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

Abstract

Drawing upon a speech Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave to the APA in 1967 challenging our field to become more involved in racial injustices, this discussion of papers by Linda Jacobs and Rhona Kaplan will raise questions about how well the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis have addressed his challenge. I argue that the beginning efforts in the field to address racism, its toxicity, its violence and violation of people, and its embeddedness in our culture have not gone far enough. Jacobs’s paper, “The Unthought Sown” and Kaplan’s paper, “Can the Center Hold,” address the entrance of racial enactments in treatments, the former in individual work and the latter in group treatment. Each psychoanalyst takes up issues of racism and privilege, whiteness and the refusal to acknowledge other subjectivities, whether experienced personally, in the analytic work and/or in our culture.

Keywords:

• racial enactments
• racism
• sexual abuse
• white privilege

This article is referred to by:

Can the Center Hold?

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

Searching for Home: When Racialized Legacies Collide: Authors’ Introduction

Notes

¹ Janice Bennett, Janice Gump, Dorothy Holmes, Kimberlyn Leary, Beverly Stoute, Cheryl Thompson, Kirkland Vaughans, Kathleen Pogue White, among others.

² Annie Lee Jones, Cleonie White, Anton Hart, and Craig Polite.

³ Melanie Suchet, Gillian Straker, Sue Grand, Lynne Layton, and Adrienne Harris.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jill Salberg

Jill Salberg, PhD, ABPP, is clinical associate professor and consultant/supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, faculty/supervisor at the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies and the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, and member of IPTAR. She is the editor of and contributor to Good Enough Endings: Breaks, Interruptions and Terminations from Contemporary Relational Perspectives (2010). She has co-edited, with Sue Grand, The Wounds of History: Repair and Resilience in the Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma, and Transgenerational Trauma and the Other: Dialogues Across History and Difference (2017), both won the Gradiva Award (2018). She is in private practice in Manhattan.