Chapter 7: Enactments

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensive destruction of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.

The survey instrument largely used the term “action” to describe racist events occurring in psychoanalytic institutions and organizations. In this report, we use the term “enactment” to reflect that these “actions” or events are a form of playing out of otherwise inaccessible, often unconscious, and fraught racial dynamics among members of an organization.

Because the deep and difficult emotional work of healing has been unequal to the wound of racism, in our country and in psychoanalysis itself, many of the thoughts, feelings, processes, procedures, and organizational structures that surround and sustain racism have been pushed out of consciousness into the personal unconscious of individuals or the social unconscious of groups and institutions. As analysts we believe, as Freud did, that what resides in unconsciousness constantly pushes up toward awareness, while contravening forces attempt to keep these unpleasant and intolerable contents hidden. Psychoanalysis teaches us that what forms an indelible part of history, but is not able to be brought into consciousness, often breaks out into the open in the form of action. This makes all discussions about racism highly vulnerable to enactment.

We make a distinction between a racist act and a racial enactment. In the following pages we describe numerous actions and behaviors, some of which are overtly racist (the use of a slur for example) and some which are much more difficult to characterize (a chilling atmosphere about conversations regarding race, for exa