Melanie Klein, a founding parent of psychoanalysis, writes in “Early Stages of the Oedipus Complex”:

The early feeling of not knowing has manifold connections. It unites with the feeling of being incapable, impotent, which soon results from the Oedipus situation. The child also feels this frustration the more acutely because he knows nothing definite about sexual processes. In both sexes the castration complex is accentuated by this feeling of ignorance. (1928)

The desire to know can be linked to a desire to overcome helplessness and achieve mastery over bodily sensation and environmental happenings. The epistemophilic impulse is a response to feeling powerless against what Winnicott describes as “falling to pieces.” But what happens when society itself privileges the epistemophilic drive to categorize over the complexity of difference and multiplicity of viewpoints? A desire for mastery over our environments and bodies easily translates to a desire for mastery over other types of unknowns, including differences between cultures and communities by way of patriarchy, colonialism, the “doctrine of discovery”, and racism. The United States has a long history of colonizing the body of the “other” in the service of privileging those admitted into the category of “white” which separates and categorizes people in a way that can be reified, codified, and upheld by law.

Whiteness as it exists in America is a structural, social, political, economic phenomenon which creates and perpetuates violent and exploitative hierarchies for the sake of maintaining power for those associated with European descent and white skin color. Whiteness can be internalized, it can be interpellated, it can shapeshift to determine who is white and who isn’t in order for some to maintain their power. It is used to dehumanize, other, categorize, and separate. It maintains its power by remaining invisible and unquestioned. We live in whiteness in this country. Founded on genocide and the psychic and physical enslavement of generations of people, our cultural millieu is saturated with messages about race and othering. Our psychoanalytic institutes and theory are not immune to this phenomenon. Psychoanalytic institutes and other psychoanalytic spaces are, generally speaking, white spaces, and the whiteness of these spaces is not often acknowledged by its members. Instead, we move toward a desire to diversify the representation of bodies in our spaces, even though the same patterns of whiteness continue. I argue that it’s not enough to invite diverse representations of people into these spaces and call them diversified. Rather, the spaces themselves, and the unconscious assumptions psychoanalysts hold about whiteness via our theories and sociocultural millieu, must be interrogated in order to dismantle the beliefs and systems that have privileged whiteness in our field. This paper describes the author’s personal journey on interrogating whiteness in their psychoanalytic training program, as well as what it will require from our institutes and members in unpacking internalized systems of power and white supremacy.

contributed by Molly Merson