You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Don Moss makes clear at the outset that his is not a “traditionally organized psychoanalytic text.” I was at once intrigued and made anxious by the unknown spaces and frames into which Don Moss casts us with his paper. If we do not have the anchors provided by our traditional psychoanalytic language and ways of thinking, with what do we anchor ourselves adequately to be able to experience and process the “affliction” Don invites us to study? I do not have an answer to that question for all of us. I can only say that, for me, intellectual curiosity about and a need to deeply understand Whiteness were enough for me to agree to discuss this paper, knowing that uneasy feelings would likely be stirred in me by plunging into such untrodden territory. Don recognizes that all the tools we use for inquiry have their limitations. If we rely only on our introspective capacity, we run into the limit that you can introspect only on what you already know. In exploring Whiteness, the search is for more than we already know and for more than we care to know. If we were to rely on theorized observation to study Whiteness, we would face the opportunities and biases of whichever theories we relied on. I would add that traditional psychoanalytic frames are particularly suspect because our history in psychoanalysis has been that we have appropriated those frames to perpetuate Whiteism. Here I use the word Whiteism to recognize Whiteness as action, in addition to its being a way or state of being. By use of Whiteism, we psychoanalysts have persistently and gratuitously privileged one theory over another and/or weaponized “theories” to hatefully exclude or degrade disfavored sexualities and races.
To restate a bit what I have just said, when a psychoanalyst presents a topic that is outside our traditional frames to an audience of psychoanalysts who are in varying degrees of struggle about how much to modify or even set aside our traditional ways of thinking and practicing, we have to expec