Whiteness on the Couch: A Discussion of Dennis’s “The Paranoid-Schizoid Position and Envious Attacks on the Black Other”

Abstract

ABSTRACT This discussion explores the complicated and fraught relationship between Ebony Dennis, A Black Psychoanalyst, and her patient, Mrs. A, a White woman from the Southern United States. Employing a socio-cultural lens, I explore how constructions of Whiteness embody and contain unconscious normative processes and highlight the impossibility of untangling what is personal and subjective from what is systemic and intersubjective. Whereas Dennis is primarily concerned with uncovering and confronting her patient’s racialized mind, I focus on the context in which the dyad’s ruptures occurred and became racialized, foregrounding the ways that those contexts reflect a complex tangle of personal history and subjectivity with intersubjective and socio-cultural systems.