Whiteness and the Psychoanalytic Imagination

Abstract

In this essay I seek to interrogate the specialized language of psychoanalysis and the implicit role unexamined racialization—and hence White hegemony—play in the American psychoanalytic imagination. I begin with a discussion of Eng & Han writing on racial melancholia, a work that offers a thoughtful exposition of the power of Whiteness to induce racial melancholia in its “Others.” I then turn the inquiry toward my own life story, seeking to illuminate the role of Whiteness and racial othering in my own racial formation. Given our field’s core interest in subject formation, notions of racialization and the dominant discourses of Whiteness would appear to be ideal grist for the mill of psychoanalysis. This could only be true, however, if psychoanalysis were self-reflexive about the dynamics of race and the hegemony of Whiteness in U.S. society. There is considerable literature suggesting that psychoanalysis may embody potential for such critical work. However, because the theory and practices of conventional psychoanalysis are racialized through and through, psychoanalysts—as currently trained—are ill-equipped to address the hegemony of Whiteness or the dynamics of racial difference. If, as Claudia Tate suggests, psychoanalysis functions “as a writing of the ethnicity of the White western psyche,” we have much work to do to unconceal these processes and work toward a more emancipatory and inclusive psychoanalysis.