by June Lin-Arlow, MA

DECENTERING WHITENESS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 

When I go to a lecture or workshop by well-meaning therapists who claim to value diversity and equity, I anticipate the inevitable disclaimer: “I know all these theories are from dead white, straight, cis-men. They are incomplete and don’t represent the patients we work with in the Bay Area, so let’s learn and critique them.” The problem with this viewpoint is that it still centers whiteness and views the critique as secondary. As I was brainstorming for my Master’s program thesis, I realized that I could only think of theories from white perspectives because they were all that I was exposed to. I’m complicit too, and I’m sick of it. 

If we at NCSPP want to live up to our new Equity Clause, we need to actively read, discuss, and feature perspectives from outside the dominant paradigm. It takes more than a hand-waving disclaimer; it takes work. My intention for writing this article is to find theorists of color who are overlooked in our foundational understanding of psychoanalytic theory. 

As I was researching psychoanalysts to feature for this post, I looked for people writing about general topics: “identity development”, say, rather than something specific like, “masculine identity development in gay Latino males.” I didn’t want to include people who were only writing in the context of a specific race or culture because I didn’t want their ideas to be yet another addendum that we file away in our “multicultural counseling” section of psychoanalysis. It is ethnocentric to claim a subjective lived experience as something that people generally experience. Because I am so deeply entrenched in white supremacist culture, it was difficult for me to look outside the dominant paradigm and equally validate academics who were actually being specific about what (and whom) they were writing about. The problem with classical theory is that it fails to recognize that all experiences are highly subjective and contextual. Perhaps Freud’s seminal work should have been more aptly named Studies on Hysteria in Upper Class European Women. 

Here are five psychoanalysts of color I’m excited to share with you: 

Margaret Morgan Lawrence was the first black psychoanalyst. She was Chief of the Developmental Psychiatry Service for Infants and Children at Harlem Hospital and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University. She studied the experiences of children in schools in Mississippi, Georgia, and Africa. Her writings on the development of a child’s self-image are based on her clinical observations and her own childhood reflections. 

Dorothy E. Holmes is Professor Emeritus of Clinical Psychology at The George Washington University and Supervising Analyst Emeritus at the Baltimore Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis. She writes about the intrapsychic influences of race, gender, and class as well as their effects on transference and countertransference. 

Carlton Jama Adams is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He writes about masculinity, fatherhood, the experience of African immigrants in China, and the impact of neoliberalism on psychological development in children.

Maria de Lourdes Mattei is Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology and Critical Social Inquiry at Hampshire College. She writes about intersubjectivity, psychoanalytic perspectives on race and racism, and psychosocial development in Puerto Rican women. 

Usha Tummala-Narra is Associate Professor of Counseling, Developmental & Educational Psychology at Boston College. She writes about immigration, race, gender, interpersonal and collective trauma, and culturally informed psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Let’s make 2020 the year of decentering whiteness and getting to know the work of psychoanalysts of color. Who would like to join and/or organize a reading group? Email me: hi@junelin.com.