Racial Identities, Racial Enactments, and Normative Unconscious Processes

Abstract

The author surveys various views of racial and ethnic identity, and proposes a model of thinking about identity aimed at capturing both its oppressive and its facilitating character. To further elaborate the dual nature of identity, she discusses the way that inequities in the social world, and the ideologies that sustain them, produce narcissistic wounds that are then enacted consciously and unconsciously by both patient and therapist. A variety of such enactments are presented in a summary of the author’s work with an Asian American patient, during which she began to recognize unconscious racial and cultural underpinnings of some of the ways she has thought about certain “basics” of psychoanalytic practice: dependence, independence, happiness, and love.