Kimberlyn Leary

Racial Enactments in Dynamic Treatment

The aim of this paper is to discuss racial enactments for what they might contribute to our understanding of the intersubjectivity of race and racial experience. “Racial enactments” designate interactive sequences embodying the actualization in the clinical situation of cultural attitudes toward race and racial difference. I present examples of racial enactments in several social contexts, as well as in an extended clinical vignette. I consider racial enactments in the light of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and suggest that collaborative methods facilitate the effective analysis of racial material.

Race, Self-Disclosure, and “Forbidden Talk”: Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Clinical Practice

In this paper I attempt to extend the psychoanalytic conversation about race and ethnicity by discussing the intersubjectivity of race and racial difference. I present clinical material from an interracial treatment in which disclosures about race played an important role in deepening the clinical process. The resulting interactions permitted the patient to admit more of herself into the treatment space. I suggest that contemporary psychoanalytic formulations and multicultural perspectives from outside of psychoanalysis can together create more meaningful conceptualizations which take into account the lived realities of race and the ways in which these may be shaped by individual psychology.

Psychoanalytic problems' and postmodern solutions'

A number of recent revisions of psychoanalytic theory implicitly draw on postmodern conceptualizations of human selves and human subjectivity. Though postmodern ideas have a wide currency in the humanities and in literary criticism, and are increasingly represented in critiques of science, psychoanalytic clinicians are generally less familiar with the body of writings that encompass postmodernist thought. This paper discusses the evolution of postmodernism and its emergence into psychoanalytic theory using the work of Roy Schafer and Irwin Hoffman as cases in point. I will suggest that when postmodernism is applied to psychoanalytic practice, the result is only a partial solution, at best, to the problems of metapsychology postmodernist revisions were intended to resolve.

Crossing the Threshold: First Impressions in Psychoanalysis and Negotiation

This paper explores the role that first impressions play in two different relational contexts: psychodynamic treatment and negotiation. Although the goals of therapy and negotiation are very different, both endeavors rest on the capacity of the participants to engage in a process of constructive dialogue, and “to get things done” via a relationship. We argue for the utility of an interdisciplinary conversation between psychoanalysis and negotiation, and specifically suggest that exploring these similarities and differences about first steps in building a working relationship may be instructive for practitioners in both professions.

IN THE EYE OF THE STORM

During the fall of 2005, typing into the Google search engine the keywords Katrina, woman, and flag called up a singular image: that of an elderly African American woman, wrapped in a blanket patterned after the American flag, huddling in the rain outside of the New Orleans Convention Center (see Figure 1 on the following page). This photo (the original in color) was taken on August 31 by Eric Gay for the Associated Press, two days after the neglected levees of New Orleans gave way. It was widely reprinted in both the domestic and international press. The woman in the picture is 87year-old Milvertha Hendricks. A second photo (Figure 2 on the following page), taken by photojournalist Alan Chin two days later on September 2 and published in Newsweek, finds Milvertha Hendricks still wrapped in the American flag blanket, still sitting outside the convention center, but now slumped in her chair, staring down into her lap, her face away from the camera. This photo appeared in black and white. In an influential book on picture theory and visual culture, Mitchell (2005) argues that “a picture” is commonly understood to be “the entire situation in which an image has made its appearance, as when we ask someone if they ‘get the picture’” (p. xiv). He notes that the essence of our contemporary media culture (in which, for instance, Googling is recognized as an intelligible verb) is, to a critical degree, visual. Quoting Heidegger (1977), Mitchell proposes that the present moment is distinguished by the way in which the world is conceived and grasped as picture. Images, he

On the Face of It—Difference and Sameness in Psychoanalysis

Abstract This paper is a reflection on papers by Aronson and Rubin. Difference and sameness exist in dynamic tension in both the consulting room and in the larger social and political culture in which psychoanalytic treatment occurs. Using the case vignettes presented by Aronson and Rubin, this paper explores the parameters of an authentic psychoanalytic voice speaking to issues of diversity and multiculturalism.

Discussion of Kris Yi’s Paper “From No Name Woman to Birth of Integrated Identity: Trauma-Based Cultural Dissociation in Immigrant Women and Creative Integration”

Using a clinical vignette describing her work with a Korean patient, Kris Yi draws attention to the ways in which ethnic minority cultures are not monolithic. Yi offers the theoretical construct of a “cultural dissociation.” When sexual violence or discrimination is infused with cultural practices, people may seek relief by dissociating themselves from the culture that is fused with emotional pain. In this discussion, using examples that range from Sigmund Freud to Henry Louis Gates, I link Yi’s formulation to one I have developed, namely, that race in America constitutes an adaptive problem. When clinicians take into account the adaptive nature of the problem that race and ethnicity constitute in contemporary American culture, practitioners should expect dislocations. I conclude with a call for our profession open ourselves to the different stories differently situated others have to tell in their own voices and on their own terms.

Adaptive challenges in the consulting room: A discussion of Sue Grand’s “Skin memories: On race, love and loss”

In this discussion, I reflect on important lessons in Sue Grand’s paper “Skin memories: On race, love and loss.” I suggest that racial experiencing in both American cultural life and the consulting room embodies aspects of an “adaptive challenge” (Heifetz, 1998) where opportunities and solutions look different to different members of the community or the dyad. Engaging adaptive challenges as they occur in clinical work is most possible when we open ourselves to the different stories differently situated others have to tell in their own voices and on their own terms.

Free Fall: Finding Solid Ground in the Treatment of a Patient with Catastrophic Injury

KT is a 30-year-old single, wheelchair-bound, paraplegic woman. Despite a recent increase in self-injurious behavior and numerous recommendations that she accept more psychiatric help, she has had limited psychiatric treatment since a severe physical injury ten years ago. Her case has presented continual diagnostic and therapeutic challenges because of her medical, psychiatric, and substance abuse comorbidities and her unwillingness to engage in ongoing psychiatric treatment. The third of five children, KT was born and raised in a working class New England city. Her oldest sister (36 years old) works cleaning houses; a sister (34 years old) currently works in a supermarket; a brother (28 years old) works in construction; and a sister (25 years old) is unemployed and lives with her boyfriend. Her father was a fireman and a heavy drinker. He is reported to have been verbally abusive to her mother and occasionally to KT. Nevertheless, KT notes that she was his “favorite” and that he was usually very good to her. Her special status with her father created “tension” between KT and her mother and siblings. The mother is described as “the strongest woman I ever knew,” although their relationship was always strained. KT’s parents separated when she was 7 years old. She spent the next nine years moving back and forth between her mother’s and father’s homes. KT notes that she was not much of a student, never liked school, and began to miss school regularly as an