ABSTRACT
During African-American slavery, the rape of slave women by their masters was ubiquitous. This unrecognized atrocity was intersectional at its core: greed, racism, and sexism shaped the very origins of the U.S. economy, constructing a class system that continues to be marked by both racism and sexism. This history is written into the skin of U.S. analysts, but it has not penetrated psychoanalytic theory, practice, or consciousness. The chapter traces the historical abuse of slave women’s bodies and the trans-generational effects of this exploitation. This tracing proceeds through an intimate and intersectional analysis, in which she, a Russian-Jewish patient, is treated by a light-skinned African-American analyst. In the transference, the history of slavery emerges: the analyst’s apparent whiteness echoes with rape on the plantation. Racial guilt and conflict is threaded through issues of gender and class. These threads are worked through motifs of loss, forced separation, and internalized racism.
