Abstract
As a clinician it is not unusual for me, at least in my work, to encounter a woman who has been abused, and for the abuse to have had prolonged negative intrapsychic and relational consequences. In the case analysis that follows, we will see how abusive experiences reach deep into the psyche and entwine their way into all aspects of the relationship with self, culture, and others. In this chapter we bring a womanist self psychological perspective to a discussion on the loss of cultural selfobjects after trauma. Mourning becomes a central consideration as a necessary process to move beyond trauma and as the path toward the reengagement of cultural selfobjects that are sources of self-enhancing experiences.
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Notes
N. Lynne Westfield, Dear Sisters: A Womanist Practice of Hospitality (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2001).
Laura S. Josephs, “The Treatment of an Adult Survivor of Incest: A Self Psychological Perspective,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 52, 3 (1992): 201–212, 201.
See Doris Brothers and R.B. Ulman, The Shattered Self (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1988);
Doris Brothers, “The Leather Princess: Sadomasochism as the Rescripting of Trauma Scenarios,” Progress in Self Psychology, ed. Arnold Goldberg (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1997).
See Regina E. Romera, “The Icon of the Strong Black Woman: The Paradox of Strength,” Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, ed. Leslie Jackson and Beverly Green (New York: Guilford Press, 2002), 225–238.
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Sandor Ferenczi, quoted in Doris Brothers, “Trust Disturbance and the Sexual Revictimization of Incest Survivors: A Self Psychological Perspective,” in Progress in Self Psychology: New Therapeutic Visions, Vol. 8, ed. Arnold Goldberg (Hillside, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1992): 75–92, 76.
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Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991), 231.
Only very recently has this aspect of race and self begun to be included in the critical work pertaining to African American women’s lives. See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000);
Katie Canon, “Womanist Perspectival Discourse and Cannon Formation,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 9, 1–2 (Spring-Fall 1993): 29–37, 36.
Steven Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space, and Subjectivity (New York: Routledge, 1995), 8.
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Nancy Boyd-Franklin and Tonya Walker Lockwood, “Spirituality and Religion: Implications for Psychotherapy with African American Clients and Families,” in Spiritual Resources in Family Therapy, (New York: Guildford Press, 2003), 90–103, 93.
For examples, see Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999);
Jo Anne Marie Terrell, Power in the Blood: The Cross in the African American Experience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998);
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Gehrie, Mark, “The Self and The Group: A Tentative Exploration in ‘Applied Self Psychology’” in Advances in Self Psychology, ed. Arnold Goldberg (New York: International Universities Press, 1980), 381.
Fowlkes, Martha R., “The Morality of Loss—The Social Construction of Mourning and Melancholia,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 27 (1991): 532.
Lee H. Butler, Liberating Our Dignity, Saving Our Souls (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2006), 105.
Maurice Apprey, “Reinventing the Self in the Face of Received Transgenerational Hatred in the African American Community,” Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 1, 2 (1999): 131–143.
Michelle Scott, “A Perennial Mourning: Identity Conflict and the Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma within the African American Community,” Mind and Human Interaction 11, 1: (2000):11–26.
The application of the idea of the inability to mourn cultural phenomena is not an idea unique to my work. For resent applications, see Avner Falk, “The Problem of Mourning in Jewish History,” in The Psychoanalytic Study of Society: Essays in Honor of Alan Dundes, Vol. 18 (New York: Analytic Press, 1993), 298–315;
Peter Homans, The Inability to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
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© 2011 Phillis Isabella Sheppard
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Sheppard, P.I. (2011). Black Embodiment and Religious Experience after Trauma: A Womanist Self Psychological Perspective on Mourning the Loss of Cultural Selfobjects. 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_7
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