ABSTRACT
Can psychoanalysis remain a viable undertaking for theorists, analysts, or patients if it exists only in psyche's drawing rooms, absent of accounting for external influences that shape identity – our sense of being human? Over the last three decades, our field of study and practice has certainly undergone significant theoretical repositioning vis a vis the impact of culture on our own lives, and on the lives of our patients. As the essays in this volume illuminate, psychoanalysis has far yet to go. Psychoanalytic patients have always been intersectionally constructed. Today's patients, however, more questioning, and less subject to authority than might have been the case in the past, demand to be met psychoanalytically at those points of experience where race, gender identity, sexuality, immigrant status, and imposed sociocultural traumas intersect. This brief essay discusses three stellar papers that address this new positioning of the patient-therapist relationship in context of these growing demands for analytic relevance.
