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The white man is sealed in his whiteness, the black man in his blackness… . How do we extricate ourselves?
So what does it mean to consider the concept of psychoanalytic neutrality in the clinical setting “as a white lie”? Why a lie at all, even if it is only a white one that allegedly does no harm? And what does a white lie have to do with race and racism? I want to explore these questions and some of the important issues they raise. I'll begin with some ideas about the political effects of applying the neutrality principle to the development of clinical psychoanalysis. Then I want to consider how centuries of racial inequality in the U.S. have been legitimated and justified during different phases of a sociopolitical system of white supremacy that has used white lies, among many other tricks, to sustain white domination over people of color (see especially Crenshaw , 2011, 2019; Lipsitz 2016, 2019; Mills 1997). Finally, I want to consider the idea that neutrality may function for white analysts as an ideological1
Elsewhere I have discussed ideology as “a systematic scheme of ideas that reflect important political, moral values and beliefs”; developed in and communicated through “social institutions like the church, the state, the family, public and professional media, and educational [organizations],” ideologies are normative “maps of the psychosocial world that … mandate the terms of … theoretical and clinical discourse, stipulating what can be legitimately thought and said and demarcating the criteria of authorized therapeutic exchange” (Portuges 2009, p. 61). As important as it is in explicating and shaping social reality, ideology is seldom dis-embedded in our theories of mind and unwrapped in our clinical work, especially in formal psychoanalytic education.
New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles.
Paper presented to plenary panel “Neutrality as a ‘White Lie,’” American Psychoanalytic Association, February 14, 2021.
Invited p
Elsewhere I have discussed ideology as “a systematic scheme of ideas that reflect important political, moral values and beliefs”; developed in and communicated through “social institutions like the church, the state, the family, public and professional media, and educational [organizations],” ideologies are normative “maps of the psychosocial world that … mandate the terms of … theoretical and clinical discourse, stipulating what can be legitimately thought and said and demarcating the criteria of authorized therapeutic exchange” (Portuges 2009, p. 61). As important as it is in explicating and shaping social reality, ideology is seldom dis-embedded in our theories of mind and unwrapped in our clinical work, especially in formal psychoanalytic education.
New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles.
Paper presented to plenary panel “Neutrality as a ‘White Lie,’” American Psychoanalytic Association, February 14, 2021.
Invited p