We are all Located Somewhere: Thoughts on History, Trauma, and the Psychoanalytic process

Abstract

This article honor’s historian/psychoanalyst Tom Kohut’s work by bringing forth the interpenetration of history, and psychoanalysis grounded in an empathic experiential method. Within the psychoanalytic process, the focus of empathic inquiry will now be informed by a radical contextual sensibility with the recognition that all dyadic experience cannot be understood outside of the contribution of the wider historical/cultural world within which that experience is embedded, a history that will inevitably include various forms of traumatizing violence. A clinical vignette is discussed in which empathic sensitivity to differences in economic privilege between therapist and patient tied to marked differences in respective historical location resulted in unusual therapist activity that evoked a special moment of meeting whereby the patient felt deeply understood. The chapter concludes with a sober reminder that the denigration of the other to inferior and subhuman status constitutes a slippery slope to genocide.