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I am very grateful to Drs. Gump and Cushman for their thoughtful, thought-provoking, and stimulating discussions of my paper.

When I first presented the paper, in Washington, DC, Gump was the discussant. She said, as you have now read, that Mr. A was “enlisting” me in his “struggle with a conflicted sense of self”—between his sense of self as a responsible professional man who could be expected to handle a checking account and his sense of self as a Bronx street tough who couldn't. I realized that, by accepting his initial offer to bring cash, I was communicating to him that I was unreflectively seeing him as the “street kid.”

This was a startling insight. It was one of those appalling and fascinating psychoanalytic moments in which one sees one's own blind spot. I realized that a racist attitude (in the form of low expectations) had been most evident in a place where I wasn't at all aware of it, for all my preoccupation with racism at many points in the treatment.

Where I might differ with Gump is in her comment that Mr. A. was seeking to evoke my “acceptance.” I think what is at issue in this as in all enactments is more complex. I believe that Mr. A was unconsciously seeking my disapproval, anger, and greed, as well as my acceptance and understanding. In my view, he was unconsciously seeking to put on the table between us the most problematic affects and interpersonal entanglements taking shape at the intersection of our psychic worlds, in this particular historical context. How he and I, both of us also seeking love and understanding, would find our way through this particular minefield was the question of the treatment.

We, as psychoanalysts, have been garnering considerable experience in managing such complexities, but we have been slow to apply our knowledge of the subtle and complex workings of the mind to the field of race relations on both individual and social levels. Our failure to make this application is revealing about the anxiety, shame, and guilt that a