Dangerous Dialogues: Racial Enactment as the Scene of Address

Abstract

This article presents our collaboration as supervisee and supervisor at the Changing the Conversation Conference held in New York City, March 2019. We address racial enactments in supervisory dyads, the absence of institutional holding, and the barriers to speaking candidly about these experiences. We locate these struggles in race as a “forcefield,” in which experiences of difference collide in ways that can both transform and threaten cherished aspects of identity. In the process, we reflect on how legitimate concerns about confidentiality can, in this context, mask analysts’ desires to protect their access to normative privilege, institutional power, and facilitate avoidance of their own racialized shame.

Keywords:

• racial enactments
• ethnicity
• supervision and psychoanalytic training
• consent and confidentiality
• Arab subjectivity

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank Alison Brown, Dodi Goldman, Lynne Layton, and Melanie Suchet for reading and generously commenting on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1 At the White Institute, each psychoanalytic case must be supervised by a Training or Supervising analyst. This directly introduced the way in which institutional hierarchies and power differentials structure not only supervisees’ relationships with supervisors, but supervisors’ relationships with one another.

2 We use the terms race and ethnicity interchangeably, keeping in mind that they carry different significations, with race historically having been presumed to be biological, and ethnicity presumed to be cultural. Both race and ethnicity are understood as socially constructed categories, potentially overlapping, and differently invoked to justify the unequal distribution of resources and protections.

3 The ways in which gender and race intersect with one another is beyond what we are able to address here, although we assume complex intersections between all such features of identity (see, for example Belkin & White, 2020). Indeed, such intersections are embedded in the very origins of psychoanalytic theorizing (see for example, Aron & Starr, 2015).

4 We do not, here, mean to imply that the construct of consent applies to the choice to give a talk or a paper, in the same way that it is used in the clinical situation with patients. Rather we use the idea of “consent” throughout the paper to evoke the complexities of power, hierarchy, and agency at different stages of our work together.

5 See Saketopoulou (2020) for an adept analysis of how “yes” and “no” cannot be taken at face value in the charged domain of interracial same- and cross-sex erotic relationships.

6 For example, see Aron (1996), Greenberg (1991), and Mitchell (1997) for seminal contributions to this theorizing.

7 Here we are using the third in the way that Crastnopol (1999) has elaborated, as it reflects how the psychoanalytic community intersects with an analytic or supervisory dyad, and how it provides a context outside the dyadic field for making complex clinical judgements (see also, Aron, 1999; Greenberg, 1999).

8 For meaningful examples of the very distinct racial dynamics that can unfold, see Abassi (2014), Layton, (2006), Powell (2018), Suchet (2015).

9 I am grateful to Lara Sheehi (see Sheehi, 2019) my co-presenter at the Division 39 Spring meeting, 2015, who named the conflation of Muslim/Arab/Terrorist. In addition, I want to thank Lynne Layton (see Layton, 2015), our discussant, for her help in my processing this conflation in supervisory experiences during psychoanalytic training.

10 I am intrigued by issues of power, seduction, and consent in how supervisees match with supervisors during training. Unlike with Sarah, to whom I was assigned by the Clinic Director for my psychotherapy cases, for my psychoanalytic cases, I had to choose a preferred supervisor, approach them, and hope to be “taken on” in the context of waiting lists and the feelings around exclusivity, specialness, or rejection these hopes generate.

11 In my own processing of these encounters, I have found the writings of Melanie Suchet profoundly containing and hopeful. Yet, it is also worthwhile to note Sheehi’s (2019) critique of Suchet’s (2010a, 2010b) use of the word “terrorist.” Sheehi calls our attention to the islamophobic normative unconscious at play in the ways Suchet and others, myself included, essentialize the word "terrorist" to Arabs/Muslims even when using this word symbolically in our writings. She reminds us that in the case of White terrorism, such as Anders Breivik in Norway, we rarely refer to these individuals as terrorists.

12 For other examples of analysts “searching for the ethical” (Suchet 2010b) see Guralnik (2016), Rozmarin (2010), and Straker (2007).

13 I have resisted publishing since 2015, despite invitations to do so by mentors and colleagues not affiliated with my institute. Perhaps I feel readier now, especially in a journal closer to my psychoanalytic home and trauma, and in co-writing with Sarah, who has been a protective presence and, who in this collaboration, has shared the burden of its vulnerability and risks.

14 For the most part my comments about my experience will be a response to the events between Nadine and Supervisor A, in which I was a direct participant.

15 It is the case that talking through these concerns with Nadine alleviated them, as did my awareness that Nadine had received other such invitations from admired mentors which she had, indeed, declined. But to be clear, the alleviation of such concerns does not eradicate them. Rather as we noted in our early section on confidentiality and consent, they are “rightly [mine] to bear.”

16 Nadine reminded me that, while true, the Director of Clinical Education at the time was also a supervisor of hers whom she spoke to directly and who, like me, offered her support in the context of their relationship. And while it seemed likely that some conversation about these events did take place in a Training Committee meeting, this did not lead to an institutional address or intervention that involved Nadine and Supervisor A.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nadine Obeid

Nadine Obeid, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is a clinical supervisor at Lenox Hill Hospital Psychiatry Department and at the William Alanson White Institute’s Intensive Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program. She is an active member of Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility (Section IX, of APA’s Division 39) and an editor for their newsletter The Psychoanalytic Activist.

Sarah Schoen

Sarah Schoen, Ph.D., is Faculty and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute; Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; and invited faculty at the Columbia Psychoanalytic University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Dr. Schoen is on the editorial board of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and in private practice in Manhattan’s Flatiron District.