Haunted Talk, Healing Action: Commentary on Paper by Kimberlyn Leary

Kimberlyn leary brings together several distinct areas of psychoanalytic theorizing in order to illuminate the particular knot that race occupies in conscious and unconscious psychic and social life. She interweaves considerations of transference and countertransference as scenes of enactments and analyzes the interpenetration of history and psyche, the transgenerational transmission of trauma, and the lived psychic consequences. Although Leary's focus is the manifestation and impact of “the racialized subjectivity” in clinical experience, she raises interesting questions about technique and ways of working with and writing about enactments more generally.

In Leary's hands, analysis of the effects and meanings of race makes for a complex, multiply configured constellation of psychic, historical, and material factors. In one of the strongest images in her essay, race becomes a transitional space, both a vehicle for psychodynamics and a complex, layered space in which depth and surface are never fully what they seem and in which racialized subjectivity is made and created. In that space, one must attend to the intersection of race with differences of class and of privilege, the particular arenas in which race and gender cohere and fracture, the frighteningly seamless enmeshment of constructions of race in silence, in procedural memory, in the unconscious.

Leary stresses the fragility of the conversation around race outside and inside the consulting room, its vulnerability to narcissistic disturbance and disequilibrium. She sets discourse about race, in this historical moment, as the expression of four potent binaries— affirmation or exclusion, deprivation or domination, powerlessness or