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Discussing what we would be writing for this snapshot, a memory came to mind: when we began training to become psychoanalytic psychotherapists in Chile, two young undergraduate classmates some 20 years ago, the idea that one could maintain a psychoanalytic perspective while at the same time engaging deeply with – and recognizing the impact of – women’s, minorities, and gender issues, and being activists, was not something that appeared possible, much less desirable. Neutrality was the rule. Equidistance was key. And yet, quoting Argentinian illustrator Liniers, there are certain things that will happen to you if you’re alive.
Being alive in these times, for us, has meant there’s been an impact we cannot remain unaffected by, as women ourselves. We are all subject to, traversed, by gender – all the time. Politics is in the bodies, as poet Maria Negroni wrote. So a decade later, we found ourselves having become not only therapists, but feminist therapists at that. Both of us in our own distinct clinical paths, via different yet shared, temporally similar experiences of migration and dislocation from Chile to the US, we found our way into relational thinking: a space where our own subjectivities not only informed our work, but became thinkable as interwoven in it. It felt like a vitalizing breath of fresh air, and at the same time an unavoidable response to the turning point that the experience of migration had been. Doing clinical work with migrant and undocumented women and children, while at the same time having become minority women due to our own migrations, meant that issues of otherness, alienation, trauma, identity, home – they all became central in our lives, work, and thinking. It was in this context that we realized just how essential the possibility to explore these experiences, share them not just in the private spaces of supervision and analysis, but collectively, was. We needed to find a way to creatively use our own subjectivities in these newfound (exte