Outside of History

Engaging with marginalized social histories and recognizing the psychic consequences these histories hold for the treatment dyad poses a challenge for psychoanalysis. Bottom line, the fact that social history is a source of distress outside of the control of the individual has always been a conceptually difficult yet clinically pressing issue for psychoanalysis.

A few years ago, I did a presentation to maintenance workers and managers on healthy ways of caring for the self in a time of institutional cutbacks. The group was comprised exclusively of persons of color, most of them females and many with expressive Spanish as their preferred mode of speaking. So while they had a good working knowledge of what I was saying, it was difficult for them to share their perspectives in English. I asked them to respond in Spanish and then had someone interpret. The interaction became more animated as the volume of comments increased dramatically. They spoke of healthy practices that were familiar but not necessarily still practiced. One woman, for example, spoke about the benefits of making tea using dried orange peel. This triggered much laughter as many remembered that, as children, they struggled to master the art of peeling the entire orange without the peel breaking or bruising the skin.

Our psychological selves reflect the influence of the experience and interpretation of these quotidian acts across time. While some acts, like traditions of self-care, are self-affirming and form a basis of our sense of agency, others are painful and unduly constrain us. For all of us, there is the temptation to avoid the painful aspects of our histories by acting as if we are outside of them, exempt from their structural and psychic consequences. Psychoanalysis both hinders and facilitates the acknowledgment and reinterpretation of history by what it privileges and by what it marginalizes.

By “history” I mean a focu