A group of candidates at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, and some of our colleagues, have gathered to demand that we recognize the whiteness in the field, we interrogate its power, and that the lived experiences and gaze of marginalized people and communities be increasingly centered in our theory, practice, and seminar. This demand has birthed the Interrogating Whiteness project.
This project that is the subject of this paper emerged in the summer of 2018 after an invitation was extended to me (Molly) to speak at a Division 32 “Humanistic” hospitality suite at the APA convention in San Francisco. I had been invited to bring together a panel after I posted on social media about my frustrations with the whiteness of the psychoanalytic material I was reading early in training. I approached two of my fellow candidates, Janie Riley and Ben Ringler, with whom I had taken an extracurricular course called “Whiteness on the Couch” through our analytic institute. I invited them to join me in putting together papers on interrogating whiteness in psychoanalysis. They agreed, and we set to work. As our work on this topic has deepened, the papers we presented then continue to be rewritten, just as our identities earn new narratives the more we examine our assumptions through psychoanalysis and other forms of self-awareness.
This website is here to offer resources, insights, process, and considerations for others interested in interrogating whiteness in their psychoanalytic spaces.
contributed by Molly Merson
Interrogating Whiteness in Psychoanalysis 