Racial and cultural in‐betweenness meet in the consulting room

The case of ‘Anna’

Bibliographic Data

ID8983668
AuthorsLourdes Hernandez (0000-0001-8383-2061, Boulder Colorado USA, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume66
Issue3
Pages644-664
Publication date2021-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Analytical Psychology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8774 • E-ISSN: 1465-5922
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1468-5922.12686
PMID34231910
OpenAlexW3181841626
LanguageEN
References cited5

An upper-middle-class black woman, who grew up adapting to a white-dominated environment, entered the consulting room of a multicultural 'white-passing' analyst, and here unique emotional experiences were reflected in dream images of racial disorganization, internal racism, and identity confusion. While sorting through the analysand's internal dynamics, the external world erupted in May 2020 with the murder of George Floyd, catapulting both analysand and analyst (and the nation) into a transformative confrontation with their mutual, deep-seated woundings of American racial and cultural inequities. The analysand's racial complexity directly impacted the analyst's 'white-passing' privilege, bringing into question established classifications of American whiteness. Overlapping dynamics and experiences as 'in-betweeners' and 'outsiders' - a black woman subsumed by a white-dominated society and an immigrant refugee acculturated to American life - provided a common exilic ground for mutual understanding and mirroring. The analyst explores the racial and multicultural straddling that served as a lens into the analysand's fragmented racial identity during the eruption of American racial unrest

Betweenness centrality · Psychoanalysis · Statistics · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Mathematics · Psychology

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