Exploring the Dynamic Unconscious: Intersubjectivity and the Raced-Self in Vertically Infected HIV-Positive Adolescents

Abstract

psychological clinical practice and the professional training and supervision of clinical assessment. Her research interest lies in social asymmetries, activism and advocacy, applied psychoanalytic theorising of socio-political issues, developmental challenges in children and young adults who are HIV-positive. She is currently completing her PhD in the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy programme. Tanya Graham counselling psychologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, School of Human and Community at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is primarily involved in the professional training of psychologists in community and therapeutic practice, and also lec-tures in professional ethics, human rights and research methods. Her research interests lie in the fields of community psychology, critical psychology and public health theory, as well as the psychosocial support and advocacy needs of marginalised communities. She has published in the areas of community psychology theory, practice, training and knowledge production; as well as the psychosocial and developmental issues affecting children and youth in post-apartheid South Africa. She is currently supervising several doctoral students in the PhD in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy programme. ABSTRACT This paper explores intrapsychic life as a site of socio-political insertion from birth. The first part of this paper engages with the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein on the notion of the dynamic unconscious and the Oedipal situation as key processes in the development of the self. The paper goes on to discuss the critical contemporary position taken up by scholars who have highlighted the racialisation of the Oedipus complex and its use in justifying racial hierarchies. Furthermore, the paper engages with the unconscious as an intersubjective organising principle. Franz Fanon’s psychoanalytic framework, that deals with colonial subjectivity, is reviewed here in order to explore how the raced-self becomes imposed and internalised. The second part of the paper locates this theoretical argument within the context of HIV. Intrapsychic development, which comes to be located in our unconscious mind from birth, cannot be understood outside of specific socio-political considerations. The unique developmental challenges of HIV for those who are vertically infected cannot be taken for granted, and there must be more deliberation on the ways in which intersubjective, politically aware versions of psychoanalysis can be used to inform clinical knowledge and practice in working with vertically infected HIV-positive adolescents in South Africa. The youth had thus been strongly socialised into accepting white, middle class norms as desirable, and were not actively supported in coming to terms with their multiple identities. Notably, these mechanisms were invisible to the managers. P1 posited: “We don’t see the kids as with HIV . . . We do see them as Black and White . . . Ironically when you ask the children which culture they want to be, it is White”. Race and class issues thus had an impact on the experiences of residential care, HIV status and adoles-cence, but were not formally acknowledged as influencing factors.