Inhabiting Implication in Racial Oppression and in Relational Psychoanalysis

1. Introduction: Engaging Implicated Subjects

Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay and David Mark

2. Getting Next to Ourselves: The Interpersonal Dimensions of Double-Consciousness 

Michelle Stephens 

3. Recognition in the Face of Harm: Implicated Subjectivity and the Necessity of Acknowledgement

Jessica Benjamin 

4. He's My Brother 

Cynthia Chalker

5. Psychoanalytic Spaces, Implicated Places

Carnella Gordon-Brown, Natasha Holmes, Beth Kita and Lynne Layton 

6. The Other Within: White Shame, Native-American Genocide 

Sue Grand 

7. Don't Blame The Mirror For Your Ugly Face (A Russian Idiom) 

Ofra Bloch 

8. The Complexity of Implication for Racial Minority Immigrants 

Pratyusha Tummala-Narra 

9. The Relational Citizen as Implicated Subject: Emergent Unconscious Processes in the Psychoanalytic Community Collaboratory 

Billie A. Pivnick and Jane A. Hassinger

10. Awakening to the Political - Or is it All an Undream? 

Matt Aibel 

11. Parental Implication and the Expansion of the Child Relational Therapist's Clinical Imagination 

Laurel Moldawsky Silber

12. Implication as Central to a Relational Stance: Vulnerability, Responsibility and Racial Enactment

Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay and David Mark

Biography

Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay (she/her) is a founding board member and the co-director of the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia and is on the faculty of the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center in New York. Her work has appeared in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, and Psychoanalytic Perspectives.

David Mark is co-director of the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia. With Jeffrey Faude, he is the author of Psychotherapy of Cocaine Addiction: Entering the Interpersonal World of the Cocaine Addict (1997). Other works of his have appeared in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and Psychoanalytic Perspectives.

'As our discipline undertakes the collective responsibility imposed upon it by its method - what good are we as analysts if we cannot face ourselves? - we could have no finer accompaniment than this volume. Braiding personal reflection (some searing), theoretical elaboration, clinical work and social activism, the text becomes a place where we meet ourselves beyond the facile comforts of binary thinking. If this book leads more deeply into the knotty racial labyrinths of our historically shadowed present, it is in the belief that there is no way out but through. Psychoanalysis needs such tools for staying with the good trouble it is in.'

Francisco J. González, personal and supervising analyst, co-chair of Community Psychoanalysis Track, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California; staff psychiatrist, Instituto Familiar de la Raza

'This is a book for our moment. Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay and David Mark and their colleagues have put together a collection of essays that are deeply and sensitively engaged with the myriad crises that define us - especially the crisis of racism, in the context of contemporary relational psychoanalysis. While diverse in their perspectives, the essays are united in taking up both socio-political injustices and intimate psychic dynamics: they powerfully combine emotional vulnerability and theoretical savvy. Whether focused on geopolitical conflicts or familial trauma, structural racism or the structures of educational and psychoanalytic institutions, this book helps us understand what it feels like to live in - and think through - complex forms of personal and political responsibility.'

Michael Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators

'This is a powerful and exceptional collection of essays and articles that the editors, Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay and David Mark, have astutely assembled and one that I highly recommend. In inviting their authors to address and integrate Michael Rothberg's lens of the 'implicated subject and complex implication' they have assembled what will be an indispensable text for the field, both for training in psychoanalysis and for clinicians before and after their training. These authors, who write from a myriad of subject positions, advance how the social, historical/political, racial, cultural, class/caste, and genders/sexualities necessarily can and must be fully integrated into psychoanalytic theories and praxis. These writers offer compelling examples and experiences that prove that no one is outside of regimes of oppression and privilege, and neither is psychoanalysis nor the training institutes. After reading each chapter I am left with immense gratitude for the deep and thoughtful work that has been done and inspired to make sure this work continues.'

Jill Salberg, faculty and supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis