The Unthought Sown: The Ghost of Disavowed Racial Identity and the Failure of Imagination

Abstract

This paper explores the imprint of slavery and its ensuing intergenerational transmission of trauma. It further explores a biracial man’s shame over the disavowed paternity of his white father. His ambivalence about his identity transmitted a traumatic world to his daughter, in which an imaginative and creative experience was foreclosed. The man’s hidden aspects of self left him with dissociated, deeply ambivalent feelings about racial identity which, transmitted to his daughter, brought into sharp focus the liminality of the Black experience in a White world. His daughter, the author’s patient, was deprived of an imagined realm in which she could see herself as knowable and loveable. Her identity was damaged, not only by her attachment experience, but by generational cycles of racial hatred that came before her. The analytic work generated a search for the father’s love, which had been eclipsed by his hidden shame.

Keywords:

• dissociated self- states
• intergenerational racial identity transmission
• trauma

This article refers to:

Enlisting Hope: Discussion of Papers by Linda Jacobs and Rhona Kaplan

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Linda Jacobs

Linda Jacobs, PhD is a psychoanalyst in Private Practice in New York City and a graduate of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She has coauthored two books on a relational approach to working with parents, which are based on attachment theory and reflective functioning. Her published papers focus on relational inter-subjective work with trauma.