On Our Own or Together – A Reply to Holmes and Straker

ABSTRACT

Both discussions from Drs. Holmes and Straker (this issue) resonate curiosity and introspection. This response attempts to meet them in collaborative synchrony to continue exploring the psychic impacts of privilege and how clinical work may meet such sociopolitical dynamics, both with clearer conceptualizations as well as a sense of caution regarding the role of psychoanalytic practice. Through their invitations to go further, together, I will try to consider the intersection between White privilege and White supremacy as well as further examine the conditions and capacities undergirding the constructive use of deserved shame. While opening up space for such change is primarily taken up at the level of the individual, the elaborative and reparative potential of shame lies in its togetherness, seeking to better bridge self with the ideal self as well as self with the other. Deserved shame holds prospect to reclaim the intersubjective nexus of shame as not just a space of misattunement, inferiority, envy, and aggression but for re-attunement and intentionality, wherein subjective and objectiveness awareness may transition and interpenetrate.

This article responds to:

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

The (Un) Examined Life Is Not Worth Living

Disclosure statement

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