. Drawing from Heidegger, Derrida, Lacan, Freud, and Levinas, I understand care as a relational and ethical imperative rooted in responsibility, difference, and vulnerability. My exploration of these thinkers—including my review essay, “Psychoanalysis and Difference: Alan Bass’s Generalization of Fetishism,” published in the European Journal of Psychoanalysis in 2007, on Alan Bass’s Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care—has profoundly shaped this framework.
Alan Bass, a senior psychoanalyst, philosophy professor, and prominent Derrida translator who was my mentor, redefines care as the “strangeness” of encountering and existing within the undecidable unconscious, which Barnaby Barratt describes as the “otherwise other.” This strangeness aligns with Freud’s concept of “uncanniness” and Derrida’s notion of a “fever” in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Encountering the radical otherness of the unconscious creates anxiety and instability, provoking a fevered response to repress or deny difference by seeking conformity to “more of the same.” This uncanniness of care deeply impacts teachers and analysts alike, shaping their responses to difference in classrooms and consulting rooms.
Maintaining openness to difference is essential to psychological and cultural health. The uncanniness of encountering difference underscores the ethical and relational challenges of engaging with the unknown and the other. Derrida’s Archive Fever extends this uncanniness to cultural exclusions and repressions embedded in traditional canons and cultural memory. While rooted in Heidegger’s mitsein (“being-with”), which emphasizes relational existence, both Derrida and Bass reframe it as an ethical practice grounded in relational responsibility and openness to difference. This dynamic understanding of mitsein is central to my ethics of care, informing clinical and pedagogical practices that foster compassion, inclusivity, and meaningful engagement with the other’s irreducible uniqueness.
Ethics of Care in the Classroom and Beyond
This openness to difference directly supports anti-racism, anti-sexism, and pro-LGBTQ+ initiatives in the classroom by creating an environment where diverse identities and experiences are valued and respected. This principle, my ethics of care, deeply informs my pedagogy, where I strive to cultivate a classroom culture rooted in mutual respect, shared responsibility, and acknowledgment of each individual’s place within a larger community. By prioritizing relationality and openness to difference, my ethics of care fosters a learning environment that challenges exclusionary practices and actively builds pathways toward equity, inclusion, and the celebration of diversity.
In practice, I apply these principles by curating diverse course materials and employing flexible, inclusive assessment strategies that honor a range of perspectives. Inspired by Derrida’s notion of “archive fever” and the opportunities provided by Digital Humanities (DH), I invite students to critique and reimagine cultural archives that perpetuate exclusion.
My ethics of care is equally evident in my nearly 30 years of clinical practice, which includes a great deal of supervision and teaching psychoanalytic psychotherapy. My clinical work also includes work with traumatized combat veterans, survivors of torture, victims of female genital mutilation, and extensive work with the LGBTQ+ community with my East Bay practice. My practice prioritized accessibility through low-fee and pro bono services. It was listed as "Trauma-informed, affirming care empowering diverse voices and supporting individuals through overlapping oppressions and life transitions."
I have fostered growth, trust, and healing in diverse populations. This commitment to cultural humility and progressive values has been foundational to my ethics of care and practice as a clinician and a teacher.
My Creative Commitment to Justice, Equity, Antiracism (JEA), and LGBTQ+ Inclusion
Music can be a powerful medium for addressing justice, equity, and antiracism (JEA) and LGBTQ+ inclusion, and my work intentionally engages with all of these issues. My 2017 album, Eleven Nine, was created in partnership with Lambda Legal to respond to the threats posed to LGBTQ+ rights by heterosexist and transphobic "Christian" MAGA ideology.
I have released over forty political protest songs which can be heard on my playlist called Morton's Pillory Plea: The Political Songs. My song "Morton’s Pillory Plea" addresses Native American rights by revisiting the story of Thomas Morton, who challenged the Puritan exploitation of Indigenous peoples at the very founding of America. Through his plea, the song critiques the erasure of Native voices and underscores the enduring injustices rooted in the colonization of Indigenous lands.
My 2011 EP, Remains In Me, was also a project trying to promote Native American rights and was inspired by the Michael Apted award-winning documentary, Incident at Oglala. My music partner, Mark O'Bitz, is part Cherokee.
Recognizing the intersection of misogyny and systemic violence, my song “Hey Josephina” reimagines and critiques the radical misogyny embedded in the American rock classic “Hey Joe.” This reinterpretation confronts the troubling normalization of gender-based violence in our cultural memory.
In my song "Won't Live it Down," I grapple with the deep hypocrisy at the heart of American identity, inspired by both literary works and critical scholarship that expose the intersections of race, gender, and power. Drawing on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson’s exploitation of Sally Hemings, a relationship emblematic of slavery as institutionalized rape, the song reflects on how these violent contradictions reverberate through generations: a prime example of generational trauma caused by institutionalized rape, toxic masculinity, and virulent racism.
Jefferson’s radical rhetoric of liberty (supporting the most violent groups of the French Revolution) stood in stark contrast to his actions, including the rape of Hemings—an enslaved woman and his late wife’s half-sister—on his French-inspired estate at Monticello. This stark dissonance mirrors the broader systemic violence that Angela Davis and bell hooks have critiqued as intrinsic to the institution of slavery, where Black women’s bodies were commodified and violated under the guise of white patriarchal power.
"Won’t Live it Down" is inspired by Kwame Dawes’ poem "Quasheba, Quasheba," it's stunning musical adaptation in Our Native Daughters' “Quasheba, Quasheba," and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, specifically the haunting character of Litzie Wright. These songs and the literature that inspired them all try to give voice to enslaved ancestors and highlight their endurance in the face of horrific sexual and racist trauma, and the intergenerational trauma that builds up through the generations.
My song seeks to explore how the cultural legacies of slavery can be so deep that they even become a biological legacy as evidenced in the widespread European ancestry among African-Americans, as revealed by Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s work on genetic heritage. These are not merely historical footnotes but deeply embedded wounds in the American psyche. Following the insights of Annette Gordon-Reed and Saidiya Hartman, I aim to draw attention to how Jefferson exemplifies the contradictions at the nation’s core: a champion of liberty who perpetuated violence and exploitation. As bell hooks has argued, the intersection of misogyny and racism in America's history leaves scars that require us to reckon with the truth "to the bone" (a line from my song that cites "Quasheba, Quasheba").
My song--based on George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, specifically the haunting character of Litzie Wright--seeks to hold that truth in creative tension, challenging listeners to confront the nation’s unlivable past and its enduring impact on identity and justice today. Litzie’s story embodies the intergenerational trauma of slavery and attempts to address the centrality of racist and sexist violence to American identity, which has long been denied. My lyrics try to emphasize Litzie’s humanity and the extreme violence at the core of America she represents. Our song attempts to confront the deep, often hidden scars of America’s past.
Like my work as a clinician, scholar, and teacher, my music strives to amplify marginalized voices, challenge cultural complacency, and create space for healing and reflection through storytelling and song.
Won’t Live It Down
(A Song for Litzie and All Her Kin)
(©2019 Anders/O’Bitz)
She steps up
Litzie Wright
What shut her up
Up so tight
What could be done
Cause such a fright
What was done
So many times
Had been done
So many times
All her life
And down her family line
I can’t miss the signs
How this violence
It defines
To the bone
Home of mine
Won’t live it down
Her beauty stuns
Litzie Wright
Her mothers' mothers
Feared the night
Of violence born
All down the line
I can’t miss the signs
How this violence
It defines
To the bone
Home of mine
Won’t live it down
Break
I can’t miss the signs
How this violence
It defines
Our broken home
Ah
We are born
Defiled
She is more
American
Than any white
Ah
You’re our home
Litzie Wright
To the bone
Won’t live it down
from American Bardo, released July 31, 2020
Eric Anders - Vocals
Mark O’Bitz - Acoustic and Electric Guitar, Background Vocals
Jason Littlefield - Electric and Upright Bass
Mike Butler - Slide Guitar, Wurlitzer
Matt Lynott - Drums
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