Introduction: 2018 Symonds Prize

Through the generosity of the Alexandra and Martin Symonds Foundation, each year Studies in Gender and Sexuality (SGS) recognizes an outstanding essay that speaks to the intersections of psychoanalysis and cultural theories of gender and sexuality. The editors are delighted to award the 2018 Symonds Prize to Emily Green for her paper “Melanie Klein and the Black Mammy: An Exploration of the Influence of the Mammy Stereotype on Klein’s Maternal and Its Contribution to the ‘Whiteness’ of Psychoanalysis.” Green developed the paper as she was pursuing a master’s degree in psychoanalytic studies at Birkbeck, University of London.

SGS welcomes the ideas and voices of thinkers who speak from within and beyond the field of psychoanalytic theory and practice, in the hopes that diverse angles of perspective and experience, as well as innovative approaches to inquiry and analysis, will break up or prevent blockages in our thinking about the workings of gender and sexuality in our lives and practices. Our work as clinicians and critical thinkers is always embedded in a political and cultural context mediated by relations of power and by deep and ongoing histories of structural inequality. Psychoanalysis is not innocent of these structures, even as it can help us think about them more clearly. But to do so, it needs to assess the ways its own working assumptions—what and whom it sees; what and whom it does not, or will not—may coordinate with power. Power seeks above all to seem inevitable, a given, a what-goes-without-saying, like air. In her important paper, Green directs our attention to the origin stories psychoanalysis tells about itself, asking us to consider the workings of racialized and racializing phenomena both in the wider culture and as they come into, and recirculate from, psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Green begins her remarkable paper with two questions for the field of psychoanalysis regarding its relationship with racializing phenomena that let us know she w