ABSTRACT
In every psychoanalysis, there is a prevailing motif and a transference dynamism in which that motif comes alive. In my first analysis, that theme was aborted grief. For me, this grief had collective meanings, which would be illuminated by a racialized transference. But like all analyses, this process would begin in my personal past. When I was seven I lost my Russian Jewish grandmother, who cared for me while my parents labored, seven days a week. Grandma died and I was lost: lost to my parents’ attention, small at her funeral, invisible to the adult mourners, all of them larger, more vocal, more clamoring than myself. I was without tears, without comfort, without her enveloping body. She was five foot one, and sometimes she weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. She had pendulous arms and a vast bosom. To me, her body was bountiful. It had held me and nourished me, and now it was gone. My parents were first-generation Americans. Grandma had come through Ellis Island with her parents, in flight from conscriptions and pogroms. Then there was World War I, the Great Depression, unemployment and starvation, and then World War II. My father witnessed atrocities in battle, and after the liberation he was stationed at Dachau. Life was full of catastrophic reversals and moral imperatives. What we had was humor, our wits, and our labor. Children’s lives were rough-and-tumble; they worked, if they could get work, and when they weren’t working they ran in the streets. After Grandma was gone, I knew I would raise myself, on city streets. Childhood had already passed on. Of course, there was still laughter. There were riotous family stories, but none were told about Grandma. Where Grandma had been, there were vague memories of
Russia, and the disappearance of others. There were absolute good-byes, and impossible distances. There were always holes in our mourning, and, now, after my grandmother’s death, there was another hole in our stories. If we were silent about her absence, that absence would be felt in Brooklyn. In life, Grandma was a presence. There was nothing inert about her heft. No: her bulk seemed to make her a formidable force. In Brooklyn, she knew who ran things; they owed her favors; and she could make things happen. By day, she bustled about and kibitzed and cooked and cleaned. In the evenings, she took off her apron and stepped out. She had always lived from hand to mouth. But on Saturday nights, her flesh poured out of her strapless gowns. She put on lipstick and powder, long white gloves, costume jewelry. Glorious in her plentitude, the Queen of Canarsie, she sallied forth to some political event. She schmoozed, and deals were struck. For family and neighbors, there was rent reduction and free doctoring; immigration officials melted away. Grandma had a kind of nurturing insistence, and she wouldn’t back down. She saw need, and she took care of it. With me, she was tender, but she was also fierce for me. But what inspired her to take care of Brooklyn? Even in the absence of stories, I sensed that there were other bodies nesting inside her body. I often played with those Russian puzzle dolls, painted, rotund wooden figures that contained ever-smaller replicas of themselves. Grandma was Russian, and she had the same shape. I thought those dolls must be alive inside of her. This would explain her devotion and her bulk. But exactly who were these bodies sequestered inside Grandma? This mystery found commentary in my grandmother’s hands. Broad and calloused, they were full of competence, grace, and intention. They never stopped moving. And yet, each hand had several mutilated fingers; there were just rough stumps ending at the knuckles. Gradually, I absorbed the discrepancy between her hands and my own. One day, I asked, “Grandma, what happened to your fingers?” “I was working in a factory. They were severed in an accident. We were poor. We didn’t have enough to eat. I was lucky to be working. I had to feed your father.” She goes on kneading dough and I am riveted by those fingers. I slip into the folds of time, assembly lines, harrowing sounds and sharp, implacable machines. The Great Depression, and my grandmother, bleeding. No money for a hospital, or a doctor. No one else to feed the family. I see her being saved by other, hungry, working hands. Those
times layer into present time: there are mountains of food emerging from her deft movements. Now she is feeding Brooklyn, defying poverty’s implacable machine. She is corpulent; she eats in memory of hunger, and for those who had nothing to eat. Years after my analysis, I find myself visualizing her hands. They were a miracle of post-traumatic resilience and provision; they were proud, and they moved without shame or fear. But all of this is reawakened memory, a luxurious, unfolding vision, loosened by my psychoanalysis. When I came to see my analyst, I was depressed. I knew Grandma mattered, and I knew that she had died. What followed was a remarkable analytic excavation, between an African-American analyst and a Russian-Jewish patient. Between us, there were complex transgenerational legacies, interleaved with racial/ethnic identities and inscribed on our woman bodies. In an analysis between a white patient and an African-American therapist, issues about racism will surface. But in this treatment, race trouble became a direct conduit to the plantation. It was as if racism moved swiftly backwards in time: through the assassination of MLK, Jr; Medgar Evers; Emmett Till, the bridge at Selma, lynchings, Jim Crow, Reconstruction, the Civil War, until we arrived at the cotton fields and the slave block. I have always been vulnerable to dual vision: life, here, now; and the long tangled history of violence. And this is what I knew at the beginning of my analysis. In my first consultation, I met an analyst who appeared to be white. After the first few sessions, I had random encounters with two white people who knew her. Each of them told me that my analyst identified herself as African-American. One of them had known my analyst in college and described her as an African-American student who was a political activist in the sixties. And I knew this: her name didn’t sound like Brooklyn. It sounded like the deep South. So what, then, did I know? I knew we lived in racial categories and that I had shame and guilt for perpetuating those categories. I wanted to be colorblind (see K. Leary, 2002). But I also knew, as Cornel West (2001) would put it, that “race matters” – that an African-American identity references an objective history of oppression (K. Leary, 2002). And I knew that there was a gap, a tension, between her apparent whiteness, and her identification as black. I knew too that she could “pass” as white, but that she had refused to pass. This is what I understood: that she had important familial and community attachments. She had a political
position and solidarity with those who could not pass. What to do with this in my analysis? I knew that she thought I thought she was white. I thought she thought that I was “passing” her. As Kim Leary (1997) puts it, “Passing always occurs in the context of a relationship: it requires, on the one side, a subject who does not tell, and on the other, an audience who fails to ask” (p. 85). But what my analyst didn’t know is that I knew without asking. Discovering her racial identification from external sources, it was as if I had plundered Pandora’s box. I had forbidden, extra-analytic knowledge. I had the puzzle of white skin, black identity. I had questions that had no place in classical psychoanalysis. It was the 1970s. My analyst and I were ten years apart; we were both products of a radical era: anti-war protests, feminism, the Civil Rights movement. But we were also embedded in a white psychoanalysis, which did not inquire into trauma or the intersection of psyche and culture. She was a politically active African American who was also successful in the white world of psychoanalysis. Faimberg, Laub, and Bergmann and others had begun to recognize transgenerational transmission, but this new lens was trained on the Holocaust and excluded slavery (see Bass, 2003; Leary, 2005; Gump, 2010; Fletchman-Smith, 2011). Eventually, we would trust each other enough to talk race trouble. But, in the transgenerational area of what Akbar (1996) calls “plantation syndrome” or J. Leary (2005) calls post-traumatic slave syndrome,2 there were no words yet for the phantasms that would appear in my transference. From the first, my analysis was haunted by the ghosts who were, as Reis (2007) puts it, carrying “their mute messages and their enigmatic demands, seeking witness to hidden catastrophe” (p. 622). As Davoine (2012) might suggest, history emerged through unexpected events, through symptoms and the interpenetration of our psyches. My transference would be personal, plastic, healing and imaginary. But it would also be defined by a real, and terrible, history. My racial conundrum referred to what Laub and Podell (1995) call “trauma’s empty circle”: a residuum of mass atrocity that exceeds speech and narration, in which “we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (Caruth, 1995, p. 24). I knew, or sensed, that my therapist’s “white” skin was not due to generations of mutual, and loving, intercourse. In the United States, interracial love was as rare as it was forbidden and dangerous. For much of our history, it was illegal “miscegenation.” But the rape of black women by white men was ubiquitous. White skin, African-American identity: this
insinuated the predicament of slave women, whose descendants could emerge with light skin. Lying on the couch, I glimpsed these slave women in the shadows. They cried out at the edge of my consciousness, and they are crying out still. Of all the things I shared with my analyst, of this I never spoke.
