Black Rage: The Psychic Adaptation to the Trauma of Oppression

Passivity and Gender: Psychical inertia and maternal stillness

Who is afraid of passivity? Historically, women and minoritized people have had good reason to be, given that passivity has been a way to keep them out of the world of "reason." Freud's move from the activity/passivity binary as the principle of all instinct, to its gendering as femininity/passivity and masculinity/activity, leads him to assert the "repudiation of femininity" as the bedrock of psychic life (Freud, S. 1937. "Analysis Terminable and Interminable." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 23, 209-254. London: Hogarth Press). This has led to a generative history of feminist, queer and Black psychoanalytic scholarship that constantly re-opens the question of female subjectivity and sexuality, and what we mean by psychic femininity and masculinity. However, what does remains as "bedrock," even in this theorizing, is the figure of the mother in the internal world of the infant - supposedly castrated yet all-powerful, and requiring that the infant defend itself against what is stirred up as a result of dependency on her. After reviewing some of the psychoanalytic debates about femininity, I turn to "stillness" rather than passivity to suggest that we can identify a maternal element that is on the side of development, a figuration of psychical inertia that holds the capacity for waiting, stopping, ceasing and withdrawing in a world in which these mental functions are sorely missing.

The role of groups during individual development and within the clinical dyad

The author proposes that group identifications have been under-appreciated by individual psychodynamic psychotherapists in their conceptualization of normative individual development. He identifies the routes by which the child begins to internalize small and large groups during the early years of identity formation. Through individual therapy vignettes, the author suggests modifications to customary technique so that developmental shortcomings in group attachment security can be shored up. He offers some guidelines for the individual therapist so that group experiences are accounted for as the clinical narrative is written. Finally, he distinguishes patients who may require additional group-level interventions to address their avoidance of group participation.

Racism, Activity, and Passivity in the Analytic Dyad: A Fanonian Meditation

Frantz Fanon's reception within psychoanalysis has been hindered by an interpretive "snag" that vexes discussions of his work and relevance. This "snag" misleadingly situates Fanon's clinical approach as necessarily outside, or antithetical to, treatment as conceived and practiced in the Freudian tradition. As a result, analytic educators, students, and therapists are prone to position Fanon on one side of a conceptual boundary and "analytic neutrality" on the other. This reading is not only misguided but detrimental to the healing potential and continued development of psychoanalysis. A closer look at one of Fanon's oft-repeated rallying cries, in which its context is examined and its intent unpacked, allows for a disambiguating of "analytic neutrality" and affords a number of takeaways that can help readers recognize the stakes of Fanon's contributions to psychoanalysis and appreciate their pertinence for dyadic clinical treatment. A major implication is the importance for psychoanalysis, in both pedagogy and clinical practice, to take coloniality (the continued legacies of colonial domination, including especially white supremacy) far more seriously.

Anti-Racist Racism: Trauma, Traumatism, Traumatophilia

A particular epistemology of trauma now wields an outsized hold over psychoanalysis. Trauma, we are trained to think, has destructive effects whose ghostly lingerings can, nevertheless, be durably turned into ancestors. But what if we got this wrong? What if trauma is not a piece of shrapnel to be removed but a cause of becoming? And what if the tenet that trauma may be worked through is but a manifestation of a disciplinary spell?Introduction of the concept of traumatophobia invites readers to rethink the relationship of psychoanalysis to healing or repair, and to become attentive, instead, to what subjects do with trauma (traumatophilia). Traumatophilia involves a revivification of trauma, and that is easily confused with compulsive repetition or destructiveness. Traumatophobia, however, also courts psychic energies that can be psychically transformative. For transformation to be possible, however, we need to be working with a notion of psychic life that can be transformed. Careful consideration of a controversial sexual fetish (race play) shows how belated efforts of psychoanalysis to attend to racial trauma have generated new forms of racism: treating the Black unconscious not as a transformative and dynamic force but as housing only repressed representational contents. Considering race play instead through traumatophilia allows a race player's actions to be mined not for unconscious motives or for what past traumata, symbolized or unformulated, those motives carry, but to track their effects. Traumatophilic repetitions, it is argued, deliver traumatisms that may (or may not) be transformational. Questions of ethics are thus central to this paper's thinking, which is grounded in queer of color critique, Black feminisms, and Laplanchean metapsychology. Because traumatophobia preserves the world order (and thus white logics), readers are urged to consider the metapsychology of traumatophilia.

Practicing Psychoanalysis at the Intersection Of Covid-19, The Murder of George Floyd, and Trump's Presidency: Reflections from a Brown Analyst

The author focuses on some of her experiences as the COVID-19 pandemic began and her retrospective understanding of those experiences. She describes having drawn on memories from her early life to arrive at this understanding; she discusses how this process has allowed her to move past certain countertransferential obstacles in her clinical work during the early days of the pandemic and to listen to her patients with more optimal analytic attentiveness. The author also discusses concurrent sociopolitical events, such as Donald Trump's presidency and George Floyd's murder, and how these impacted her analytic work. Illustrative clinical vignettes are presented.

We Have Never Been White: Afropessimism, Black Rage, and What The Pandemic Helped me Learn About Race (and Psychoanalysis)

Amidst a pandemic and the events following George Floyd's murder in 2020, discussions of race have escalated in the psychoanalytic community. One theoretical formulation, Afropessimism, has served as a lightning rod across both psychoanalytic and academic circles. Another, Black Rage, offers a psychoanalytic theory of the psychic effect of racial oppression on traumatized subjects. Using both as catalysts, this essay explores the historicity of the questions raised by the racial unrest of the pandemic--the deep embedding of questions of race and Blackness in unconscious prehistories of modernity, the human, and our understanding of our social worlds.

A Call for Inclusiveness in the Psychoanalytic Community

Historically, the psychoanalytic profession has been populated by white analysts. That has been changing as more people of color have enrolled in analytic institutes. But more is needed for institutes to truly be inclusive. White analysts need to be more sensitive to the experience of colleagues and candidates of color. They need to be aware of the dynamic known as White privilege, and how their own White privilege may affect their interactions with people of color. Institutes need to look at their curricula and how they teach candidates to analyze. The early generations of psychoanalytic theorists including Freud worked with White patients. The theories they wrote-and that are still being taught-have led to many analysts knowing how to work with White people, but not necessarily people of color.