Whiteness and the Psychoanalytic Imagination

Abstract

In this essay I seek to interrogate the specialized language of psychoanalysis and the implicit role unexamined racialization—and hence White hegemony—play in the American psychoanalytic imagination. I begin with a discussion of Eng & Han writing on racial melancholia, a work that offers a thoughtful exposition of the power of Whiteness to induce racial melancholia in its “Others.” I then turn the inquiry toward my own life story, seeking to illuminate the role of Whiteness and racial othering in my own racial formation. Given our field’s core interest in subject formation, notions of racialization and the dominant discourses of Whiteness would appear to be ideal grist for the mill of psychoanalysis. This could only be true, however, if psychoanalysis were self-reflexive about the dynamics of race and the hegemony of Whiteness in U.S. society. There is considerable literature suggesting that psychoanalysis may embody potential for such critical work. However, because the theory and practices of conventional psychoanalysis are racialized through and through, psychoanalysts—as currently trained—are ill-equipped to address the hegemony of Whiteness or the dynamics of racial difference. If, as Claudia Tate suggests, psychoanalysis functions “as a writing of the ethnicity of the White western psyche,” we have much work to do to unconceal these processes and work toward a more emancipatory and inclusive psychoanalysis.

Keywords:

• racial melancholia
• psychoanalysis and colonialism
• psychoanalysis and race
• racialization
• White hegemony
• Whiteness

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my gratitude to colleagues Carter Carter and Annie Lee Jones, as well as to the editors of this special issue for invaluable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael O’Loughlin

Michael O’Loughlin, Ph.D., is on the faculty of Derner School of Psychology and in the College of Education and Human Services at Adelphi University. He is coeditor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. He writes about politics, severe psychic distress, intergenerational trauma, racial and ethnic difference, family and child refugee issues, childhood subjectivity, and child therapy. He edits the book series Psychoanalytic Studies: Clinical, Social and Cultural Contexts. His most recent book (co-edited with S. Arac-Orhun & M. Queler) is Lives Interrupted: An Analysis of Life Narratives of Persons with Chronic Psychiatric Struggles, which was released in 2019.