Fertile Ground at the Edge of Difference: Self, Other, and Potential Space: Commentary on Paper by Gillian Straker

Abstract

This discussion of Gillian Straker's paper represents one of multiple efforts among American psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to reach across geographical and political boundaries and to engage in dialogues with colleagues across the globe. The author addresses questions raised by Straker regarding the world of politics and morality and the choices we make as individual citizens and as psychoanalysts. The historical links between East and West of the Atlantic are discussed, focusing on the politics of colonization and on racism, particularly as these have exerted powerful influences on cultural narratives and on the process of identity formation. The author argues that, as race is a social construct established for the benefit of the financially and politically powerful (who claim “whiteness”) at terrible costs to those lacking such power (the “Others”), it cannot be understood solely from the position of the “Other.” Whiteness, too, must be interrogated, the author proposes, if we are to grasp fully the conflicts, the anxieties, and the ambivalence of whiteness itself (Bhabha, 1984) that are integral to the experience of being “raced.” We know well that difference, though natural to the human condition, can nevertheless potentiate deadly human conflict. Thus, sharing Straker's profound concerns regarding the current traumatogenic state in which our world is situated, the author joins the call for psychoanalytic thinkers and practitioners to exercise our clinical and intellectual expertise in the service of promoting mutual understanding.