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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April 9, 2021 — Dynamics of identification, defense and dissociation in racialized enactment

[27 pages]

Tummala-Narra writes about racism and xenophobia in the context of immigration. She notes that these issues are inevitably part of the treatment dynamic and exact a toll on both members of the dyad. From her perspective, “Working with xenophobia and racism requires a willingness to witness and engage with sociocultural trauma and defensive reactions in intrapsychic and interpersonal conflicts.” She discusses the ways in which defense and dissociation leave xenophobia unmentalized and provides two case examples of how racism affects her, her patient and the therapeutic process. As she relates these two cases, she calls our attention to the clinical question of whose narrative is privileged moment by moment in a clinical process.

Leary’s article explores the ways in which transference dynamics are enacted in a racialized context. She highlights the intersection of race, class, and mobility and the possibility of misrecognition between two people who appear similar. She writes, “I think that the most common racial enactment has been our relative silence about racial issues.” She recommends collaborative methods of analysis of transference, particularly when racial material arises, though she notes that this needs to occur in a context of earned trust.

What does it mean to encounter the “other,” within ourselves, our patients, and the cultures that we share? When and how do we make the implicit, explicit? What do you make of Leary’s notion of collaborative exploration of transference?

Tummala-Narra, P. (2020). The fear of immigrants. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 37 (1), 50-61.

Leary, K. (2000). Racial Enactments in Dynamic Treatment. Psychoanal. Dial., 10(4):639-653.