Abstract
In 1998 when I saw my first patient for psychoanalysis, as a candidate at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, I was determined to take the “rules” of psychoanalysis seriously—especially as it regards establishing a neutral psychoanalytic space unencumbered with “myself and my stuff.” I wanted to be a near blank screen, one able to receive whatever made its way into the clinical arena. This was, of course, a fantasy psychoanalyst—and certainly not a useful fantasy. I suspect that for most patients, regardless of their analyst, the first glance exchanged, if not already the first phone call, is filled with me-ness—and her response to me. New patients typically express some surprise that I am a black psychoanalyst. Discovering the meanings associated with this convergence of black and psychoanalyst takes—well, it takes what only time can offer—a relationship. Yes, I am a black psychoanalyst. I am also a black woman; and a “full-bodied” black woman; and a lesbian; and a womanist; and a practical theologian. The late black feminist lesbian poet Pat Parker thought that it would be revolutionary:
If I could take all my parts with me when I go somewhere, and not have to say to one of them, ‘No, you stay home tonight, you won’t be welcome,’ because I’m going to an all-white party where I can be gay, but not Black. Or I’m going to a Black poetry reading, and half the poets are anti-homosexual or thousands of situations where something of what I am cannot come with me. The day all the different parts of me can come along, we would have what I would call a revolution.1
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Notes
Pat Parker, Movement in Black (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1978), 11. Italics added.
Lee H. Butler, Liberating Our Dignity, Saving Our Souls (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2006).
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Moncayo, Raul, “Cultural Diversity and the Cultural and Epistemological Structure of Psychoanalysis: Implications for Psychotherapy With Latinos and Other Minorities,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 15, 2 (1998);
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For an in depth understanding of ego psychology, see Heinz Hartman, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (Madison, CT: 1975);
and Gertrude Blanck and Rubin Blanck, Ego Psychology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).
Margaret M. Lawrence, Young Inner City Families: Development of Ego Strength Under Stress (New York: Behavioral Publications Inc, 1975), 32. Italics added.
Gloria I. Joseph, “Black Mothers and Daughters: Their Roles and Function in American Society,” in Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives, ed. Gloria I. Joseph and Jill Lewis (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1986), 76–81.
Patricia Hill Collins, “The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother-Daughter Relationships,” in Double Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters, ed. Patricia Bell-Scott et al. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993): 47, 53.
See Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer (Massachusettes: Addison-Wesley, 1988).
Margaret Morgan Lawrence, “The Roots of Love and Commitment in Childhood,” Journal of Religion and Health 40, 1 (Spring 2002): 61–70, 69.
Hugh F. Butts, The Blackness of Darkness (New York: Clementine Publishing Company, 1993).
Judith S. Schachter and Hugh F Butts, “Transference and Countertransference in Interracial Analyses,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 16 (1968): 792–809.
Phyllis Harrison and Hugh F Butts, “White Psychiatrists’ Racism in Referral Practices to Black Psychiatrists,” Journal of the National Medical Association 62, 4 (July 1970): 278–282.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 188–189.
Hugh F Butts, “Child Abuse: A Black Perspective Utilizing a Social-Psychological Model,” Journal of the National Medical Association 71, 9 (1979): 899–901, 899.
Dorothy Evans Holmes, “Race and Transference in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 73 (1992): 1–11.
Dorothy Evans Holmes, “Race and Countertransference: Two ‘Blind Spots’ in Psychoanalytic Perception,” Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 1, 4 (1999): 319–331, 322.
Dorothy Evans Holmes, “The Wrecking Effects of Race and Social Class on Self and Success,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 75, 1 (2006): 215–236, 215.
Ibid., 219. See Michael Moskowitz, “Our Moral Universe,” Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 1, 4 (October 1999): 333–340;
Donald Moss, Hating in the First Person Plural (New York: Other Press, 2003).
Kimberlyn Leary, “Interpreting the Dark: Race and Ethnicity in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 12, 1 (1995): 127–141, 127.
Kimberlyn Leary, “Race, Self-Disclosure, And ‘Forbidden Talk’: Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Clinical Practice,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 66, 2 (1997): 163–189.
Kimberlyn Leary, “Racial Enactments in dynamic Treatment,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 10, 4 (2000): 639–654, 651.
Kimberlyn Leary, “Racial Insult and Repair,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 17, 4 (2007): 539–549, 544.
Also see Holmes, Dorothy E., “Racial Transference Reactions in Psychoanalytic Treatment: An Update,” in Race, Culture and Psychotherapy: Critical Perspectives in Multicultural Practice, ed. R. Moodley and S. Palmer (New York: Routledge, 2006), 61–73. Tang, N.M. and Gardner, J., “Interpretation of Race in the Transference: Perspectives of Similarity and Difference in the Patient/Therapist Dyad,” in Race, Culture and Psychotherapy., 89–99; Yi, K.Y., “Transference and Race: An Intersubjective Conceptualization,” in Race, Culture and Psychotherapy, 74–88.
Beverly Greene, “African American Lesbian and Bisexual Women in Feminist Psychodynamic Psychotherapies: Surviving and Thriving between a Rock and a Hard Place,” in Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, ed. Leslie C. Jackson and Beverly Greene (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 82–125, 82.
Hortense Spillers, “All the Things You Could Be by Now, if Sigmund Freud’s Wife was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race,” in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1997), 135–158, 140.
Tate, Claudia, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3.
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© 2011 Phillis Isabella Sheppard
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Sheppard, P.I. (2011). Black Psychoanalysis and Black Feminist Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: Resources toward a Critical Appropriation of Psychoanalysis. In: Self, Culture, and Others in Womanist Practical Theology. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118027_5
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