by June Lin-Arlow, AMFT

Hello everyone, I’m June, the new editor of Impulse! I wanted to introduce myself here so that you can get to know a bit about where I come from when you’re hearing from me each month. 

I’m the daughter of Chinese immigrants who grew up during the Cultural Revolution and came to the US in search of education and freedom from an authoritarian government (we had a good run until, well, you know ...). I was raised in Texas around very few people who looked like me, which was challenging but also helped me understand the complexities of feeling like an outsider. In addition to being a therapist, I’m an oil painter, plant enthusiast, and recovering tech worker. I first became interested in mental health and psychoanalysis through my experiences in activist spaces organizing for racial justice around when the Black Lives Matter movement started 7 years ago. 

I love the potential for psychoanalysis to be subversive. At its core, psychoanalysis honors subjective experience and looks under the surface at what in the world happened to us. To me, psychoanalysis represents a willingness to turn towards suffering rather than turn away from it (ahem, CBT). This also extends to the collective experience. Through this pandemic we might stay in our homes, order from Amazon and DoorDash, and never have to contend with what it means to be forced to work a job that puts you in danger to enable others to stay safe. Or how capitalism and White supremacy work together to create generational wealth for some while exploiting others. The willingness to look at things that are hard to be with is pretty radical in a world where quick fixes and productivity are valued over complexity and questioning the status quo.

Now we all know that psychoanalysis is far from perfect. There are plenty of ways psychoanalysis itself is defensive and turns away from people at the margins. But I have hopes for psychoanalysis that I want to bring into this publication. I hope we can truly honor self-reflection and subjectivity by looking at how our own positions of privilege and oppression impact our perspective. I joke that Freud’s seminal work should have been more aptly named Studies on Hysteria in Upper Class European Women. I hope that we can learn from and recognize theories of knowledge about the unconscious that come from outside the dominant discourse, many of which preceded Freud, such as Black psychology, Indigenous worldviews, and Buddhist philosophy. I hope that we can use psychoanalytic theory to think about the structural conditions of society and serve the most marginalized people in our community. I’m a fan of Eng and Han’s work using object relations to look at immigration as well as Stephanie Davis’ work using attachment theory to look at racism. More of this, please. I hope that all of this will help psychoanalytic theory and praxis evolve towards equity and justice.

Before this, I was on the NCSPP Education Committee, where I was the liaison for two courses that were for clinicians of color only. I tried to fiercely protect these spaces, and there were inevitable racial enactments, ruptures, and reckonings at both the individual and institutional levels. Thank you to Asya Grigorieva and the Education Committee for supporting me in all this. We have a lot of work to do within NCSPP as a community. I’m also often complaining about how there are not enough people of color in leadership roles, and that’s a big reason why I agreed to step into this role. Thanks to the Board and Danni Biondini, former editor of Impulse and creator of the funniest psychoanalytic memes, for trusting me with this work. 

And finally, I hope that more people will want to write for Impulse! I would be excited to hear from you, so if you have thoughts about any of this and/or want to write for Potential Space, please email me at jlarlow@ncspp.org.