CRITICA

Psychoanalysis, like other communities and systems throughout the world, is facing a reckoning in regard to its whiteness and collusions with systems of oppression.

Look around you. Who do you see represented? Look in your bookshelf, in your syllabus, in your theories. Who are you reading? Who are you listening to? Who, and what voices, are missing?

I believe that any invitation to center our work, our feelings, or our positions as people and psychoanalysts must begin with a recognition of our relationship to social location. What do we believe about our world? What do we think we know about ourselves and our values? Part of this questioning involves calling to mind the deep history of how the United States— where many of us practice psychotherapy— was created as a nation. It is easy to dissociate from the narratives of enslavement and settler- occupation which founded the framework of this country, but this only perpetuates a traumatic repetition which prevents reparative and restorative processes. 

To put it bluntly: The United States, its wealth, its policies, its values, and its systems was built on unceded lands from the unpaid work of kidnapped people for the benefit of the wealthy, property-owning few. Here, I ask an old question: who is considered “equal” in the proclamation “all men are created equal”? In some ways this phrase is an historic reverberation of the claim that “all lives matter,” an impossibility in a system entrenched in anti-Black racism and oppression.

Our psychoanalytic institutes, theory, praxis, and practitioners are not immune to whiteness or racism/racist enactments, nor is psychoanalysis absolved or separate from the historical milieu of European imperialism and settler-colonial history in which our theories have been developed. In my view, the field of psychoanalysis is embroiled in racism, even with our radical roots or our fantasies of being “not racist,” in no small part because of the landscape in which our practitioners work and the official systems within which we practice. Ibram X. Kendi (2019) states, “The opposite of ‘racist ’ isn’t ‘not racist,’ it is ‘antiracist.’” Therefore, we must work to become anti-racist in all our efforts, policies, and practices.

“Becoming antiracist” is not a simple task, and I don’t know whether there is really a “right” pathway nor an ultimate achievable destination towards this ongoing, iterative work. Just as some people might say “love” and “ally” are gerunds, there is a “going-on-becoming” involved in delinking racist assumptions and collusions from our actions and systems. However, just because we don’t have the answers does not mean we wait to begin. To that end, I offer several suggestions for our institutes and our field to take up interrogating whiteness with the aim of creating a living, anti-racist field. 

The first is to make actionable commitments to interrogate our racism and whiteness inherent in the field. Second, inquire into our syllabi and curriculum to ensure the material is taught through a critical lens. Third, create spaces for constituents to work through their own whiteness and identifications with racism and how that may show up in psychoanalytic practice and institutional policy, including the system of complaints, fees, hierarchies, and “hoops”. The fourth suggestion is to consult with [and pay] BIPOC  on creating inclusive spaces that are set up intentionally for BIPOC, rather than for tokenization or diversity optics. Fifth, each white member of any decision-making group should commit to doing their own personal anti-racist work, including paid work through Layla Saad, Rachel Cargle, Guilaine Kinouani, among other Black and Indigenous clinical mental health workers who have written syllabi and workbooks for this very purpose.

I believe we can do this— I believe we must do this, to focus our efforts on building an anti-racist community in the psychoanalytic field by attending to our own policies, ethics, racism, biases, and complicity in our practices, our theories, and our personal lives. Like COVID -19, racism is a public health issue, and is disproportionally killing people in communities who have been historically marginalized. When it comes to rethinking where we invest our efforts, and how we expose the paradoxes of our systems, Angela Davis (2013) “[urges] us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together. (104)” Psychoanalysis is well-positioned to take up this work of linking things that have been kept separate (like the social and the personal), and de-linking collusions with systems of oppression— if we can prioritize these efforts within ourselves and our institutions, too.