ABSTRACT
The notion of “intersectionality” refers to two or more dimensions meeting and modifying one another at their point of meeting. Dimensions such as “race,” “gender,” and “sexuality” intersect and modify the individual’s lived experience in interaction with one another. The lived experience of being a woman or a man, a black woman or a white woman, a gay black man or a heterosexual white woman are all bound to vary in accord with the individual’s position on these dimensions. Such dimensions are abstractions, however. When one looks at any individual’s experience, complexity increases geometrically. Each of these dimensions is typically defined in the abstract as a one-dimensional polarity but lived as a multi-dimensional continuum. The point occupied on each dimension changes from moment to moment in a complex interaction with social context. Racial, gender, and sexual categories are stereotypes that have a poor fit with the way any given individual lives and experiences him or herself (from moment to moment) as a raced, gendered, and sexually oriented individual. The navigation of such complex and multi-layered psychic and interpersonal situations is the clinical psychoanalyst’s stock in trade; this chapter, therefore, draws on clinical vignettes to illustrate what can be learned about intersectionality from psychoanalytic work, as well as how an understanding of intersectionality can enrich clinical psychoanalytic therapy.
