Introductory Commentary to “Psychoanalysis’ zero gravity moment: Disrupting where we land”

ABSTRACT

This paper challenges readers to examine how the “halls of power” within the psychoanalytic enterprise, and our own institutions mobilize our hatred and ‘white rage’ often subtly and imperceptibly towards non-whites. It raises the question: Are the marginalized and all non-white worlds also represented in our theories and training programs? He argues for a critical pedagogy which begins by our own racial self-examination and interrogation of our collective “implicated subjectivities” in the inhuman treatment of our patients, supervisees and colleagues – especially non-whites but whites as well because their unexamined racism dehumanizes even them. Using his own lived experiences in these psychoanalytic halls of power over 20 years, the author questions our tendency for universalizing, including self psychology’s central concept of empathy, especially as it is practiced. How shall we redress past and contemporary iniquities in order to make reparations, create a more just and inclusive psychoanalytic theory and practice and what might that look like?

KEYWORDS:

• White rage
• white supremacy
• critical pedagogy
• opressive ideologies
• double-consciousness
• implicated subectivity

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cherian Verghese

Cherian Verghese, Ph.D. - Licensed psychologist Cherian is a Psychologist in Private Practice since 1990 in Washington, DC. He is on the faculty at the Washington School of Psychiatry (Supervision Training Program) and a Founding and Steering Committee Member of the School’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Culture. He is also on the Faculty of the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (ICP&P) where he previously Coordinated for the Institute’s Psychotherapy Training Program.