Living History: Responsibility and Blindness in the Therapeutic Process

Abstract

ABSTRACT Psychoanalysis underscores that history isn’t as distant as it may feel. Even so, it’s difficult to recognize how our ancestral history, the history that precedes our birth, influences our subjectivity. This paper explores the difficulty of recognizing and owning the implications of our throwness into particular socio-political and cultural contexts, especially the ways that larger history is embedded within our identities. To illustrate this difficulty, the author considers the ways that her sociopolitical history, including her family’s history of land ownership in California, intersected with her patient’s history, an immigrant from Mexico. She considers the ways that their broader socio-cultural histories influenced the understanding that they reached during her patient’s therapy. Owning our history, she concludes, entails continually reflecting on the complex historical currents that influenced our lives, confronting our inconsistencies and contradictions, refinding ourselves in that more complex story, and supporting our patients in doing the same.