Termination, Trauma and Star Wars: The Collapse of the Therapeutic Frame During a National Health Crisis, Political Uprising, and a Racial Injustice Movement

ABSTRACT

Clinical examples of four patients highlight the way my work has evolved as a result of the shift in personal and professional frames during the early stages of the coronavirus and after the murder of George Floyd. Psychological regression as consequence of a worldwide pandemic opened my mind to the racism in myself, my work and my culture. While the field of psychoanalysis has been challenged by its African American members for years to examine how the White I have chosen to capitalize White and Black for this paper. While there are varying points of view about this seemingly simple matter, my current position is that claiming my Whiteness racializes me in a way to which I am unaccustomed, although racializing African Americans IS the custom. By capitalizing both, I am giving equal weight to the words that currently signify the White and Black races Eurocentric ethos upholds systemic and structural racism, we have not “taken heed.” This paper aims to revisit the work of African American writers on the subject of racism in our field, and to investigate the psychopathology of racism, as well as address its effects on me as a clinician and my work with White patients. Written from the vantage point of a White therapist working with White patients, I aim to add something new to the literature by discussing the value of working therapeutically with White people on White identity and unconscious racism.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• racism
• White
• Black
• coronavirus
• therapeutic frame
• psychopathology
• generational trauma

Notes

¹ Star Wars is used allegorically in this paper and I take creative license with the placement of several movie titles. There is no clear correlation between the titles I have chosen and the events in this paper. However, the parallel between the premise of these movies and our political landscape today is uncannily similar.

² Although many African American psychoanalysts have written about this point, please see Dr. Dorothy Holmes’ work for a thorough examination of this idea (Holmes, 1999, 2016b, 2016a, 2018, 2019).

³ I must include here the podcasts of 1619, Good Ancestor by Layla Saad, and the Instagram videos by Sonia Renee Taylor and Kimberly Jones, each of which have indelibly instructed me.

⁴ For the purposes of this paper, I am focusing on systems that oppress particularly those who are part of the African Diaspora, but I am acutely aware that Whiteness harms all marginalized people.

⁵ I learned of this concept from consultation with Mr. Marvin Evans, a clinician in Chicago, IL.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alison McGrath Howard

Alison Howard is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Washington, DC. She sees adolescents and adults, and provides individual, couples and group psychotherapy.