Narcissistic States of White Privilege and the Constructive Potential of Shame

ABSTRACT

A psychoanalytic formulation of privilege can be constructed by capturing how shifts and restrictions in awareness create a sense of narcissistic wholeness. Paradoxically, these states of being render the individual incomplete, unaware of certain dissociated aspects of identity. Experiences of White privilege in the United States of America involve this self-conserving, yet narcissistically fragile system of reflection. To challenge and repair the limitations that occur within White privileged subjectivity (“going-on-privileged”), shame represents a radioactive affect that can both interfere and facilitate. Drawing upon the works of Jacobs (2016), Watkins (2018), Grand (2018), and Harris (2020), this paper attempts to consider how checking privilege is a process that can be supported by harnessing the constructive and creative potential of shame available through objective states of awareness.

This article is referred to by:

Getting to Where We Need to Get: A Meaningful Step Towards Understanding and Remedying White Privilege

The (Un) Examined Life Is Not Worth Living

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Alan J. Levy, PhD, for the encouragement and opportunity to present an initial version of this paper at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy as well as to John Rosegrant, PhD, for his constant and ongoing assistance in developing these ideas.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Dynamics of gender and gender privilege possess similar specific influences on subjectivity given their social and cultural constructions.

² Race’s multiplicity as social construction, with real and fantasy features, sustains the paradox.

³ I thank Elliot Jurist (personal communication, March 14, 2021) for this reminder.

⁴ As well as depressive and proper.