The Reality Principle: Fanonian Undoing, Unlearning, and Decentering: A Discussion of “Fanon’s Vision of Embodied Racism for Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice”

Abstract

This response argues that attention to the ideological misattunements in psychoanalytic work helps us move beyond the symbolic—and that which it hides—into the real, material implications for our patients. By discussing Waverley’s hyper-corporality especially in relation to Knoblauch, his White analyst, we can mark a real vs. symbolic recognition of the expansiveness of Whiteness and the ways in which it aims to recenter itself in our theory, practice, and training. More specifically, using Knoblauch’s (this issue) moving account of a moment of “misrecognition,” this response takes up the ways in which Whiteness materializes an ideological apparition that aims to invert the visible-invisible spectrum.

This article refers to:

Fanon’s Vision of Embodied Racism for Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice

View responses to this article:

Beyond Racial Visibility and Invisible: Reply to Hartman and Sheehi

Notes

¹ Fanon quote used as was cited in Ahmed (2007, p. 153).

² Double occupation refers to the settler-colonial occupation of Lenape land by White Europeans, and the subsequent stealing of land from Black communities (e.g., what is now Central Park) who had been enslaved and whose labor had been used to build settlements. See for example, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174246.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lara Sheehi

Lara Sheehi, Psy.D., is a Faculty Member at the GWU Professional Psychology Program. Her work is on decolonial struggles as well as power, race, class and gender constructs and dynamics within psychoanalysis. She has an upcoming coauthored book with Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Theory and Practice in Palestine (Routledge), and her most recent chapter, “The Islamophobic Normative Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Considerations” can be found in Islamophobia and Psychiatry: Recognition, Prevention, and Treatment. Lara is the Secretary of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (Div. 39 of the APA) and Chair of the Teachers’ Academy for the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is on the editorial board for the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA), Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society (PCS), and Institutionalized Children: Explorations and Beyond, and is on the advisory board to the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and Psychoanalysis for Pride.