Innovative as we think we are, it has been painful for us, as psychoanalysts, to acknowledge that we have lagged behind the times on major social issues. That’s been true for the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, for feminism and women’s rights, for homosexuality and gender variance, and for American racism. A long time ago, Harold Blum shocked us when he rose from the audience at an APsaA panel to point out that Holocaust-scarred European psychoanalysts had fled to the U.S. from Nazism, but had avoided dealing with the Holocaust with their analysands. This, of course, included psychoanalytic candidates. They missed the opportunity to work on their hatred and bias in relation to the Holocaust. So too, white American psychoanalysts have not addressed racism in the training of psychoanalytic candidates.
The first African-American psychoanalyst, Margaret Lawrence, graduated from the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center in 1954; but the number of African-American psychoanalysts in our membership remains abysmal. The voices of these few African-American psychoanalysts have crescendoed, telling us clearly and forcefully that we neglect issues of race and racism, in our ranks, in our consultation rooms.
From the fall of 2016 through the winter and spring of 2017, TAP published an unprecedented series, Conversations on Psychoanalysis and Race. That series is used now as primary reading in institutes across the country. [See TAP 50/3, 50/4, and 51/1.] At APsaA’s opening Plenary Panel in Austin in 2017, David Hershey said American training analysts must confront first their own racism if they are to help their candidate analysands understand their internal racism. For racism has persisted institutionally within APsaA and within our members just as it has persisted throughout the United States.
Hewing to its task of building bridges between academia and psychoanalysis, the University Forum series, spearheaded by Stanley J. Coen, has had previous forums on topics in the social world, including immigration and the “Unseen and Unheard in Memoir and Fiction.” The latter, in 2016, explained and resisted the pressure on African writers that they submerge their individual visions in order to be representational models, anthropological informants, and performers against stereotypes that are the result of Western racism and historical legacies of colonialism.
In the current powerful series of forums on racism, begun in 2017, the University Forum has invited as speakers, pathbreakers, academic and literary guides, to help us find our way through this darkness, to help us see what we have not wanted to see. The 2019 National Meeting program will be the third in the series on racism.
“Racism in America, Part III,” will feature two eminent, powerful writers/scholars of racism, Christina Sharpe of York University, Toronto, and Saidiya Hartman of Columbia University.
“Racism in America, Part I,” featured deeply personal reflections by essayist Darryl Pinckney on the “Freedom Trail” of race: How far we have come; where we are; and, following the drinking gourd, how far we have to go—and how we will get there. Speaking, as tens of thousands of feet lifted and fell in swirls and eddies of movement toward and up Fifth Avenue in affirmation of women against misogyny that very day of the 2017 inauguration, Pinckney pondered whether Obama had made us feel we did not have to do the hard work we now know we have to do deconstructing our racial attitudes. Remembering his great-aunts and uncles, a generation seared by the civil rights movement, by two world wars, who said, “This, too, will pass: We will make it through”—he also noted the worn wisdom of the generations of black Americans. Lawrence Bobo, W.E.B. DuBois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard, then contextualized our history of race here in the United States. He spoke of how our country has created “categories of Otherness,” structuring our racism, its institutions and its practice, its cruelty. Discussion and commentary were provided by sociologist/psychoanalyst Jeffrey Prager and psychoanalyst Dionne Powell.
For the forum, “Racism in America, Part II,” last February 2018 poet/playwright/social leader Claudia Rankine and Jonathan Holloway, a historian and provost at Northwestern and formerly dean of Yale College, discussed institutional racism, its causes and effects. As the ongoing discussion seeks to understand the unconscious, intrapsychic and relational implications of the social and historical, similarly, Rankine described Americans as having both historical and personal selves. Holloway discussed the ethical necessity, as we, hopefully, move forward to take care of and refuse to forget the past. Jeffrey Prager and Rutgers dean of humanities and psychoanalyst Michelle Stephens provided commentary.
“Racism in America, Part III” will take place on Friday afternoon, February 8, 2019 from 2:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. during APsaA’s 2019 National Meeting in New York City. It will feature two eminent, powerful writers/scholars of racism, Christina Sharpe of York University, Toronto, and Saidiya Hartman of Columbia University. Saidiya Hartman, professor of English and author of the seminal Scenes of Subjection, will discuss, “The Poetics of Hope and Despair.” Using slave narratives and integrating the work of W.E.B. DuBois, Hartman addresses the profound grief and despair resulting from anti-black racism. Christina Sharpe, professor of humanities, will open up the oft-discussed criminalization and policing of black life by exposing and exploring the attendant, often unconscious, pleasures for whites. Carolyn Roberts, assistant professor of African-American studies, history and history of medicine at Yale University, and Kirkland Vaughans, director of the Postgraduate Program in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy at Adelphi University and visiting faculty and honorary member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), will be the discussants. Beverly Stoute, co-editor of the TAP series and co-editor with Michael Slevin of the forthcoming, Race in the Therapeutic Encounter, will chair and moderate the panel discussion.
Giving nuance and depth to their engagement with the affective, traumatic residue of slavery and the policing of black life may prepare non-black attendees to grasp and work with the felt experience of black patients. Further, the Forum presenters seek to clarify the unconscious defensive collusion involved for white analysts with their white patients in ignoring the historical trauma of blacks that is so often replayed in the popular news media. We anticipate a thought provoking rich program.