When Sleeping Dogs Awake, There Is Wisdom: Holmes’s Response to Guralnik, White, and Tummala-Nara

Abstract

Whether the three discussions are framed in terms of the pull on all of us to the socio-political world in which we live (Guralnik), the usefulness of interpersonal psychoanalysis as a way of working (White), or the need to legitimize culturally imposed trauma in the face of resistances to doing so (Tummala-Narra), each commentator offers meaningful elaborations on what I have offered and/or alternative perspectives to be considered. This response affords me a welcome opportunity to celebrate and elaborate the multiple ways in which culture and cultural trauma can be conceptualized, understood, and worked with in the consultation room. I hope these papers, considered together, will make cultural trauma more accessible to work with for all psychoanalytic clinicians.

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Dorothy Evans Holmes

Dorothy Evans Holmes, Ph.D., ABPP, is Teaching, Training, and Supervising Psychoanalyst at The Psychoanalytic Education Center of the Carolinas. She is also Professor Emeritus of Clinical Psychology at George Washington University, where she was Program Director and Director of Clinical Training from 2005 to 2011. She is also a Teaching, Training, and Supervising Analyst Emeritus at the Baltimore Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis. Dr. Holmes has written extensively on intrapsychic influences of race, gender, and their impact on psychoanalytic treatment process. She has served on the Ethics Committees of APsaA and the American Psychological Association, and on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Presently, she is in private practice in Bluffton, SC.