Walking on Thin Ice: Discussion of Kris Yi’s “Asian American Experience: The Illusion of Inclusion and the Model Minority Stereotype”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using Kris Yi’s article in this issue as a point of departure, I explore the desperate lengths of “not-knowing” to which a simultaneously invisibilized and racialized individual must go in order to survive in the care of a narcissistic parents and/or state structures. Following Yi, I consider the ways in which violently racialized events can release repressed knowledge, together with traumatic affect, in the dissociated individual in psychotherapy, and, continuing to respond to Yi, I think about the implications for the gendered and racialized transference that I have personally experienced, both as psychotherapist and as patient. I compare Asian-American and (especially “mixed-race” or multi-ethnic) Black British identities, both marked by hybridity and divided subjectivity: a part that colludes, and a part that is oppressed unto death. Reflecting on my clinical practice at times of traumatically racialized socio-political disintegration, I outline the stages of a potential psychic structure of new kinship, based on the shared vulnerabilities of complexly and intersectionally racialized therapist and patient.