As I listen to soothing Indian flute music while writing this, I look around at my home office and am struck by the confluence of many elements in my life in the process of my own analytic growth: a cherished empty wine bottle with a Freud photo label on it that reads “Got Freud?”; my favorite photo of me draped in a saree holding my two-month-old son; an art piece created and given to me by my analyst. The art piece has what seem to me Christian symbols such as cherubs hovering over a woman with a halo over her head playing the piano and poignant quotations along the border. I find that I have placed it right above my desk, as if to have my analyst's presence hovering over me in a comforting stance.
This home office in San Diego, California, is the hub of all my psychoanalytic work that has burgeoned during the pandemic and my candidacy at the San Diego Institute. For me, it represents many integral aspects of my “self” that are rubbing shoulders again during my psychoanalytic journey. At this juncture of my life, perhaps most significantly, it represents another coming together of my own inner East and West as I continue to wrestle with “otherness” in new ways that I was not consciously aware of, and that take on a whole new meaning in my pursuit of psychoanalysis: the foreign profession.
Often, I am still amazed by the fact that the man who knows me deeply is my white analyst and that many significant others such as supervisors and teachers are becoming my internal objects in hitherto unimaginable ways. In the deepest recesses of my mind these internal objects have collectively represented a significant “other” when it comes to culture, race, language, and ethnicity.
In mundane moments I catch myself asking questions like, “I seem to be collecting ‘old white men’ in my closet, what's this about?” “Is this my way of working through my own unconscious colonial baggage and feeling like I have finally arrived in America and in psychoanalysis?” “Is this a disavowal of my Indian self, or is it really that I have transcended otherness, or is it my grandfather transference?” Maybe it's a bit of all of these.
When I started my private practice last year, my deep-seated unconscious worries about my accent, how I imagined I looked to my American patients, my ability to comprehend them, and their ability to open their minds to me all began to get stirred up again. These are issues I thought I had resolved (somewhat) as an immigrant living in the West for two decades now. Seeing patients from many different cultural backgrounds, I rekindle old struggles, trying to analyze their new meanings and reintegrate them in adaptive ways. It is not easy.
I recently realized that I prematurely disclosed to my patient that I am married, because unconsciously I assumed I am not his type, because I am not white. Why would he have fantasies about me? I both gasped and laughed at myself when the conscious absurdity and unconscious significance of this gaffe dawned on me. Often, I am surprised by how welcoming and accepting my patients are of me with all my unique qualities as a person and as an Indian female therapist. That I am more worried about my otherness and how it can make them feel othered in return is a heavy burden to bear at times. That in my eyes I am a foreigner to them is a problematic and a disturbing conflict for me to grapple with, let alone how it might affect the treatment process.
My countertransference reactions often give an inkling of these undercurrents in my own psyche. For example, when I have noticed that most of my patients do not use my name to refer to me, I have wondered. Is it because my name is hard to pronounce? Or is it because my patients are worried about offending me by mispronouncing it? Occasionally, I catch myself feeling estranged and saddened by this, and my tendency to quickly ascribe it to my race or ethnicity could perhaps be defensive on my end. I could be using cultural explanations to quickly dismiss my own sense of rejection and not look beyond it to examine other possible meanings.
In another instance I found myself delighted when one of my patients addressed me by name, and I felt an instant sense of gratification, relief, and a connection with that patient. I felt as if “I” was finally “seen.” In my mind I was not sure I am a “real” presence in my patient's internal world. This same patient, a few sessions earlier, had playfully remarked on my being “Indian” which is different from his “Indian,” that is Native American. I felt outed. My secret had been leaked. Later, I pondered, what is the meaning of all this for me and for my patient?
With yet another older white patient, while exploring her feelings about her previous therapist, who was also older and also white, I asked her what it feels like to work with me, a much younger therapist. It slipped my mind to ask what it feels like to work with a therapist from a different racial background. Once again, I wondered later about this omission and
what it might have meant for me, given that I actively look for opportunities to talk about the way racial differences might affect the therapeutic alliance and weave themselves into the transference. As I try to join these different threads and analyze them, I recognize that I seem to have an unconscious ambivalent relation to my own racial/ethnic background. I do not want to be seen as different, yet I simultaneously cling to cherished aspects of my Indianness that I want others to see and acknowledge. This conflict is now part of my work with my patients—a layer that adds to both the depth and richness of my connection with them. At the same time, challenges and anxiety arise as we attempt to work through these myriads of issues.
One of my Asian patients shared that my not being a part of her community is what makes her feel safer with me. We examined what this means for her, and I reflected on both the adaptive and defensive ways in which we can all use the “cultural piece” when trying to understand the unconscious dyad in the therapeutic encounter. On occasion, when I do see an Indian patient, I find that our shared cultural heritage can uncover but also gloss over my understanding of the patient because the similarities are too many and the closeness too great. I am reminded by my diverse patients continually that having a therapist from a different or similar racial background has its own pros and cons, that being the other on the margins can be both a boon and a bane.
Initially in my own analysis, it was easy for me to question my analyst and assume at times that he cannot possibly understand me because he is not Indian. I was convinced I could not be seen by and see myself back in his blue eyes. How has that changed? I ask myself. It has taken considerable courage on both our ends to work through my disappointments, in some instances when the rupture seemed to arise from cultural issues. But the secure base was always there—whether in familiar objects and figurines in his office from my culture and other cultures, in our shared interests in diverse music, art, literature, poetry, and mythology, or in my analyst's existing knowledge of and interest in my culture. From the beginning, I perceived my analyst as a multicultural figure whose inner life was rich and expansive, enabling me to find a representation of myself in his psyche. His ability to be curious, interested in, and accepting of the limits in his understanding of me as a woman, a person, and an Indian, and to acknowledge his own biases and misinterpretations was a significant factor in the deepening of our work and mutual growth.
I do not want to be seen as different, yet I simultaneously cling to cherished aspects of my Indianness that I want others to see and acknowledge. This conflict is now part of my work with my patients—a layer that adds to both the depth and richness of my connection with them.
Many times I have wondered what it would be like to work with a male Indian analyst, someone, I imagine, with whom I could talk freely in Hindi and not have to translate my spontaneous thoughts and feelings when they sprang up in my language. Would the transference be more potent and therefore curative, or would I flee from treatment, running for my dear life? I imagine that it might be potentially so close to home that I might feel unable to bear the heat. My analyst's different racial identity probably made the distance feel safer in some ways, and his being an other made it possible for him to be an outsider just enough to help me understand the ways my own culture has shaped and impacted me. It is hard to know. But what I do know is that it was my analyst's connection with me as a human and my suffering and his engagement with me in very real ways that held deep personal significance for me and contributed powerfully to my connection with him. When I got the sense that I mattered to him and his growth—that he was willing to stretch his inner emotional canvas and be redefined in me—that's when I felt equal, heard, and seen.
I can hear my analyst's voice all the time, and I am rattled at times that I am sounding like him when I talk to my patients. This deep internalization of my analyst, someone who strongly represents the “other” for me, signals a profound growth and elaboration of my own psyche. For now, I am inclined to believe that this expansiveness in my own life, due to my own analysis, is the deepest foundation that my analyst and I have laid together for a lifetime of work that I am undertaking with my multicultural selves and patients in the West. The psychodynamics of these issues are rich and complex. I comfort myself by knowing that it is the analytic process itself that will help me rework these conflicts of assimilation and acculturation all over again as I dive deeper into my work with my patients. While I might consider myself foreign, at times, in America, and now also in India, it is psychoanalysis itself that may come to represent the idea of a “home” for me. It represents a transitional space between my East and West, where, I hope, I can learn to play and reimagine issues of self and other, sameness and difference, closeness and separateness.
Susmita Thukral, M.A., MFT, is a psychotherapist in private practice in San Diego, California, and a third-year analytic candidate at the San Diego Institute. Originally from India, she is also an assistant psychology professor at Grossmont Community College in El Cajon, California.