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The last issue of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly featured an essay by Gilbert Cole (2005) entitled “Categories as Symptoms: Conceptions of Love in the Psychoanalytic Relationship.” To illustrate what he means by “categories as symptoms,” and paraphrasing James Baldwin, Cole writes:
I am gay precisely to the extent to which you think you are straight. And I am certain that the converse is also true: you are straight precisely to the extent to which I think I am gay. My thought, that I am gay, and that many of you are straight, may describe certain facts about the ways we identify ourselves to ourselves and others, but to regard this distinction as telling me anything deeply meaningful about any of you is a symptom. And the thought that my being identified as gay tells you anything at all about me is equally a symptom. If there is any hope of resolving this symptom … we must start with acknowledging the problem. We must find a way of identifying and taking back the projected psychic contents that keep these categories' specious effects alive. [p. 986]
Translate gay and straight into the racial, ethnic and cultural categories Baldwin had in mind, and you have the precise problem we are trying to explore in this Special Issue of the Quarterly. It is a problem Cole characterizes as “the endlessly circulating process of repudiation and projection” (p. 979).
In this issue, we bring together fourteen psychoanalytic writers, some primarily clinicians who offer the reader clinical process, others primarily academics with insights directly applicable to the