Un(Thinking) Race, Resisting Knowing, Restoring the Social Third

Using personal reflections and theoretical analysis, this article engages Bernadine Han’s excellent essay “Thinking Race: Exploring the Scene of Racial Enactment.” The author shares his resonance with Han’s experience in psychoanalytic spaces, weaving in and out of the impact of her writing on his subjectivity and the reminiscences it evokes from him as a Puerto Rican analytic candidate. Resonating with Han’s subjective experience while also following her thinking, as a fellow traveler, the author makes some analytic observations about the limitations of using traditional psychoanalytic theories to understand and critique racism and inequality. Specifically, the extent to which psychoanalysis—relational psychoanalysis in particular—betrayed a “dyadic default,” the tendency to reduce psychosocial phenomena to a primarily two-person experience, and to recenter a two-person “dyadic logic.” The interplay between this logic and its default is argued to limit our imagination for addressing structural and collective problems in psychoanalysis as a treatment, a mode of training, and a community. The author concludes with the implications of Han’s thinking for how we address such tensions not as individuals, not as pairs, but as a group, the necessity of thinking as a “we,” and the importance of creating such a sense of “we” for analytic candidates of color.