Del Sentimiento de No Estar del Todo: Reply to Csillag and Orfanos

Abstract

This response presents associations elicited by commentaries from Csillag and Orfanos (this issue), on the author’s paper discussing issues of language, race, and social class in an immigrant clinical dyad. The author describes ways in which these issues were experienced during the process of writing and sharing the original essay, provides some reflections on the state-dependent nature of epistemological truth in clinical enactments, and offers, through biographical fragments, an example of how the principles organizing our psychic experience inform and are informed by our cultural context.

Notes

¹ As a career changer (I worked in the corporate world for years before and after I moved to the U.S. to get my MBA degree), I have also experienced a “professional migration” of sorts, including the challenges of shifting languages, identities, priorities, and sensibilities.

² I tend to identify as a Hispanic, as I did in my original paper, instead of as a Latino. This is in part because that is the first term I was aware of as a label for my new identity as an immigrant, and because most Latinxs who are surprised by my command of Spanish, or curious about my accent, guess that I am from Spain, not from Latin America. “Hispanic,” then, conveys my two-fold experience of otherness.

³ Csillag wonders if it would have been “easier to address the racial/class tension in English” (p. 104) I think so, partially because of the reasons she describes, but also because in English I don’t feel White, or at least not the same shade of white. It is in Spanish that the privilege of my whiteness, and the corresponding dissociated and disavowed affect, is prominent.

⁴ I borrowed the title of this essay (“Del sentimiento de no estar del todo,” translated as “On feeling not all there”) from a piece by Argentinian author Julio Cortázar (1914–1984). It conveys my experiences of otherness and “in-betweenness,” and I have always felt identified with its opening paragraph: “I will always be a child in many ways, but one of those children who from the beginning carries within him an adult, so when the little monster becomes an adult he carries in turn a child inside and, nel mezzo del camin, yields to the seldom peaceful coexistence of at least two outlooks onto the world” (Cortázar, 1986/1967, p. 17).

⁵ Education was in Peru, throughout the 20th century, one of the main paths to social mobility, not by eliminating hierarchies, but by redefining racial categories as cultural differences (De la Cadena, 2000).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Santiago Delboy

Santiago Delboy, MBA, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in private practice in Chicago, IL. He is a graduate of the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, a Reflective Practice Supervisor at The Family Institute at Northwestern University, and a Faculty Member at the Institute for Clinical Social Work.