Introduction: Can We Speak to the Ism in Racism?: Changing the Conversation¹

Abstract

The articles in this special issue represent a range of experiences and a collection of voices reflecting on race and ethnicity from psychoanalytic perspectives and in psychoanalytic contexts. Together they illustrate how macro- and micro-aggressions, racial traumas and divisions—whether perpetrated wittingly or unwittingly—result in feelings of diminishment, pain, and humiliation. In addition to bringing a psychoanalytic perspective to racism and racial subjectivity, the goal here is to foster new and more effective conversations addressing the structural, educational, and interpersonal issues that contribute to racism in psychoanalytic training institutes. The ongoing interaction between racism at the cultural, organizational, and individual levels extends to the cultural context outside the consulting room. This, in turn, raises important question as to how we—as psychoanalysts—can contribute not only to greater awareness, but to change, where change is sorely needed.

Keywords:

• racism
• racial enactments
• racial alexithymia
• Intra and Inter-institute infractions
• structural racism
• training
• micro-aggressions

In recent decades, psychoanalysts have increasingly been considering their work from the context of interpersonal relations and the culture in which they are embedded. Although we generally understand this as a need to think about how the broader social world affects our theories, our work, our minds, and our bodies, it seems we also should be thinking about how we can make a contribution to the world outside our consulting rooms—how we can offer psychoanalytic perspectives on the important problems in living we currently face.

The conference² from which most of these articles originated took place in Spring 2019, yet this issue was not finalized until a year later—smack in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge what is currently happening in the world at large and the effects these events are having on us and on racism, the subject of this special issue. With COVID-19, we are navigating unfamiliar territory—traversing a world that we have never known. No question that this pandemic, laden with trauma, is wreaking havoc on everyone’s mental health and well-being.

Yet, some of us are more vulnerable than others, at higher risk for contracting and dying from the virus. These are the elderly, the immunocompromised, people with low incomes, and people of color. Although there is a clarion call for more research to support these higher risk people, research alone does not ‘change the conversation,’ as we say. We already know that class, gender, ethnicity, and race intersect in complex ways to create disparities: disparities that follow from unequal access to adequate healthcare leading to the higher prevalence of medical conditions that weaken immune systems. We know these conditions are exacerbated by the complex psycho-social stressors associated with longstanding oppression and marginalization.

Thus, COVID-19 has put racism in full relief.³ Although there are many who maintain that race is no longer the problem it once was in this country,⁴ we can see clearly how the rise of Trump, and the rhetoric of his supporters, reveals the racism and White supremacy that continue to dominate social, political, and interpersonal structures. Racism is a global epidemic we have lived with for far too long. Not only is it time to fight against overt expressions of hate, it’s time to combat the hate that remains hidden, implicit, and unconscious.

We cannot take the position that we just don’t know, nor can we see, and hide our heads in the sand. Not knowing, seeing, or making the effort to know or see represents our biases, which in turn make us blind to the data. When we don’t talk about class and racial disparities and refuse to acknowledge those who may be disproportionately affected, we are refusing to address the reality that COVID-19, as well as so many previous crises, affect and harm some groups much more than others.

Here’s the irony and the challenge: The human tragedy of this pandemic, a catastrophe that should remind us of our shared vulnerability, is one that has also raised the dim specter of “othering” and splitting. But it’s not COVID-19 that is dividing us by race, class, and age: The dividing arises from the sadly common phenomenon of shifting blame onto “others,” an “othering” that—in turn—breeds contempt, rage, and hatred. Now, more than ever, as we face yet another instance of the deadly problem of “otherness,” we need to be reminded how essential it is to keep race and class at the center of our thinking, consciousness, and actions.

‘Otherness’ in the context of White dominance is wide in scope. It not only includes race and ethnicity, but also gender, sexual orientation, religious, and political affiliation. To be “othered” often includes experiences of being misrecognized, invisible, hyper-visible, distorted, and objectified. Otherness is a phenomenon that is neither altogether inner nor completely outer, but, rather, is suspended between the two. Conversations are needed to create a space where individuals can bring aspects of self that have been marginalized into a relational exchange, in which both—actually all—participants reflect back to each other their subjective experience. This kind of conversation is only possible through the ongoing process of listening, assuming one’s own and the other’s full humanity, and trusting in the validity of disparate experiences. The conference that spawned this issue was an effort to respond to this need.

As psychoanalysts, clinicians, and educators, we have often cast a blind eye to the racism in our profession: We’ve been slow to explore issues of diversity and racism, and slow to address the ongoing commission of both macro- and micro-aggressions. This is a story that begins with who applies for psychoanalytic training, who is accepted into training, and the resulting absence of diversity in membership and particularly in leadership positions across the country. Discussing what unfolds once people of color do actually enter psychoanalytic institutes, Woods (2020) notes in an important recent article, The Work Before Us: Whiteness and the Psychoanalytic Institute, how—over the past ten years—she has witnessed, heard of, and also been party to, numerous painful interactions and acts of erasure initiated by White people—including psychoanalysts—toward psychoanalytic candidates and graduates who identify as racial and ethnic minorities. “The white people were usually quite oblivious to what they had done or were unaware of the reverberating impact of their actions” (Woods, 2020, p.155). Since 2010, Woods, a presenter at the Changing the Conversation Conference, has been a member and co-chair of a free-standing committee⁵ that focuses primarily on matters of race and ethnicity, and—despite her concerns—she notes recent positive changes in the field. Yet, there’s still a long way to go.

Now, if we are to make any difference in these trying times, we must confront the urgent issues of our times. Changing the Conversation: Political and Clinical Issues of Race and Ethnicity in Psychoanalytic Institutes⁶ was a beginning, an effort to find ways to talk about what’s been so very hidden. In addition to papers presented at that conference, other contributions—arising from dialogues the conference inspired—were invited through the combined efforts of the three guest editors of this volume, Sarah Schoen, Cleonie White, and myself.⁷ Taken together, these essays focus on the ways in which attitudes toward race and ethnicity—conscious or unconscious—affect how we operate in the world at large, personally and professionally. Of special interest to us as psychoanalysts are questions about how race and racism are embedded in the culture of psychoanalytic institutes, and how these dynamics are enacted during the process of psychoanalytic training.

We wondered why and how a profession dedicated to understanding and transforming the difficult, conflictual, subtle, painful, perplexing, and resistant forms of human experience can also—at times—be either blind to forces in the arenas of race and ethnicity or participate in maintaining existing power differentials. We recognized that as a field, we were—and are—overdue for a reckoning with the ways in which attitudes toward race and ethnicity affect institutional culture, theoretical orientations, leadership, and demographics. Like all expressions of racism, racism in psychoanalysis includes interpersonal acts of discrimination. Yet we know that racism is not simply limited to individual acts of bias, attitudes, or interpersonal exchanges: It extends to structural factors embedded in institutional policies and societal norms. Our intention, as guest editors for this issue of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, is to join all those in the field who are committed to the acknowledgment that racism is rooted in the history of psychoanalysis and to building on the potentials for change in our field’s future.

As analysts, we know that history repeats itself, and history has meaning. Racial enactments that reproduce White supremacy are everywhere. No psychoanalytic institute, including our own analytic home, the William Alanson White Institute, is exempt. The Changing the Conversation Conference was designed, in part, as a response to our own institute’s unwitting exclusion of voices. An example of this exclusion was addressed at the Institute’s 75th anniversary conference, both in the discourse and among presenters reflecting racial diversity and scholarship. In planning the Changing the Conversation conference, we—a different group of organizers—also became acutely aware that we were likely to commit new blunders and reveal our own racist attitudes, even as we aspired to ‘right the wrongs’ that came before. Similarly, we, the three guest editors, are aware that part of what is so difficult about having—much less trying to change—the conversation about race and racism in psychoanalysis, is the painful participation in the problem such engagement makes inevitable (see Obeid & Schoen, this issue). No conference or journal issue devoted to this topic will avoid such missteps and participation, and we can only hope to learn, both from what has come before us and from our own mistakes, as we try to change and grow.

In twenty-five years of creating, planning and chairing conferences, Changing the Conversation was, for me—an Italian, Jewish, White girl, born in the Bronx—by far the most difficult in its production and execution. And yet, I may have learned the most from this particular experience. One thing that clearly changed was my rethinking of the idea that real, much less radical racial, change would develop organically, without focused and conscious effort. Interestingly, the notion that change should be “organic” may be one form that institutional resistance to change has assumed (Cooper, 2010). As analysts, we know well that patients, especially in early phases of addiction or in treatment more generally, often object to being challenged to consider change. What we sometimes miss is the degree to which our own defenses against change do not just disappear in the face of rational thinking. Affective change and personal engagement require a shove to bear things beyond the comfortable, including feeling and acknowledging personal shame. Often it is raw experience of discomfort that creates a climate of emotional openness and complexity. Change necessitates moving through the process and becoming immersed, and this process is painful. We see this both at the individual and the organizational level, and, moreover, it is certainly true as we aspire to create institutional environments that reflect cultural diversity and expansiveness.

One point is clear: as analysts, if we are to help our candidates, analysands, or students understand racism we must first acknowledge our own conscious and unconscious biases, roles, and underlying feelings, all factors that perpetuate the status quo. In training, we must recognize the Whiteness of the vast majority who are in positions as administrators, teachers, supervisors, and training analysts.

Racism is powerful and pervasive. Fueled, in part, by the hatred and fear we have toward “others” who are seen as threats to our feelings of security, importance, and sense of control, racism can only be addressed when we risk the threats and acknowledge our implication in fostering it, creating new conversations amongst and between us. We must work through our fear of change, as well as our desire for it.

So how to do this? Deconstructing racial attitudes involves the hard work of talking substantively about race and racism in order to figure out how we are affected by it—for we all are. Dialogues that build relationships where there have been divisions and that teach tolerance require us to examine—to chew over—ideas that were once swallowed whole. As in all traumas, silence and secrets do not help us. Yet talking also risks re-traumatization. Reckoning with the collective trauma of racism, our distress about finding ourselves the holders of centuries of shame and blame as both victims and perpetrators provokes profound anxiety. And paralyzing fears of navigating the landmines we’ll likely encounter along the way can keep us silent.

Thus, the daunting task—as products of our histories—is to face its lessons and try to learn gracefully—both personally and professionally. Only with resilience, will we be sustained by knowing that—no matter how uncomfortable we may feel, no matter how much pain or shame we must tolerate to be radically honest—holding and processing such painful feelings can open the door to a less divisive, more inclusive, and ultimately more generative psychoanalytic future.

Can we imagine a new psychoanalysis? A psychoanalysis that would include the full acceptance of the racism inherent in our collective, institutional biographies? I am again drawn to the metaphor of addiction, knowing the ways that the addict or alcoholic in recovery may well choose sobriety, but live with the disease forever, owning who one once was as well as owning who one can be. To change our field, we need to make some reparations and to challenge the intoxication of hubris among us. We need to see our field, our analytic institutes, and our selves, as they are: fallible humans. Here, I am reminded of the words of Harry Stack Sullivan: “We are all more simply human than otherwise” (Sullivan, 1953). Sadly we have not all been treated as such.

For psychoanalysis to make amends we have to be more conscious. Our “White” field must stop burdening people of color—and those from diverse ethnic backgrounds—with having to teach or explain racialized experience to us, so we can feel better about ourselves. We have to do our own work. We have to recognize the gaps between what we feel and what we say, naming things we don’t want to name, pushing ourselves out of what we can see as a sort-of racial alexithymia. We need to air our secrets, settle with old ghosts, and call ourselves toward our conscience and toward consciousness. We need to consider that whatever we may lose in access to resources and exclusivity, we may gain in healing the splits in our own psyches and the possibilities for both spiritual and psychological renewal. We need to change the conversation on many levels, pushing ourselves beyond the paralysis of White guilt, and risking the unknown. This is a process that involves trusting the reveals as they occur, moving from our fear of the rug being pulled out either from under us or them, to an anticipation of a tapestry we might weave together.

Now, to this special issue. Psychoanalysis has long celebrated freedom in one’s sense of self, including the freedom to define oneself in one’s own terms, which often involves ideals of agency in acts of creativity and resistance. In celebrating this ideal, we must also recognize its historical roots in the power and privilege of Whiteness. As we consider this history, it’s vital to acknowledge the idea that agency itself is shaped differently for people whose subjectivities were formed through histories of enslavement, marginalization, and othering. And we must recognize, as well, the ways in which agency, for people of color and of differing ethnicities, is further eroded in the face of pressure to “speak” for their entire racial or ethnic group.

The contributions that follow hold these ideals. They capture a multiplicity of voices reflecting on race and ethnicity in psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic training, and personal subjectivity. They are each, in their own way, acts of creativity and creative resistance. This is a collection of old and new voices—of senior psychoanalysts and early career clinicians. As such, we mean to capture generational as well as racial and ethnic differences in varied and diverse perspectives. The essays represent a range of experiences and feelings around how divisions created amongst people, wittingly and unwittingly, result in feelings of diminishment, pain, and humiliation. Some contributors describe and deconstruct racism in their own analytic homes. Some contributors speak out for the first time about injustices—professional and personal. Several of our contributors are deeply vulnerable and extraordinarily brave, writing honestly about personal experience and risking exposure that they know might come as they make their voices heard.

Adam and Phillips (2019) recently remarked in an interview about psychoanalysis that the most interesting experiment in living is finding out who we can be in relation to other people, which is finding out what people might want from each other. The editors of this special issue have been living this very interesting and challenging experiment in the troubled but rich domains of race and ethnicity. In doing so, we hope that, whatever our missteps, we have created a space for different narratives and different conversations—within and between us—to unfold. We have expanded our own awareness. Here, we strive to expand our readers’ awareness of affective tensions and unwitting exclusions and collusions when it comes to race and racism. We want to share with you the inherent dangers in such a project, but also share our efforts to provide a safe space to talk meaningfully about race, understand our biases, our racial subjectivities, and expand our understanding of the racial meanings that constitute our psychoanalytic field. We want to reflect on those things that cannot be said as well as on what can.

Such reflection is crucial if we want to address racism’s pernicious destructiveness, as well as create the potential for new narratives and genuinely “free” speech (Gentile, 2018). As noted above, it’s a daunting task, one that promises many starts, stops, and stutters along the way. Yet, it is a beginning—a long time coming—and it is an invitation to all of our readers to join the conversation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jean Petrucelli

Jean Petrucelli, Ph.D., is a Training & Supervising Analyst, Faculty, Chair & Founder of the Conference Advisory Board (CAB), Director & Co-Founder of the Eating Disorders, Compulsions & Addictions Service (EDCAS), at the William Alanson White Institute. She is an Adjunct Clinical Professor at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and Adjunct Faculty for the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy (ICP). Additionally, she is an Associate Editor for the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis; editor of five books: including the American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAPsa) 2016 Edited book award for Body-States: Interpersonal & Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders (Routledge, 2015). Dr Petrucelli is in private practice in New York City.

Notes

2 Changing the Conversation: Political and Clinical Issues of Race and Ethnicity in Psychoanalytic Institutes held at Fordham Law School in March 2019 by the William Alanson White Institute.

3 Take for example, the abusive behavior directed toward Asian people, and the invocation of racial slurs, such as “The Chinese Virus,” by our President.

4 Consider, for example, the US Supreme Court’s 2013 decision that invalidated aspects of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, specifically those requiring states to receive clearance from the Justice Department or federal court in Washington before making changes to voting procedures, like redrawing electoral districts. This decision enhances the possibility of racial discrimination in voting on the grounds that “the country has changed,” according to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. See https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html.

5 Members are from various institutes.

6 See Footnote 2. The conference was sponsored by the Conference Advisory Board (CAB) of the William Alanson White Institute. CAB members include Lori Bohm, Ph.D.; Jacqueline Ferraro, DMH.; Maria Nardone, Ph.D.; Naomi Snider, LLM; Cleonie White, Ph.D.; and Jean Petrucelli, Ph.D. (Chair).

7 As guest editors we are extremely grateful for the opportunity afforded us by Ruth Livingston and Susan Fabrick (CP Co-Editors-in-Chief) and appreciate their dedication, continuous support, and generosity extended to the Conference Advisory Board Projects. We also extend a heartfelt appreciation to all the contributing authors for their personal and valued reflection. A special thanks to Sarah Schoen for her incisive and helpful comments on all the contributions.