Discussion: Kimberlyn Leary, “Race in Psychoanalytic Space” (Vol. 2, no. 2)

I am pleased to have the opportunity to respond to Kimberlyn Leary's “Race in Psychoanalytic Space,” and thank my editorial colleague Virginia Goldner for inviting me to this dialogue. But the dialogue I would most like would take place at my kitchen table, where Kim Leary—whom I have been pleased to know through the beginning of her teaching and clinical career in Ann Arbor, and through her recent acceptance for psychoanalytic training—could talk back and forth with me over coffee about her paper and we could jointly record the result. As it is, I will write and she will respond. And that means I don't have her here to say, “But, Elisabeth, that is not the paper I set out to write!”

So, I have had to do the reminding to myself: this paper has only two tasks. It explores theoretically the proposition that race as a category or construction and race as an experience, part of a shared history of oppression, intertwine; and it gives one example of that intertwining in a clinical vignette. The paper's overall aim is to call for clinicians to withhold prejudgment about what race is going to mean in psychoanalytic space generally or in the space of any given treatment.

I have needed to keep the paper's tasks and aim clearly in mind, because I kept wanting this paper of Kim Leary's to fill in a huge blank in psychoanalytic literature all at once, making up for decades of neglect