PEP | Article - Discussion of Kris Yi’s Paper “From No Name Woman to Birth of Integrated Identity: Trauma-Based Cultural Dissociation in Immigrant Women and Creative Integration”

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Abstract

Using a clinical vignette describing her work with a Korean patient, Kris Yi draws attention to the ways in which ethnic minority cultures are not monolithic. Yi offers the theoretical construct of a “cultural dissociation.” When sexual violence or discrimination is infused with cultural practices, people may seek relief by dissociating themselves from the culture that is fused with emotional pain. In this discussion, using examples that range from Sigmund Freud to Henry Louis Gates, I link Yi’s formulation to one I have developed, namely, that race in America constitutes an adaptive problem. When clinicians take into account the adaptive nature of the problem that race and ethnicity constitute in contemporary American culture, practitioners should expect dislocations. I conclude with a call for our profession open ourselves to the different stories differently situated others have to tell in their own voices and on their own terms.

Discussion of Kris Yi’s Paper “From No Name Woman to Birth of Integrated Identity: Trauma-Based Cultural Dissociation in Immigrant Women and Creative Integration”

Kimberlyn Leary ABPP

Cambridge, MA

Kimberlyn Leary, Ph.D., ABPP, is the Chief Psychologist and Director of Psychology Training at the Cambridge Health Alliance and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. She is also an Associate in Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and is a Faculty Affiliate at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, where she previously was a Visiting Scholar working on relational processes in negotiation and in clinical practice. In 2009, she received an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School, where she was awarded a Public Services Fellowship. Leary’s research interests include (with Michael Wheeler) the role of first impressions in shaping initial dialogues and work on emotion and negotiation. Her published work addresses postmodern and relational perspectives in teaching, supervision and psychotherapy and racial and cultural issues in clinical settings. Her 1997 paper on race and self-disclosure won the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Karl Menninger Prize. She is the 2007 recipient of the Ernest and Gertrude Ticho Award of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In 2010, she received the American Psychological Association’s Division of Psychoanalysis award for clinical scholarship. Her current research is focused on delineating interpersonal exchanges that promote collaborative decision making and on adaptive practice, leadership, and negotiating change. She is a recipient of a certificate of teaching excellence from the Derek Bok Center at Harvard University. Leary also holds degrees from Amherst College and the University of Michigan where she was also a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. In addition, Leary was graduated from the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Psychoanalytic Association and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. She maintains an active clinical and consulting practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Correspondence should be addressed to Kimberlyn Leary, Ph.D., ABPP, 1218 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139. E-mail: