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

ABSTRACT

Anen’s paper adeptly uses a racial lens to psychoanalytically examine an important but neglected aspect of racism, namely how white privilege is deeply rooted in narcissistic states of mind. The white psyche and corollaries such as having whiteness as a psychological condition are a current focus of psychoanalytic writers. Anen’s approach adds significantly to this burgeoning inquiry by adapting additional psychoanalytic tools to the inquiry. He ably stretches established and familiar theories of narcissism, shame, internalization, and capacity for aloneness to interrogate white privilege. His additional perspectives give the analytic thinker more adequate scaffolding to hold the tensions of exploring the polarizing topic of white privilege. The openness of Anen’s inquiries and his highly illuminating case example also make room for additional questions such as whether the tools he offers adequately address the underlying hatred of racism and one of its weapons, namely, white privilege.

This article refers to:

Narcissistic States of White Privilege and the Constructive Potential of Shame

View responses to this article:

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

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Dorothy Evans Holmes

Dorothy Evans Holmes, PhD, is a Teaching, Training, and Supervising Analyst in the Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas, Professor and PsyD Program Director Emerita at the George Washington University, and Teaching, Training and Supervising Analyst Emerita at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. Dr. Holmes is widely published on the psychoanalysis of race and gender and currently interrogates dynamic and institutional factors that impede the psychoanalytic examination of intersectionality. Her most recent publication is Holmes, D. (2022). Neutrality is not neutral. JAPA, 70: 317-322. Dr. Holmes served on the editorial boards of the IJP and JAPA and now serves on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She is the eponymous Chair of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis.