At last, on October 11, 2020, the weekly meetings of the Holmes Commission's leadership team — regularly attended by (the eponymous) Dorothy E. Holmes, Anton Hart, Dionne Powell and Beverly J. Stoute — expanded to all 19 members in our inaugural gathering of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in APsaA. It occasioned warm welcomes and introductions, listening to the Stanford Talisman Alumni Virtual Choir's rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which brought many to tears and the emotionally connected sharing of personal reflections and aspirations as we began our work as a commission.
Commission Chair Dorothy E. Holmes opened the meeting by reading from Freud's 1937 Analysis Terminable and Interminable.
In addressing psychical matters that may or may not require psychoanalytic attention, Freud referred to the patient's latent, instinctual conflict as a “sleeping dog.” But, he noted, when such a dog is, in fact, causing disturbances, it is not truly sleeping and should not, thus, be left to lie. Instead, Freud argued:
We seek to bring this conflict to a head to develop it to its highest pitch in order to increase the instinctual force available for its solution. Analytic experience has taught us that in every phase of the patient's recovery we have to fight against his inertia which is ready to be content with an incomplete solution.
In the reality of our current society and in our organization, the “sleeping dog”—racial conflict and racial inequality—have again been awakened. It is, in fact, repeatedly barking and loudly.
Following Freud's admonition that we must bring such latent conflicts “to a
Anton Hart, PhD, FABP, FIPA, is a training and supervising analyst and faculty at the William Alanson White Institute, and co-chair of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in APsaA.
Dorothy E. Holmes, PhD, psychoanalyst in private practice, Bluffton, SC; teaching, training and supervising psychoanalyst, Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas; fellow, IPTAR; PsyD Program director emerita, clinical psychology, The George Washington University. Her current scholarship is focused on “whiteness.”
Dionne R. Powell, MD., is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at both the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY) and Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (CUCPTR), New York.
Beverly J. Stoute, MD, FABP, FAPA is a training and supervising analyst at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute, and child and supervising analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and co-chair of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in APsaA.
head,” the commission's aim is to bring to a head the conflicts and disturbances around race in APsaA, and to bring them to their highest pitch. This will not be easy.
In the formation of CO-RAP, our acronym for our commission, there is an intellectual recognition of the mental sickness of racism and that we must do something about it, starting in our own analytic home. Given the intransigence and embeddedness of racism in its many expressions, institutionally and individually, and the historical record of high cultural moments about race being repeatedly followed by the basest moments, we need to wage a fight against inertia in our attempts to find solutions to racism within our organization.
Systemic racism, wherever it is found, involves powers, the organizational equivalent of instinctual forces that are expressed to create and maintain racial inequality. The formation of this commission is an intentional effort to bring a new powerful voice to meet and transform the old organizational powers that have kept systemic racism in place. Our work will be aimed at helping APsaA redefine and rebuild its structures, operations, and practices, including institute practices, in order to achieve racial equality and to build alliances to do the same with other analytic groups. In such kinships we will also aim to actively work in larger communities—regional, national, and global — to eliminate all forms of oppression.
Just as Freud speaks of necessary suffering, frustration, and damming up of libido as necessary components of the work to be done to liberate oneself, in fostering CO-REAP, APsaA has agreed to the examinations the commission will conduct that will likely involve some organizational frustration. We will persevere to make discoveries and propose changes that will not dam up but transform organizational instincts into constructive developments. Deep disservices of race are as old as our country. They persist and course through all of us. Perhaps racism is interminable, but the commission's commitment is that it is modifiable for the good of all in our Association and beyond. We pledge to be radical in our examination of race in the best psychoanalytic sense. That is, we will upset the status quo for the purpose of progressing toward racial equality.
Remarks by Dionne Powell, Beverly J. Stoute, and Anton Hart of the Holmes Commission's leadership team follow below.
It is difficult to come up with introductory remarks for such a lifelong battle; including the personal, which I believe is the source of any meaningful change. We are a segregated, invisibly gated community. And while there may not be the snarling white faces and racial epithets of my youth, the message of how “welcoming” APsaA and analytic institutes are is suggested by its lack of diversity, particularly African-Americans, Latin Americans, and Asian- Americans.
The Holmes Commission is an attempt to look at all of this closely or as stated in my recent paper “From the Sunken Place to the Shitty Place: The Film Get Out, Psychic Emancipation and Modern Race Relations from a Psychodynamic Clinical Perspective” published in the [2020]Psychoanalytic Quarterly:
Our analytic understandings are formed within a racist system that privileges certain people and excludes others. We hide behind maintenance of an “analytic stance” and yet are blinded and mute to how that precludes inclusiveness and diversity. In the end our stance becomes defensive armor that is rarely challenged.
The Holmes Commission is tasked to look at our participation and the maintenance of racist structures and behaviors individually, organizationally, and institutionally, requiring us to dwell in the shitty and unpleasant places, exploring its embeddedness and intransigence, finding new paths to mitigate the effects of racism. This is undoubtedly subversive and uncomfortable as we acknowledge our sordid past and present, while looking at personal, institutional and organizational thoughts, behaviors, and biases that have denied, discriminated, and restricted access to those often identified
as foreign or stranger or the Other. However, if we can struggle with humility and openness, we can reclaim those aspects of the self that have been unacceptable because of our conscious and unconscious attempts to exclude and deny that have our institutions, organizations, and an entire nation psychologically enslaved. To move toward a freedom that is essential for psychoanalysis and our nation, is the reason for my excitement for the commission's and APsaA's possibilities.
My understanding of our convening is to help us think together, to create the mind of our group, and to use this mind in the service of equality and justice, and that is an exciting prospect. I experience this as the beginning of something exciting rather than obligatory, a chance to think together and to be surprised, to be curious, to have humility, and to have courage.
This is not always what it feels like when starting a meeting with a group of psychoanalysts, I dare say. We sometimes succumb to bureaucracy, to some other version of what it is to have a meeting or to get administrative work done. My hope is that we will keep this interesting, stimulating, and surprising. I expect that, in addition, to being imaginative and courageous we'll also have to become uncomfortable with each other and in relation to the organization we're trying to help.
We'll have to expect breakdowns, that things in our dialogic process will break down. Conversations will falter. Sometimes we won't be able to find words to speak to each other. We won't be able to find suitable ways of speaking to our organization. These are inevitable when walking in the territory of race and racism. In tough moments, our words will fail us. But, as psychoanalysts, we know that breakdowns are opportunities for finding new thoughts and words. When conversations fail, there are possibilities for figuring out how we can start talking again. Let's expect such breakdowns, and let's think of them as opportunities.
My hope for APsaA is that we will begin to transform indifference toward racial equality into curiosity and engagement, and that we will help people start to move from positions of holding on to what they preciously cling to, toward positions of recognizing what they could generatively lose.
James Baldwin once said, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” Every African-American knows this. This is a trans-generational mantra of racial suffering. Every psychoanalyst knows this. It is a fundamental psychoanalytic tenet. James Baldwin believed that the true American identity would be forged by overcoming whiteness and Blackness in favor of a reformulated American nationalism, resolving the split between Black and white within the American psyche. By recognizing that which has been excluded, the identity of Black America, Baldwin believed that the identity of white America would be transformed to reclaim its humanity. This is true of America as a nation. This is true of American psychoanalysis.
I would like to mention the members of this commission who could only be here in spirit today: Solomon Carter Fuller, Ellis Toney, Margaret Morgan Lawrence, Charles Prudhomme, Jeanne Spurlock, Enrico Jones, Ruth Fuller, Hugh Butts, Henry Edwards, Walter Bradshaw, Samuel Bullock, Jean Christmas, Charles Pinderhughes, Argyle Stoute. They are the Black psychoanalysts who forged the desegregation of psychoanalysis.
The places at this metaphoric table that we each occupy were earned by sacrifice, by painful struggle, by activism, by this generation of freedom fighters — Black psychoanalysts who came before us and carved out paths where there were none. Many shunned membership in APsaA because of exclusionary practices, insularity, lack of community engagement, and the intolerable prejudiced teachings about African-Americans espoused in institute curricula. There are times when leadership takes charge and forges a path of social progress, but there are equally important times when leadership recognizes that it must yield to the forces of the historical moment to revive the radical potential of psychoanalysis by internalizing the mobilizing force of Blackness into the American psychoanalytic identity. Blackness represents Black psychoanalysis but also the symbolic Other. Our task is a noble one and a necessary one. Let's commit ourselves to the struggle for racial justice and equality with honor, with dignity, with authoritative humility, in our organization and hopefully reposition psychoanalysis in our work community to reclaim our psychoanalytic soul.
Lastly, Holmes commissioners took turns speaking personally about what had brought them to the present endeavor. Each account was moving and inspiring, reflecting fear and courage, apprehension and commitment. As expectably overcommitted each commissioner is, there was a palpable sense of gratitude for the opportunity to come together and do the important work we have set before us.