From an Other Perspective

At first, I did not know why I was weeping inconsolably upon seeing the image of George Floyd's naked face as his neck was crushed by the knee of a man fully armed with police gear and, more strikingly, a look of total nonchalance. I did not know why I could not bear watching the video of one human, so unmoved, with such ease, squeezing the life out of another human being who was squirming, pleading, begging, calling for his momma.

Then it dawned on me that the image of human life so violently, and yet lightly, canceled in the name of law and order, state and authority, was deeply imbedded in the innermost recess of my psyche.

As a Chinese Canadian migrating to the US to study psychoanalysis, I myself am an outsider, an other, and I am no stranger to violence and destruction done to people who are conveniently grouped as “others,” often by those in power who are perceived to be “good.”

Indeed, in life and in work, I am baffled by this intriguing phenomenon of “othering.” Here, the other conveys negative meanings; difference and distinction are perceived as inherently threatening and dangerous. Self and other stand in opposition and hostility to each other. Just as the toddler's first gesture of autonomy is often a loud no, certain bodies, individual and national, seek to forge homogeneity and sameness in a paranoid-schizoid way, perhaps unconsciously to salvage a clean, clear sense of self or identity. For fear of contamination, what is other must be obliterated, every trace of it. In the process, people are othered to death, both physically and symbolically—alienated, dis-identified, disregarded, and annihilated.

However, if we consult any dictionary, or even just Google, for the meaning of other, we will find another meaning: further, additional, alternate, what is left, remaining, etc. For me, psychoanalysis, starting from Freud's concept of the unconscious, has been teaching this additional or supplemental—rather than oppositional or adversarial—view of otherness. I