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

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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