A Possible but Elusive Mutuality: Psychoanalysis and Blackness

Abstract

Psychoanalysis writ large, has enriched Black lives, but not as a result of the activities of a mostly culturally indifferent institutional psychoanalysis. In its unceasing attempts to pursue a good-enough life, within the obstacles of a racist structure, elements of the Black community have both adopted and offered psychoanalytic-themed perspectives in such attempts. This offer the possibility of informing a re-imagining of a staid, and increasingly irrelevant mainstream clinical psychoanalysis.