A Renewed Appeal for Vigorous and Positive Action: Commentary on Dennis

“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there ‘is’ such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”

Psychoanalyst Ebony Dennis has reminded us of the centrality and salience of colonial US history when conceptualizing the ongoing impact of racism on both individual and group behaviors. For clinicians, history is the vital tool that guides evaluation, treatment, and prognosis. There are times, out of necessity, when we act without it; we work “blindly” when we are required to do so, e.g., as a result of the patient’s resistance, amnesia, unconsciousness, or simply repression. However, it has long been established that we are more effective when we have information about the patient’s sociocultural context and cultural identity (Lewis-Fernandez, 2016, p. 13).

Psychotherapeutic treatment that omits the history of race and racism in the US deprives us of the opportunity to effectively consider the whole patient, the whole therapist, and their cultural and historical context. This requires a disavowal of a shared intersubjectivity, which creates a deficit in the narrative. For these reasons, it is imperative that we ground ourselves and our work in the reality of US history, which includes the enterprise and trauma of slavery (and more). At this juncture, we can no longer feign amnesia about whites’ enslavement of Black people and Indigenous Peoples in the US. Nor can we feign amnesia about the sequelae of slavery, which impacted the descendants of those who were enslaved and those who enslaved. There is support for this position. In 2017, writing in The American Psychoanalyst, Dorothy Holmes issued an appeal to organized psychoanalysis to “take a bold step” and “take a firm position on the race issue.” (Holmes, 2017, p. 1-9). In this article, “Paran