Masked resonance: Asian/American enactment in a time of global uncertainty

Abstract

ABSTRACT An Asian-American analyst offers a chronicling of his work with an Asian patient that culminates in its sudden, and clinically important, interruption by the Covid-19 pandemic. A dramatic and spontaneous act of creativity unmasks an essential misalignment and shakes the therapist and patient into a long-absent connection. The author organizes his formulation around the tensions that arise from intersections of race and family, improvisation and enactment, intimacy and alienation—each being constituent parts of a relational whole—and which leads him toward the internal resolution of a treatment truncated by global catastrophe. As the author works to align his experience as a mixed-race American within the experiential framework of his mono-cultured analytic partner, distinctions become the pathway to synthesis as they each contend with intra-psychic, interpersonal, and inter-cultural estrangements, culminating in a moment of meeting that is more than simply an ending.