Beyond Racial Visibility and Invisible: Reply to Hartman and Sheehi

Abstract

In responding to the rich discussions from Stephen Hartman and Lara Sheehi (this issue), the author builds on the ways each discussant explores how invisibility and visibility shape phantomatic obstacles to reckoning with race in psychoanalytic theory and practice. A struggle with the nexus of racial and other discursive hierarchies of interpellation can serve to liberate clinical movement, otherwise infected by incarcerating categories. This effort is demonstrated to challenge both patient and analyst to find ways to trans-form racial stereotypes of rescuer and victim. Escape from such discursive traps as understanding, empathy, containment and/or recognition challenges the analyst, as Hartman reminds, to embrace vulnerability as a guiding muse and nonrecognition as a source of learning. Such efforts are offered to facilitate a trans-formation process for both clinical participants as intersubjects, complexly constituted by conscious and unconscious ideological (Sheehi, this issue) histories and affiliations.

This article responds to:

Binded by the White: A Discussion of “Fanon’s Vision of Embodied Racism for Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice”

The Reality Principle: Fanonian Undoing, Unlearning, and Decentering: A Discussion of “Fanon’s Vision of Embodied Racism for Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven H. Knoblauch

Steven H. Knoblauch, Ph.D., is Clinical Adjunct Associate Professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis where he is also a Clinical Supervisor. He is author of The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue (2000) and coauthor with Beebe, Rustin and Sorter of Forms of Intersubjectivity in Infant Research and Adult Treatment (2005). His new book with Routledge, Bodies and Social Rhythms: Navigating Unconscious Vulnerability and Emotional Fluidity, is expected in 2020.