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I would like to thank Elisabeth Young-Bruehl for her honest appraisal of my paper. Her comments are, I think, in the spirit of opening up further conversation on race and gender and their impact on our psychoanalytic work as she has also done in her recent book The Anatomy of Prejudice (1996). At the same time, I am also pleased that Elisabeth recognizes that the paper that she critiqued is not the paper I actually wrote.
I can appreciate Elisabeth's disappointment with my paper. She is, of course, correct that the paper did not systematically address the reasons why psychoanalysis has neglected the topic of race for so long nor did it specifically point to future inquiries that might fill in this admittedly large gap in our theorizing. The paper also does not attempt to weed out the racist biases in analytic practice and does not explore in any depth how the struggle with gender identity informs racial experience. In this sense, my paper is very definitely not the one Elisabeth wanted to read.
Elisabeth characterizes the goal of my paper as “the invocation not to prejudge what a person's racial identity is.” I don't know that I would claim that as my aim. To do so would be to imply that racial identity or racial subjectivity is something about which it is possible to be objective and without bias. If there is concrete import to my views, perhaps it is this: It seems to me that it is inevitable that patients and therapists will gravitate toward racialized enactments, missteps, and even unwitting displays of power and hierarchy given the social context in which