Unshed Tears That Fall Back and Beat on the Heart: A Psychoanalytic Perspective of Race in the Transference/Countertransference Matrix

Following Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, assaults on Black bodies and minds have historically and continuously being carried out through White supremacist ideological socio-politics, involving the institution of racism, a social construct, creating a toxic environment that maintains oppression, exploitation, and dominance of Black people. Black people have been psychologically subjugated by socially sanctioned terrorism commonly seen throughout the United States in the form of public lynchings of all kinds, and most currently by police that cultivate a legacy of social perversion rooted in systemic racism with the significant traumatizing effects on the Black consciousness. How do we, as psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed therapists, make space to openly explore with our patients those split-off critical historical, childhood, and adult aspects of themselves resulting from racialized trauma? This article focuses on the clinical work of a Black gay queer male psychoanalyst with Black professional male patients during a time of shared extreme acts of police violence, influenced by White supremacy. I attempt to illuminate and advocate for attention to race as an organizing structure of subjectivity and to consider its relevance and enduring nature throughout a lifespan. Drawing on interpersonal and relational psychoanalytic theory, the analyst explores patients’ intrapsychic and interpsychic complexities associated with racial trauma by analyzing the racialized transference/countertransference matrix and the influence of analyst subjectivity.