Is This My Home? How Psychoanalytic Training Led to My Cultural Reawakening

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, I reflect on how cultural selfobject experiences shape one’s sense of identity and how contemporary psychoanalysis has evolved in order to recognize the impact of extra psychic factors on emotional development. I use my personal experience as a Jewish, first-generation daughter of immigrants to focus on culture, fantasied whiteness, intergenerational transmission of the trauma of immigration, and the role of dissociation in formation of identity. I also elaborate on how an expanded psychoanalytic theory and practice that includes the socio-cultural as part of the relational field has helped me to understand how these experiences become internalized.