The Strangeness of Passing: Commentary on Paper by Christopher Bonovitz

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Passing on 2010-03-11 23:32Z by Steven

The Strangeness of Passing: Commentary on Paper by Christopher Bonovitz

Psychoanalytic Dialogues
Volume 19, Issue 4 (July 2009)
pages 442-449
DOI: 10.1080/10481880903088377

Annabella Bushra
The Westchester Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

Christopher Bonovitz gives us a rich landscape of the theoretical, historical, and relational aspects of his work with his mixed-race patient. In my response I explore what seems missing: a stronger sense of the patient as a person, more of her own history in her family, more of the clinical back and forth with her therapist, a sense of what is being played out in the transference, and particularly what “passing” is for her. I show how his choices about how to think about her story and how to tell it are oversaturated with awareness of identity and race at the expense of the basic human relationship. In the face of such racial anxiety, there is a pull to rely too strongly on countertransference as a way to gain privileged access to knowledge about the other. I attribute many of these problems to the inescapable power of race in our culture. Furthermore, I address the themes of hatred, silence, secrecy and transgression as they relate to the history of transgenerational trauma for this patient and invite our broadening our awareness about how they play out in the therapeutic process. We are faced with the difficult, yet the essential task of holding and living out the patient’s anger and outrage at the racial hatred that has been endured.

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Mixed Race and the Negotiation of Racialized Selves: Developing the Capacity for Internal Conflict

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, New Media on 2010-03-11 23:15Z by Steven

Mixed Race and the Negotiation of Racialized Selves: Developing the Capacity for Internal Conflict

Psychoanalytic Dialogues
Volume 19, Issue 4 (July 2009)
pages 426 – 441
DOI: 10.1080/10481880903088021

Christopher Bonovitz
William Alanson White Institute; New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis, Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis

The author uses contemporary psychoanalytic theory in further understanding the negotiation of conflict and dissociation in biracial patients who are both African-American and White. Drawing on the work of contemporary theorists who have made efforts to navigate the relationship between inner and outer worlds in our understanding of race from a psychoanalytic perspective, the author examines the relationship between race, culture, and internalized self-other relationshow they interact with each other and impact splitting and dissociative processes among self-states. The author argues for a notion of the unconscious as one that contains historical trauma related to race relations that influences the developing capacity to sustain internal conflict between opposing self-states borne out of this trauma. The author shows how society works against the integration of racialized self-states and interferes with the capacity to contain conflict. Through an extended clinical vignette from an analysis of a mixed-race patient, the author looks at the interplay of self-states between a White analyst (author) and a mixed-race patient (African-American and White) as manifested through a series of enactments and the unconscious mating between dissociated self-states in both patient and analyst. The author argues that the analyst’s engagement of his or her own dissociated self-states and containment of internal conflict is critical to aiding the patient in moving toward greater integration.

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