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The four invited papers we are publishing in this issue of JAPA under the heading “Neutrality as a ‘White Lie’” are minor modifications of papers presented at an APsaA plenary panel with the same title on February 14, 2021. We thought it might be useful for readers to know how the papers’ authors arrived at this unusual title.
During our final organizational meeting several months before the panel convened and shortly after having been selected by APsaA's Program Committee to discuss neutrality, race, and racism, Glen Gabbard, Anton Hart, Dorothy Holmes, and I were trying to frame the many technical and ethical issues involved in addressing race and racism in the clinical setting. We had just taken up the conjecture that our profession had reified its aspirations to do no harm by idealizing neutrality because it promised to keep clinical psychoanalysts from unduly influencing patients. Although we had different conceptions of the value of the neutrality principle for psychoanalytic treatment, as our conversation delved into the ethical implications of exploring racial identity and treating racism in ourselves and our patients, Anton Hart wondered if we had been preconsciously contemplating psychoanalytic neutrality itself as what he called “a white lie.” Not yet appreciating the multiple meanings of that phrase, we nevertheless agreed that Hart's spot-on three-word condensation of our exchange could serve as a platform for considering how the psychoanalytic principle of neutrality influences the analysis of race and racism in the clinical setting. The following articles are products of our collective and individual deliberations on this important topic. We are indebted to Anton Hart for having insightfully captured the complexities of our conversation in a single phrase.
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