The Secret Society: Perspectives from a Multiracial Cohort

Abstract

This article explores our experience in psychoanalytic training as a three-person cohort (Black, Latina, and White Jewish) in which racialized dynamics were dissociated in the service of completing our training. Acknowledging the tension of both maintaining a sense of our individual identities and connection to the “other,” we examine the disavowal of racial identifications that allowed us to hold each other in the absence of a holding environment by way of our Institute. In addition, we explore the unspoken entanglements of privilege and oppression enacted over the course of analytic training.

Keywords:

• race and culture
• analytic third
• supervision
• curriculum
• dissociation
• psychoanalytic training

Acknowledgment

We wish to give a special thanks to Sarah Schoen for her gentle and challenging guidance through the very difficult process of writing this article, which required us to formulate and share our racial experience with one another for the first time. We would also like to thank Cleonie White and Jean Petrucelli for their thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1 Rossanna self-identifies as Latina which is how the majority of how people of Latin American descent identify themselves. Latinx is a more contemporary identification that is not to be mistaken to replace Latina/Latino; rather it is another way for people to identify as a more inclusive term for transgender people and intersectional identities. There has been some controversy about the use of Latinx that is explained in this blog post: https://manhattanpsychoanalysis.com/blog-post/controversy-el-barrio/

2 Suchet (2004) postulates that Freud’s efforts to universalize the psychic reality of the individual to dissociate conflict was likely shaped by his own conflict surrounding his experience of being devalued, marginalized, and ethnically othered as a Jewish man in Austria.

3 Harry Stack Sullivan created the Zodiac group as a “club” or salon, which had both an intellectual and social element (See Perry, 1982; Ortmeyer, 1995). Despite the fact that some members were European immigrants—Jewish and escaping Nazi Germany—all were White.

4 Black Psychoanalysts Speak is a group of Black psychoanalysts and other psychoanalysts who seek to enable the voices and ideas of Black psychoanalysts to be heard (in psychoanalysis and in the wider world), and to draw attention, within psychoanalysis and its related clinical and scholarly fields, to the concerns of Black people.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chanda D. Griffin

Chanda D. Griffin, LCSW, is a teaching, training, and supervising analyst at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP) and co-chair of the Committee on Race and Ethnicity at MIP. Addtionally, she is a faculty member of the National Institute For the Psychotherapies. (NIP) and an Adjunct Professor at the Silberman Graduate School of Social Work at Hunter College. Chanda is a member of Black Psychoanalysts Speak⁴ and is in private practice in New York City.

Rossanna Echegoyén

Rossanna Echegoyén, LCSW, is Founder and Co-Chair of the Committee on Race and Ethnicity and on Faculty at Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, Member-at-Large of APA Division 39 Section IX: Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility, Organizing Committee Member of Reflective Spaces/Material Places in San Francisco, Chair of the Inter-Institute Task Force on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and consultant with Racial Literacy Groups (www.racialliteracygroups.com). She co-leads a supervision group for analytic candidates of color from various institutes and is on faculty in New York (MIP and TIMH) and San Francisco (NCSPP). She maintains a private practice in New York City.

Julie Hyman

Julie Hyman, LCSW, is faculty and supervisor at Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP) and faculty at the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center (PPSC). Additionally, she is the former co-director of clinical services and current co-chair of curriculum at MIP. She is in private practice in New York City.