Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: The Slippery Invisibility of Asian American Personhood and Subjectivity

In this article, the author, a second-generation Chinese American and psychoanalytic candidate, weaves together autobiographical reflection, theoretical discussion, and clinical case material to explore the many forces rendering Asian American subjectivity invisible and unrecognized, including within psychoanalytic discourse. A clinical vignette involving racialized and gendered erotic transference dramatically illustrates how analytic avoidance of race can reproduce this erasure within the consulting room, leaving the clinician to struggle with racial dissociation, accommodation, shame, and silence on her own. It has only been in recent years, through fuller, more diverse representation of Asian Americans within the psychoanalytic community and literature, that we are seeing greater consideration/concern for the racialized psyche of Asians in America. This, along with finding mutual recognition, kinship, and mirroring within a community of Asian American colleagues, can help develop racial reflective functioning and a collective analytic third, important conditions for restoring the clinician’s subjectivity and ability to navigate the racial enactment of Asian American invisibility.