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

ABSTRACT

This article responds to Dhwani Shah’s affectively and racially attuned article, “When Racialized Ghosts Refuse to Become Ancestors: Tasting Loewald’s ‘Blood of Recognition’ in Racial Melancholia and Mixed-Race Identities.” The discussion urges readers and psychoanalytic practitioners to consider an inversion of the haunted/haunting matrix, discussing the ideology of apparitions and the phenomenon of forced spectralization. The analysis shows how the process of forced spectralization emanates from a “coloniality of power” that structures all of our psychic and social lives. In doing so, it hopes to disrupt the over-investment in white temporalities of being in psychoanalytic spaces, practice, and technique. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s disalienation, the article works toward liberatory potential in the clinic alongside, and as a necessary extension of and to, the street.

This article refers to:

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

View responses to this article:

“Step Through and Command the Islands to Exist”: Response to Commentaries by Lara Sheehi and Shifa Haq

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ While not intended to invalidate Sandra’s lived experience that is itself dynamic, constructed by the social, systemic, and the intrapsychic, I am politically resisting the “half” categorization as imposed by both white supremacist and settler-colonial methods of understanding being; Sandra is mixt and/or fully Black and fully Asian, with the right of opacity and meaning-making that this renders for her.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lara Sheehi

Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program where she is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. She is the coauthor with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022). Lara is the president-elect of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), the Chair of the Teachers’ Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara is also a contributing editor to the Psychosocial Foundation’s Parapraxis Magazine and on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network.