Becoming raced: Psychic consequences of transgenerational racial trauma

Race, including racism, racial trauma, and racial anxieties, remains contentious for psychoanalysts to consider as a psychic phenomenon. Unlike aggression and sexuality, racism is held in silence and resistance, inhibiting exploration of this aspect of mind. This paper describes how we become raced by exploring the transgenerational transmission of racial trauma, writ large, and its intrapsychic, structuralizing components. By examining how and where the analyst locates themselves racially and working through our resistance and countertransference to this type of exploration, this paper invites us to include these aspects of mind for our analytic use. Using examples from the creative arts and clinical vignettes to demonstrate how being raced is embodied and symbolized in mind as a universal phenomenon opens a therapeutic aperture for clinicians who may benefit from a psychoanalytic, intrapsychic perspective on this aspect of our shared humanity.