This article presents a narrative about a 15-month excursion, beginning before the pandemic in March of last year and culminating in April 2021 in a two-day IPA-APsaA Conference organized to address essential current-day challenges. During the February 2020 IPA Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis (COWAP) administrative meeting, we explored the idea of joining with the APsaA Committee on the Status of Women and Girls (CoSWAG) to create a panel for the 2021 Winter Meeting. Our discussion evolved into plans for a conference on gender diversities that came to fruition on April 9th and 10th of this year. Members from IPA and APsaA committees on gender and sexuality were invited to join, thus forming a robust planning committee of nine psychoanalysts from Washington, D.C., Washington, California, and New York: Paula Ellman, Margarita Cereijido, Cecile Bassen, Victor Bonfilio, Ethan Grumbach, Catherine Mallouh, Hilli Dagony-Clark, Jill Gentile, and Janice Lieberman.
Besides knowing the conference would focus on the experience of gender, we were initially directionless about the topic. Yet with the impact of the pandemic and racial unrest that followed, the topic loudly declared itself. Functioning as both process and study group, we grappled with the pain inside and around us, and strove to contextualize it psychoanalytically. Our discussions took into account the growing impact of the pandemic on marginalized populations. Covid brought with it a general rise in domestic abuse and significant economic struggle, especially for underprivileged people. And the national awakening to racial injustice thundered in our ears. From there, our theme and title were born: The Intersection of Gender, Sexuality, and Our Current Crises: The Psychological Impact of Race, Politics, Economics, and Covid.
The goal of our April Zoom conference was to bring together a diverse collection of individuals who could navigate a conversation on intersectionality of race, class, gender, economics, and health.
Claudia Rankine, the acclaimed poet of Citizen, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, delivered the keynote. She was joined in conversation by psychoanalyst/interlocutor, Francisco Gonzalez. Not surprisingly, Rankine presented her ideas on race in a movingly poetic way. She spoke about the Lafargue Mental Health Clinic in Harlem which, between 1946 and 1958, was, as the novelist Ralph Ellison noted, our nation's most successful attempt to provide community-based mental health treatment to underserved, underprivileged Black and Indigenous populations. Rankine urged us to be intentional in offering psychoanalysis beyond the groups we customarily treat in order to reach, specifically, people of color and disadvantaged socioeconomic groups. Speaking of the Lafargue Clinic's mission, Rankine asked, “How do we create that now?” Then, with a nod towards her own psychoanalysis, she made clear her understanding of its benefits. In addition, she referenced those like Bryan Stevenson, a Black Harvard-educated attorney who created the Equal Justice Initiative with the explicit mission to provide legal services to the underprivileged. She said, “If you build it, they will come.”
Rankine emphasized the public health crisis created by racism, noting that the strain of living in Black skin yields more
Paula L. Ellman, Ph.D., ABPP, is a Training and Supervising Analyst and faculty in the Contemporary Freudian Society, D.C. and the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. Her practice is in North Bethesda, Md.
Margarita Cereijido is a Training Analyst and Faculty of the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. She is a member of COWAP.
Hilli Dagony-Clark, Psy.D., FABP, is a psychologist and psychoanalyst working in New York. She is a faculty member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.
serious illnesses and shorter lives. At age 58, Rankine remarked she is equivalent, in terms of her expected longevity, to a 65-year-old white woman. She told us that Black newborns are three times more likely to die during birth if delivered by white rather than Black obstetricians. Rankine spoke about the many Black people who view any participation in the system as useless and, therefore, refuse to vote or opt out in other ways. The audience was mesmerized by Rankine's description of racial disparity and white blindness. Her talk served as a call to all psychoanalysts.
Saturday's conference featured two panels, two breakout groups, and an end-of-day exchange between presenters and the audience. The two panels differed in focus and structure. The first panel: “The Psychological Impact of Our Current Crisis through the Lens of Race, Politics, Economics, and Gender” addressed ways that the Covid-19 pandemic has significantly impacted our global population and ways in which race, politics, economics, and gender affect individual experiences of the pandemic in the United States and abroad. Presenters Annie Lee Jones, Jhuma Basak, and Ann Pellegrini, moderator Hilli Dagony-Clark, and host Ethan Grumbach discussed intersectionality in their presentations and conversation.
Jones, in her paper “Experiencing the Other During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Racialized Projections of Contagion,” spoke to the pandemic experience described by an analyst who has been treated as Other. To quote the abstract, Jones “illuminated the deleterious effect of the twin public health emergencies of systemic racism and Covid-19 that have a disproportionately deadly impact on communities of color.” In particular, she highlighted “already-existing disparities in our healthcare delivery system and employment based on racialized projections of contagion onto the blackened bodies of the servant essential worker classes in urban areas.” Jones discussed ways that “the Black body is experienced by the larger culture as an embodied Other—the rubbish people—moving through this Covid-infected world.” She addressed “the experiences of the self in the presence of potentialities for infection mapped across multiplicities of complex socio-economic and culturally enforced projections/expectations of what constitutes the dis-eased body in self and self/other interactions.”
Rankine urged us to be intentional in offering psychoanalysis beyond the groups we customarily treat in order to reach, specifically, people of color and disadvantaged socio-economic groups.
Jhuma Basak, in her paper “Covid and Other Crises in Today's India: An Appeal to Community Benevolence,” presented on the position of women and the caste system in India. Regarding our fear of contagion, she said, “Today there is a global dread, but in India, as a culture, there is familiarity with evasion of human touch, even that of human shadow, from a certain sector of its society as for decades that ruled the psyche of the upper caste in society in relation to the lower untouchable category.” Basak explained, “The pandemic situation has prompted a sad justifiable reaffirmation of certain existing prejudices and bigotry within the Indian site, making the uncanny more reasonable, legitimate, and using medical doctrines to reawaken communal uncanny to exercise abjection of the unwanted. The binaries over urban-rural, rich-poor divide of class and caste all magnify the gap between the self and the Other.” Basak observed, “Decades of women's struggles to claim public life and space stands lost, propelling an altogether revised new effort.” Thus, she said, “It is imperative to read the clinical in India with inclusive agencies of caste, class, gender, and socio-political realities, as much as it is crucial for psychoanalysis to free itself from exclusivity, and engage in community spectrum.”
Ann Pellegrini, in “Neoliberal Necropolitics: Not Your Uncle Sigmund's Death Drive,” brought together three terms—neoliberalism, biopolitics, and necropolitics—to think about how human life has been valued during the Covid pandemic and some lives deemed disposable. According to Pellegrini, “neoliberalism names an economic, political, and moral rationality in which market values are elevated over other values, and become the measure of everything.” Pellegrini offered as an example the Trump administration's minimization of the risks of Covid in the name of reopening the U.S. for business. Next, she introduced biopolitics/biopower, terms coined by philosopher Michel Foucault. She said, “Biopower indexes a fundamental change in relation between power and life in Western modernity, starting in the 18th century. When states act, they do so in the name of life: The task of biopower is to make live and let die decisions. If the overall imperative of the modern state operating in the mode of biopower is to foster life, manage it, maximize its capacities, under neoliberalism, the life to be optimized is the endless life of the market.” Pellegrini explained, “Some life thus becomes expendable in the service of optimizing the health of the market. Under ongoing conditions of white
supremacy, expendable life is not an abstraction, however. Some die so that others may live better. In the U.S., we can see this in the disproportionate impact Covid has on communities of color.” Here, Pellegrini introduced postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe's term necropolitics to underscore the active making die of some peoples whose lives are seen as disposable. Necro means death, and Mbembe's point, according to Pellegrini, “is that optimizing the lives of select men and women means actively organizing the state of things so that other lives—human and nonhuman—are left exposed to danger, disease, death.”
The presentations of the first panel captured, in a riveting way, aspects of our current crises, here in the United States and across the world, by looking through a lens of race, gender, and class disparities. That reality seemed to spark outrage in the audience and provoked an energetic discussion about systemic racism and the deleterious effects of privilege.
The second panel, “The Impact of the Pandemic Crisis on Gender Dynamics: A Time of Transformation,” included papers about the fallout of the pandemic in relation to women and gender-based issues: job loss and regression to traditional gender roles, violence, victimization, and the search for safe spaces. As speakers noted, the pandemic creates openings for change, as in any crisis. Victor Bonfilio moderated the four-presenter panel while Catherine Mallouh hosted. Margarita Cereijido, in her paper “The Impact of the Pandemic Crisis on Gender Dynamics: From Othering to Openings for Change,” described how some partners reverted to traditional binary stereotypes and roles while others further transitioned toward more egalitarian partnerships. The crisis, according to the author, challenged the patriarchal masculine mandate that men need to be in charge as financial providers. Cereijido noted that “stereotypical hyper-masculine men have difficulties feeling vulnerability and pain and feel angry instead. They may dissociate aspects related to vulnerability and project them onto their partners, who are then perceived as weak and vulnerable.” Cereijido remarked that “such Othering is problematic for such men who have a hard time accessing their sensitivity, and likewise for their partners who become the powerless, denigrated Other.” However, she also noted that “some hyper-masculine men are able to transform, connect with their tenderness, and respond to the urgent needs regarding childcare.” Cereijido called this “an instance of the plasticity of gender identity and dynamics.”
Audience members emphasized the need to hold in mind the place of race, class, and privilege in all our work, especially between white analyst/therapist and white patient, and in our work on gender.
Paula Ellman, in “Safe Spaces, Unsafe Spaces, and Gendered Spaces: Psychoanalysis During the Pandemic,” explored the multi-layered concept of space that has been unveiled during the pandemic with a discussion of the experience of space, what is safe and unsafe, and how it has become reconfigured and differently considered. The pandemic exacerbates social fractures with regards to race and gender, and with that in mind, she observed, the concept of space is conceptualized in terms of race, space that becomes gendered, and those occasions when it is regressively experienced. Ellman used clinical vignettes to elaborate her ideas.
Leticia Glocer Fiorini, in “Gender Violence in Covid Pandemic: Disciplined Bodies-Dissident Bodies,” focused on the effects of violence on bodies in the context of the confinements due to the Covid pandemic. She reviewed models of disciplined bodies and dissident bodies: “techno-bodies, hysterical bodies, bodies subjected to masochism, bodies of maternity, of prostitution, transgendered bodies, among others.” Fiorini said, “The effects of obedience and/or resistance on bodies may potentiate previous situations, and most situations are highly related to the masculine/feminine dichotomy and its power relations.” She proposed to include post/binary logic in order to rethink this subject and, at the same time, reformulate the category of difference in this context beyond the classic notion of sexual difference and of each person's sexual orientation.
Lastly, Janice Lieberman, in “Women in Freefall: The Pandemic's Unveiling,” discussed the tragic loss of 2.5 million jobs during the pandemic, most held by women. She said, “This reverses the many work-related gains made by women over the past 60 years. In many cases, married women with children left their jobs to care and homeschool for children and do most of the domestic chores while their husbands worked.” Lieberman advanced a number of psychodynamic reasons for this based on a comparison of clinical work with women in the '70s and today. Some of the reasons she named were “careers that challenge traditional roles that women held; identifications with mothers and other family members who did the bulk of domestic work; fear that their husbands would find them to be unlovable if they worked.” Lieberman concluded that this unbalance is not good for women and men alike, and that clinicians can now work to reset it.
A salient and continuous theme of the symbolic significance of contagion emerged in the conference. From a psychic perspective, the virus becomes
a metaphor of “untouchables” in India, Black bodies that are denigrated in America, and the trans bodies of individuals who have been murdered globally. Because racial and ethnic minority groups have higher rates of Covid infections and related deaths, they suffer directly and disproportionately as a result of the virus. At the same time, marginalized people are more likely to be associated, unconsciously, with infection itself. Moreover, women of color, in particular, bear the brunt of physical, hands-on labor, such as caregiving and cleaning. They are often essential workers who do not receive proper care or protection from the virus.
During the second panel, the audience exchange was intense and challenging, respectful and very important. In the final conference discussion moderated by Victor Bonfilio, with hosts Ethan Grumbach and Jill Gentile, presenters engaged with audience concerns that the afternoon papers were not directed at themes of intersectionality that many expected. At times, expressions verged on outrage that these papers made little reference to racial issues and failed to recognize the position of privilege and reflect the urgent nature of the racial issues raised by the pandemic. Significantly, the George Floyd murder trial was happening at the same time as the conference. Many were preoccupied by the horrors of racism that seemed to afford little mental space for other dimensions of our work, specifically gender. They felt disturbed by the second panel's move away from race with its focus primarily on gender, stating that any neglect of racial issues now is emblematic of white privilege. Audience members emphasized the need to hold in mind the place of race, class, and privilege in all our work, especially between white analyst/therapist and white patient, and in our work on gender. For much too long, recognition of these privileges has been far from the minds of those who are white. At the end of the conference, there was an explicit recognition that all analysts must now keep in focus the crucial importance of serving Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). Efforts to bring services to BIPOC patients, rather than expecting them to come to us, are needed, as Claudia Rankine asserted in her keynote presentation. Conference attendees took note of those psychoanalytic institutes that have established community tracks in their training programs as models for future development. Making racism a part of each presenter's paper topic appeared to be the call of the day. As Rankine put it, “If you build it, they will come.” It is time for us to build.
Our conference stirred thoughts about the relation and sometimes tension between primarily intrapsychic struggles and group and social struggles. The question is what are the implications for our clinical work? Motivated by the horror of Argentina's military dictatorship at the end of the 1970s, the Argentine psychoanalysts Janine Puget and Isidoro Berenstein worked extensively with that question in their paper “The Subject and the Other” and developed a theoretical framework that differentiates among the intra-subjective level, the inter-subjective level, and the trans-subjective level. The intra-subjective refers to what takes place only in the individual's inner world; the inter-subjective to what takes place between the individual and another; the trans-subjective refers to what takes place at the social level, those things that concern everybody . Another important contribution by Yolanda Gampel addressed this question in the context of the violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She articulates in her paper, “The Pain of the Social,” what Freud identifies as one of the reasons for suffering—“our relations to other men.” In Gampel's words, this is “the suffering that originates in human relations as a whole” .