The Trauma of the Mother Tongue: A Discussion of “A Country of Two: Race and Social Class in an Immigrant Therapeutic Dyad”

Abstract

The author responds to Delboy’s strong theorizing about race, class, and language (this issue). The argument is made that a psychoanalytic viewpoint can augment the intersectionality prism for understanding cultural identity. The clinical challenge is how to understand the rapid changes that took place for the patient in the context of a brief treatment and with a therapist that remained outside a mutually enacted silence.

Notes

¹ I use the therapist’s first name Santiago because he uses the patient’s first name Esperanza. My reasons are obvious in the context of this paper which is concerned with race and social class. As a further aside, I am aware that Santiago is derived from the Spanish santo “saint” and combined with Yago, an old Spanish form of “James,” the patron saint of Spain. This is the name of the capital city of Chile, as well as several other cities in the Spanish-speaking world. Our author incidentally tells us that his first name, “Santiago” was “the battle cry of the Spanish conquistadors as they charged against the natives in Latin America during the 16^th century” (p. 95). On the other hand, the name Esperanza is also Spanish, feminine and means hope and expectation.

² We are told that The Shining Path, a revolutionary organization espousing Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, was founded in that locale. Poverty was profound in that day and place. In part, the oppressiveness of white privilege and economic inequalities led to the birth of The Shining Path.

³ Disclosure: I tend to oscillate between the psychoanalytic belief that we should not be too earnest for our patients to change and the words inscribed on Karl Marx’s grave, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

⁴ The mother tongue is Spanish, but it is not clear from the essay if the conversations between them were in educated Spanish or vernacular Spanish. I assume that a language in educated form evokes different things from a language in the vernacular. This holds for Spanish dialect as well.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Spyros D. Orfanos

Spyros D. Orfanos, Ph.D., ABPP, is the Interim Director of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is also the Founder and Head of the NYU Immigration and Human Rights Work Group. He has produced seven art song albums in different languages.