Narcissistic States of White Privilege and the Constructive Potential of Shame

A psychoanalytic formulation of privilege can be constructed by capturing how shifts and restrictions in awareness create a sense of narcissistic wholeness. Paradoxically, these states of being render the individual incomplete, unaware of certain dissociated aspects of identity. Experiences of White privilege in the United States of America involve this self-conserving, yet narcissistically fragile system of reflection. To challenge and repair the limitations that occur within White privileged subjectivity (“going-on-privileged”), shame represents a radioactive affect that can both interfere and facilitate. Drawing upon the works of Jacobs (2016), Watkins (2018), Grand (2018), and Harris (2020), this paper attempts to consider how checking privilege is a process that can be supported by harnessing the constructive and creative potential of shame available through objective states of awareness.