Collisions in the Dark: Invisible Intersectionality and the Black Female Psychoanalyst

Abstract

At the end of the 1980s, Black feminist legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw offered intersectionality as a way to shift our attention to Black female subjectivity as a complex, multi-dimensional unfolding of identity. This essay focuses on how she situated that identity within, as she termed it, whiteness as “a single-axis framework of analysis.” In this respect, her discussion converged with that of her peer, the writer Toni Morrison, in the work, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993). Interpreting the psychoanalytic implications of Crenshaw’s and Morrison’s stances toward Whiteness, this essay asks, where does the Black female analyst position herself in this discussion? Drawing from the writings of Black feminist thinkers, Black female psychoanalysts, and relational and interpersonal theorists, invisible intersectionality is explored as a set of unseen forces colliding in the dark, animating the dyad in the clinical space of the Black female analyst’s consulting room.

Keywords:

• black feminism
• intersectionality
• whiteness
• slavery
• black female psychoanalysts

Notes

1 “Only a change in perceptual reality can alter the cognitive reality that defines the patient's internal object world, and this process requires an enacted collision of realities between patient and therapist” (Bromberg, 1996, p. 530).

2 Stoute’s recounting of the history of psychoanalytic writing and theories on race, and Holmes’ discussion of treatment methods addressing race in more contemporary writings, offer two useful places to start for one’s pedagogy, research, and development of clinical technique.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michelle Ann Stephens

Michelle Stephens, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst, graduate of the William Alanson White Institute Division 1 program, co-founder of WAWI’s Study Group on Race and Psychoanalysis, and Founding Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. She teaches and writes on Caribbean art, literature and culture. She has also published numerous articles on race and psychoanalysis in such journals as JAPA, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, and Psychoanalytic Dialogues.