As a society, America is not new to racial tragedy. Individually and collectively, we have a long history of victimization, with many groups over the years taking turns in the role of oppressor and oppressed, some occupying the bottom of the pecking order, some never allowed a step up from those lowest rungs. The 2020 killings of African Americans, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and others who have been killed since subsequent protests erupted, demonstrate that something is horribly, undeniably wrong. How are we to comprehend the workings within us that have bred fear, hatred, and complacency that so easily override our ability to see relatives within our human family as full human beings, deserving of our respect and protection? Our persistent, collective failures to equally uphold and defend the human rights of all of us belie our good intentions. Our stand for a just society falls flat if not accompanied by personal commitment and action to improve our individual and collective shortcomings, starting within ourselves and manifesting in the way we help our patients and work for change. Can psychoanalysis save us? I believe it may be one of the few things that truly can.
In her plenary address at the APsaA meeting in 2016, “Come Hither, American Psychoanalysis: Our Complex Multicultural America Needs What We Have to Offer,” Dorothy Holmes challenged us to place a long-needed psychoanalytic focus on “the persistent societal practice of racism.” Her point, that racism is not simply an external factor of reality, but is also determinative in symptom formation, was rooted in personal experience as much as in clinical knowledge and increasing support in the literature. Current research and writing across clinical and academic fields highlight societal pathology and the complexities of understanding individual and group trauma, challenging us to identify and comprehend the ways macro- and microaggressions contribute to symptom formation. They remind us that our multi-determined conflicts are always created within our relational world.
Can psychoanalysis influence a society enough to challenge thought, self-perception, and perception of the other, even for those who do not enter formal analysis?
The relational world necessarily includes what society deems as reality, what society assigns, as well as the individual's internalizations of race, gender, class, and the many other ways we identify and construct our social worlds. (For fuller discussions of such phenomena, see, for example: Robert Carter , “Racism and psychological and emotional injury: Recognizing and assessing race-based traumatic stress” in The Counseling Psychologist; Lillian Comas-Diaz and Frederick Jacobsen , “Ethnocultural allodynia” in Journal of Psychotherapy Practice Research; Kimberlyn Leary , “Racial enactments in dynamic treatment” in Psychoanalytic Dialogues: Lynne Layton , “Racial identities, racial enactments, and normative unconscious processes” in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.)
Racism and the visible and invisible continuum of consequences that result are challenge enough to a society and its members. In addition, politically and socially, we are living in a prolonged moment in American history characterized by new powerful group externalizations and defenses in the form of novel attacks on the other and resistance to knowledge, truth, and self-awareness. Our insulation and denial are fostered by indiscriminate, yet highly censored and immediate “news” feeds, biasedly filtered social media, and readily manipulated “facts” that feed our demand for information, regardless of how incorrect. Alternate facts create dangerous alternate realities. Such challenges will persist, regardless of whom we elect as leaders. We may experience a quieting of the rhetoric, but Pandora's box has been opened. In fact, since the original writing of this essay, the consequences of manipulated reality came to fruition in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol. It was a complex confluence of events that included the manifestation of racial bias in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. No doubt, we will be deciphering its meaning for many years to come.
We may believe psychoanalysis is capable of curing the individual who seeks change, but what of those who do not seek, who do not question? Has psychoanalysis maintained enough relevance to influence the masses? Can psychoanalysis influence a society enough to challenge thought, self-perception, and perception of the other, even for those who do not enter formal analysis? If psychoanalysts do not make themselves heard, how can we contribute to the conversation?
As psychoanalysis is no longer practiced as a one-person psychology, the need to examine the analyst's inner workings has
Kimberly Chu, LCSW, is a child, adolescent, and adult psychoanalyst on the faculty of PANY, where she is co-chair of the Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Training Program and has served as chair of the Task Force on Race and Ethnicity.
become ever more evident and essential, whether one subscribes to a broad or narrow concept of countertransference. Racism does not fully exist within one group or one individual. By definition, racism exists in relation to another, relative to another. Dorothy Holmes, in making a plea and prognosis, saw that, in order to address the ills of racism, we cannot look only to or at its victims. Comprehending the introjection of negative racial meaning, in minority and majority, is incomplete without a corresponding understanding of the projections of the split off aspects of the self. This complex interdigitation of projection and introjection moderates our psychic lives, as well as the ways we engage each other. The dynamic remains an unconscious process, and, like other mechanisms of which the patient is unaware, it is unavailable to change unless a conscious step is taken to counter them.
As psychoanalysts, we benefit from psychological training that requires us to better know our conscious and unconscious selves. During our own analyses, we typically become accustomed to being questioned, challenged, pressed to tolerate intense and uncomfortable thoughts and affects. During our psychoanalytic development, we may anticipate that our defenses will rise and fall, harden, soften. We will stumble as we become aware of unconscious motivations and feelings. In our green state, we make use of the guidance and support of mentors, instructors, and supervisors, not to mention the ever-present training analyst. At some point, we graduate, having developed a confidence that emerges from greater psychic awareness and a fuller acceptance of the now-better-understood aspects of ourselves. With hard work and determination, we likely come to believe that our mundane and not-so-mundane reactions to others, if analyzed well-enough, remain benign in the private recesses of our minds. We may think our own analyses immunize us from the more typical afflictions that capture the less psychologically-minded.
Are we, as psychoanalysts, more willing and able to overcome our resistances to looking inward, to search uncomfortably for the disavowed within ourselves? Are we aware of our vulnerabilities to “other” those who are unlike us and keep ourselves safely distant rather than open? Do we truly understand the privileges and benefits we enjoy as well-educated professionals, financially better off than many, skilled in an exceptionally specialized field, and as members of an exclusive society? How rigorous is our self-analysis? Are we as courageous as our patients in tolerating the distress of the unknown and searching for what is feared and loathed within us? Having attained a level of comfort and acceptance, are we willing to stir it all up in order to understand our own complacency and participation in systems that are killing us? (Do you believe that it is us?)
These questions are provocative. Psychoanalysis is designed to provoke thought, change, evolution to help people shed what hurts and paralyzes them. Psychoanalysis is a project of learning about oneself and discovering the power of the unconscious, with the goal of change. In order to discover the mechanisms of hate and fear that drive racism, we must be willing to see what can remain invisible and understand its psychic origins. We are both analyst and analysand. Suddenly learning of our disorder, we may become disoriented, lose our equilibrium, become defensive and resistant to the demands of the treatment or the realities as revealed. We may struggle with denial, yet again. Suffering from the news of our collective disorder, are we willing to seek consultation to ensure that we, as the analytic instrument, will be able to tolerate the unknown, hear the stirrings of race and racism as important psychic material needing analysis, then analyze both victim and victimizer, sometimes one in the same?
This is more likely if the analyst can acknowledge this process begins by looking within, with another level of “competence,” this time about the self. These struggles are challenges enough for patient and analyst but are especially elusive for those without the benefit of analysis. (See further, Sander Abend , “Serious illness in the analyst: Countertransference considerations” in JAPA and Paul Dewald , “Serious illness in the analyst: Transference, countertransference, and reality responses” in JAPA.)
Psychoanalysis has the potential to save us, if we are able to pursue what Anton Hart termed “a radical openness” and a curiosity about those different from ourselves. (See Anton Hart , “From Multicultural Competence to Radical Openness: A Psychoanalytic Engagement of Otherness,” in TAP 51/1, page 12.) Rather than fear the unknown, project the unwanted and disavowed, see through biased lens, we are challenged to learn about those different from ourselves with authentic acceptance and wonder, in the consulting room and elsewhere. For Dorothy Holmes, it is a “radical curiosity” that must propel us to explore race as an equally important part of the psychoanalytic endeavor in order to “liberate people from neurotic and characterological bondage” which necessarily includes ourselves. (See Dorothy Holmes's plenary address , “Come Hither, American Psychoanalysis: Our Complex Multicultural America Needs What We Have to Offer” in JAPA.)
We are truly in this human condition together, living within systems that we neither acknowledge nor challenge because we benefit in ways we do not want to know. In order to be truly “competent” about who we are as analysts and human beings, to be radically curious and open to learn about our patients and each other, we must be able to look inward and confront ourselves first. We also must find a way to share the values of psychoanalysis more broadly and in the public domain, lest we relinquish all meaning to the algorithms of feedback loops and those who would have us reject reality for the comfort of fantasy and denial.