“Step Through and Command the Islands to Exist”: Response to Commentaries by Lara Sheehi and Shifa Haq

ABSTRACT

Racialized trauma and racial enactments are ubiquitous and frequently emerge in our clinical work with marginalized patients. Both Shifa Haq and Lara Sheehi develop compelling and creative explications of “racial ghosts” in my essay “When Racialized Ghosts Refuse to Become Ancestors: Tasting Loewald’s ‘Blood of Recognition’ in Racial Melancholia and Mixed-Race Identities” and offer significant clinical insights in treating racial trauma. After framing the discussion with several key questions I struggle with in the clinic, I engage with both Haq and Sheehi’s essays and their relevance in treating patients with racial trauma.

This article responds to:

The Ideology of Apparitions: Disrupting Supremacist Temporalities of Being (White)

Not Evil, Just Sad: Racial Melancholia and its Agonies

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dhwani Shah

Dhwani Shah, MD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst currently practicing in Princeton, NJ. He is a clinical associate faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a faculty member at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. He completed his residency in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine where he was chief resident and completed a fellowship in treatment resistant mood disorders at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He has authored articles on topics ranging from neuroscience, mood disorders, and psychoanalysis. Dr Shah’s forthcoming book entitled The Analyst’s Torment: Unbearable Mental States in Countertransference – is due out in Spring 2022 published by Phoenix Publishing House.