In a frequently repeated group phenomenon, a racial slur is spoken in psychoanalytic conferences, after which a range of defensive responses emerge to counter acknowledgment of the meanings of having done so. After a discussion of the literature relevant to the use of slurs in psychoanalytic professional settings, Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action, is used to identify and explore these events as a series of discriminatory gestures that evoke racial trauma. The defensive responses that emerge to protect the use of these gestures indicate ties to the traumatic legacy of slavery and to white supremacy as it appears in contemporary psychoanalytic culture. “Gestures of the open hand” are proposed, and their profound reparative potential is discussed. The intimate link between epistemic justice and psychoanalytic endeavors is delineated.
This paper explores resistance to equality‐promoting measures as the external manifestation of thwarted mourning of losses incurred in social trauma. This resistance, which is evidenced in backlashes against social justice, is termed the anti‐integrative impulse. Outlining the unconscious mechanisms that undergird both the desires for equality and desires to maintain inequality, the central importance of mourning in social equality movements will be established, using Moglen's model of mourning social injury and Butler's work on grievability. Common defenses against social justice efforts will be discussed and understood in terms of refusal to mourn collective losses.
Hindu supremacist ideology and Hindu nationalism are recently resurgent in India's far‐right government. This ideology has manifested itself in increased religious intolerance and human rights violations, including escalating oppression of religious and other minorities, journalists, civil rights advocates, and others. Using psychoanalytic theories of social trauma, groups, and prejudice, I link present‐day disturbances to the profound social trauma engendered by the colonial occupation of India by the British in multiple forms for nearly 200 years.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.