NEWS

The Dark Shadow of Slavery in the Psyche and Consulting Room

Ryan Parker, LCSW

The Black Lives Matter protests have accentuated the White oppression and African American trauma that persist as a legacy of slavery in the U.S. Historically, our psychoanalytic theories have minimized social, cultural, and political realities such as race. Whiteness has been experienced as an unmarked and invisible state, dissociated from the role of oppressor, ensuring that race becomes a site for enactments in the treatment setting. During the discussion today, we will explore the results of a qualitative study by our own Ryan Parker (2019), which suggest the intergenerational transmission of a White collective unconscious that resists making contact with racialized realities of domination. Concurrently, there has been an intergenerational transmission of wounding of Black individuals, which Gump (2010) illustrated with clinical case material. Suchet (2004) presented a case study of an African-American individual who was mandated to treatment and ended up working with a White analyst who had been raised in South Africa. The experience of race and the structure of the treatment essentially recreated the racial dynamics of slavery.

CFPS Alumni Group invites you to join us from 11:30 am to 1:00 pm to discuss a selected paper.

To RSVP for Round Table, please click the link below.

Click HERE to RSVP