Esperanza and the Melancholy of Otherness: A Discussion of “A Country of Two: Race and Social Class in an Immigrant Therapeutic Dyad”

Abstract

Santiago Delboy’s paper, “A Country of Two,” (this issue) focuses on race and class relations in an immigrant treatment dyad. In this discussion I will further examine racial tension from the perspective of the perverse pact, the main features of which are dissociation and amnesia, and the disavowal of hatred and hostility. The perverse pact is an essential feature of White colonial culture as well as of North American White identity and it can impact the dialogue in an interracial therapy duo. I will also comment on the melancholy of Otherness in the context of race, class as well as immigration.

Notes

¹ Incidentally, the universal language, Esperanto, has the same etymology as Esperanza. There has always been hope for a world of free recognition and communication. The grand experiment to create an easy and flexible universal language to foster peace and international understanding was conducted by L.L. Zamenhof, a Polish-Jewish ophthal- mologist, starting in 1887. Unfortunately, what followed in the first half of the 20th century was quite different, to put it mildly. While Zamenhof himself died in 1917 during the First World War, his surviving children were killed in the Shoah: His son was shot to death in 1939 in the camp at Palmiri and his two daughters were murdered in Treblinka, in 1942.

² Food, taste, smell have a magic place in the psyche. Even more so than language, they connect the subject to archaic states and conjure up memory traces of nursing and feeding in general. When I first started out as a clinician, I would avoid dwelling on such mundane matters as food, considering such discussions as avoidance of more fundamental analytic matters. In recent years my attitude in this regard has fundamentally shifted: I now willingly engage this topic, recognizing its contribution to negotiating care, holding, containment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Veronica Csillag

Veronica Csillag, LCSW, is Co-Director, Faculty, Training and Supervising Analyst, Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis; former Faculty and Supervisor, Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services; former Faculty, NYU School of Social Work. She is the author of several psychoanalytic papers, which were published in a variety of journals, Psychoanalytic Dialogues and The Psychoanalytic Quarterly among them. She is in private practice in New York City.