Intersectionality, Social Context and the Co-Creation of Clinical Experience

Fourth Year Adult Psychoanalytic Training (APT)
2020-21, 3rd Trimester — Fridays, 3:30-5:00pm
Katherine Weissbourd, PhD
Kelly Lippman, LMHC

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March 26, 2021 — Subjectivity, social context and racialized enactment

[41 pages]

Suchet describes a clinical vignette in which she experiences “a psychic and social space” within herself that she had not wanted to inhabit. Both Suchet and her patient have their subjective sense of self disrupted, disturbed and transformed when current and historical trauma become vibrantly awake in the outside world and in their relationship. Suchet’s description of her internal experience and the external clinical process are related to Hart’s ideas of working with a “radically open” approach. In particular, Suchet seems to say that her unfolding openness to her own “internal otherness” or those parts of herself she wished to avoid knowing was the key to her work with Ara.

Obeid and Schoen write about Obeid’s painful experience of racial enactment in two supervisory dyads, and the institutional framework and dynamics that made these enactments difficult to address. They explore how power dynamics intersect with race/ethnicity to affect conscious and unconscious choices about what is said, what gets silenced and how power is experienced in the dyad. How do Suchet’s ideas relate to Obeid’s and Schoen’s experiences?

How have themes of race/ethnicity, diversities and power arisen or been absent from your discussions with clinical consultants? How have you experienced the dynamics of recognition or misrecognition in the clinical or consultation context? How has current and/or historic trauma awakened in your clinical work and how was it managed?

Suchet, M. (2010). Face to Face. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 20(2), 158-171.

Obeid, N. & Schoen, S. (2020). Dangerous Dialogues: Racial Enactment as the Scene of Address , Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 56(2-3), 255-281.