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Fakhry Davids' paper: ‘Psychoanalysis and black lives’, addresses ‘the cumulative effects of Racism’ in the context of presenting his analytic work as a black analyst with a biracial man whose life story and symptoms reflect inner object relations, libidinal organization, unconscious phantasies, and the reality of cultural processes around race. The typical analytic frame brackets off ‘real’, external social and political realities and/or looks at them through the filter of processes appearing in the transference feelings toward the analyst. Hence, he points to what many of us are now able to see as a splitting of the patient from his or her social and cultural context, which makes invisible to our analytic work the impact of cultural context and processes within the psychoanalytic situation. Such a splitting of the analytic frame makes it difficult to open up the structural and historical attitudes that typically make psychoanalytic work unconscious to its own cultural complexes. Fakhry Davids astutely brings the reader into his analytic attitude toward both the personal and cultural aspects in his work.
There are many aspects of Fakhry Davids' paper that could be opened up for further elaboration. However, I will mention two aspects that I feel bring us to the heart of this timely paper. First, he expands the analytic frame to include the cultural context of internalized racism that he sees appearing in the patient's analytic material. Secondly, he demonstrates that the analyst has to be able (and willing) to see this framing, as well as be emotionally familiar with it, to create the background of safety for both the analyst and the patient, in order for the pair to explore racialized material together. In this paper, the murder of George Floyd helps to bring into focus how the racialized background impact of racial violence shadows our analytic work:
For the black person living in a white-majority world, however, the video becomes almost impossible to watch as, in