The self in jeopardy: the curious absence of race in psychoanalytic inquiry

Abstract Drawing on a scan of psychoanalytic writing, this paper engages with the historical absence of race as a subject of enquiry within classical psychoanalytic thinking and practice. In considering that psychoanalysis has only recently begun to engage more intentionally with race in thinking and practice, we suggest that this engagement has historically been complicated, and remains complex, because it challenges foundational psychoanalytic tenets, whilst concomitantly provoking a jeopardy of the self of the analyst/therapist. The paper distills key conceptual issues that are contested when considering the relevance of the racialized societal landscape on the development of the psyche—in particular, the impact on conceptualizing the nature of the unconscious, and of transference and countertransference. In addition, we consider the question of analytic neutrality and the manner in which racial melancholia may manifest to generate vulnerabilities for the analyst/therapist, when race is central to the analytic encounter. The paper emerges from an assumption that the internal world is not quarantined from external social discourses, practices and structures, but rather that these are reciprocally implicated in the structuring of the psyche. We propose a psychoanalytic project that engages with the psychic imprint of the external world, and allows for the possibility that the resolution of racial entanglements may not be the therapeutic ideal, and that ongoing work with such ambivalences and contradictions may in fact be desirable.