By Adrienne Harris (USA) and Rina Lazar (Israel)
Yevette Esprey
Our most recent IARPP colloquium has just concluded. In this colloquium we addressed Yvette Esprey’s paper entitled “The Problem of Thinking in Black and White: Race in the South African Clinical Dyad” (Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Volume 27, Number 1, p. 30-35, 2017). The Colloquium Committee found this paper to be a good introduction to IARPP’S coming conference in New York City, “Hope and Dread: Therapists and Patients in an Uncertain World.”
In her paper, Esprey argues that race, as it presents itself within the clinical dyad as an aspect of the relationship between therapist and patient, has scarcely been written about from an experience-near perspective within the South African context. This paper focuses on the difficulty of speaking and writing about race. It contends that race as a construct and as an aspect of subjectivity has the potential to interrupt the therapist’s capacity to think. In Bionian terms, these thoughts and attempts to think can prevent entry into the reverie that is crucial to the creation of an analytic third.
Each country and community will have a different and important context in which to think about race and racism as it continues to haunt and invade all of us. In the United States, we are newly made mindful of the devastating history and ongoing presence of racism through the opening of a museum devoted to recounting and presenting and maintaining awareness of slavery. This museum opened just scant weeks ago in Alabama has been greeted , as you would suspect, with intense engagement and reaction—noting just how much there is still to do in the processing of our past and our present racialized society. And, not surprisingly, there are the angry resentments of communities and people determined not to think and work on these matters of privilege and of racist practices so widely visible and palpable in American life.
The panelists for this colloquium included:
Rotimi Akinsete (Britain)
Komal Choski (USA)
Francisco J. Gonzalez (USA)
Uri Hadar (Israel)
Cathy Hicks (Australia)
Anne Marie Maxwell (Mexico)
Eyal Rozmarin (USA)
Andrew Samuels (Britain)
Mark Thorpe (New Zealand)
Cleonie White (USA)
For this colloquium we also included a third moderator, Mitchel Becker (Israel). We thank Mitchel for his readiness to join us.
This colloquium was challenging for our community, stimulating a wide-ranging discussion of race in various contexts around the world, suggesting projects for us as individuals and a psychoanalytic collective in the decades to come. We were struck by the extraordinary courage of many people in this discussion who spoke of the injuries of racism to which they have been subject.
We thank our panelists, Yvette Esprey, our holding environment (IARPP in general and Elisa Zazzera in particular), and our brave and determined participants.
Regards,
Adrienne Harris and Rina Lazar, Co-chairs
IARPP Colloquium Committee
Adrienne E. Harris, PhD
80 University Place, 5th floor
New York, NY 10003 USA
Email Adrienne Harris
Rina Lazar, PhD
Ramot Naftali 9
Tel Aviv 69278 Israel
Email Rina Lazar
