When Racialized Ghosts Refuse to Become Ancestors: Tasting Loewald’s “Blood of Recognition” in Racial Melancholia and Mixed-Race Identities

ABSTRACT

Experiences of feeling haunted and of being in the presence of ghosts are prominent in narratives of patients/people of color in the United States and of mixed-race identity. A creative reading of Hans Loewald’s evocative statement on therapeutic action, the process of transforming “ghosts into ancestors,” is used to explore a way of being with and healing patients with mixed-race identities who are imprisoned in melancholic states. An extended case vignette of an Indian American psychoanalyst working with a patient with a mixed racial identity highlights racialized components of melancholia and illuminates specific countertransference states and enactments that can both impede and allow for the gradual and partial witnessing of racialized ghosts and their transformation into ancestors.

This article is referred to by:

The Ideology of Apparitions: Disrupting Supremacist Temporalities of Being (White)

Not Evil, Just Sad: Racial Melancholia and its Agonies

Acknowledgments

This author would like to thank Nancy McWilliams, Dionne Powell, Kani Ilangovan, Jasmine Ueng-McHale, Travis Smith, Sarah Mumma, Natalie Hung, Kris Yi, Loretta Acquaah and Christine Garcia for critically reading and providing feedback for this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ This is by no means an exhaustive list. For a thoughtful overview of the use of the metaphor of the ghost in psychoanalytic history and its contemporary significance, see Harris et al. (2016a), Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, and the companion book: Harris et al. (2016b), Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice. New York: Routledge.

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Notes on contributors

Dhwani Shah

Dhwani Shah, MD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst currently practicing in Princeton, NJ. He is a clinical associate faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a faculty member at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. He completed his residency in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine where he was chief resident and completed a fellowship in treatment resistant mood disorders at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He has authored articles on topics ranging from neuroscience, mood disorders, and psychoanalysis. Dr Shah’s forthcoming book entitled The Analyst’s Torment: Unbearable Mental States in Countertransference – is due out in Spring 2022 published by Phoenix Publishing House.