Cultural, Racial and Structural Adversities in Childhood and Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Development and Treatment

Abstract

In this current highly polarized environment, in a world filled with violence and war, escalating racial and religious intolerance, we devote this special anniversary issue to furthering our understanding of the impact of societally generated adversities on the lives of our children and youth. In keeping with the mission of the journal, we explore the impact on development and seek to enhance our clinical understanding of those whose lives are negatively affected by growing up as “other.” Our hope is that this rich trove of articles will enhance appreciation of cultural differences, social trauma and also increase awareness of sources of resilience, found in family, community and the therapeutic process. We hope our readers will learn, as we did, by reading these wonderful contributions, thereby increasing our efficacy as clinicians bringing a psychoanalytic perspective to working with our children and youth. We listen to many voices in this issue, authors from diverse cultural and racial backgrounds who have much to say about the impact of growing up in racially stigmatizing cultures, the legacy of slavery and colonialism and their continuing negative impact on self-development of children of color. Our first two authors specifically consider the profound impact of these legacies, bringing with them marginalization, racial hatred and all of those aspects of inequity that were laid bare during the pandemic of the past two years (Adams, 2022; Padron, 2022). Each uses a psychoanalytic lens to consider the impact on development and treatment, defying the cultural tendency to focus solely on symptom management. Next we are treated to a scholarly exploration of how a series of mothering practices, which originated in West Africa centuries ago, created a style of parenting that the author indicates supported survival and resilience of enslaved people through extending caregiving responsibilities to the community at large (Bryant, 2022). The consistent nurturing, responsiveness, and attunement to the needs of their infants and children which such extended caregiving provides, is seen to this day in the intergenerationally transmitted family patterns of African Americans, and needs to be recognized, along with a linkage between culture and spirituality, as a source of resilience and resistance. Continuing to discuss aspects of cultural difference, and their differential impact on personality development, our next author (Kanwal, 2022) considers the devastating assault on a continuity of self, experienced by teens who are torn between family cultures which are collectivist and the values of the individualistic American culture in which they wish to be included. He presents significant theoretical and clinical considerations as he describes the identity struggles of adolescents who are navigating