Publications Announcement by Lauren Levine (USA)

Interrogating Race, Shame and Mutual Vulnerability: Overlapping and Interlapping Waves of Relation

(2022). Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 32(2): 99-113.

Through clinical encounters as a White analyst working with three women of color, I argue for a radical shift in our conception of the analytic frame, necessitating stepping outside of a familiar, comfortable role in which we have been taught to follow what patients bring to analysis. Rather than waiting for our patients to bring up issues of race, I believe it behooves White analysts to take the lead in listening for and speaking directly about race, racism and racial identity, to make it clear that we are invested in and up for these challenging discussions. I emphasize the crucial imperative for White analysts, in particular, of struggling with our inclination toward silence, complicity and dissociation.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10481885.2022.2033546

I/We, You/Us, Just Us: Reply to Commentaries

(2022). Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 32(2): 130-137.

In this reply to the generous commentaries by Michelle Stephens, Adrienne Harris and Kirkland Vaughans, I reflect on the complex questions they pose and the profound ways in which they deepen this shared conversation about “relational racialization” in psychoanalysis. As Stephens suggests, this is a process we are all subject to and subjected by, even if with more or less detrimental, corrosive effects on our senses of self. I elaborate how, as a White analyst, taking the lead in speaking directly about race requires sensitivity, care, deep listening, and a willingness to step into discomfort, make mistakes, try to repair racialized enactments when they inevitably occur, and, as Vaughans notes, to reach out rather than down, to “construct necessary scaffolding to bridge the divide” in cross-racial dyads.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10481885.2022.2033550

Lauren Levine, Ph.D.
New York, NY
Email Lauren Levine