ABSTRACT
Drawing on personal history, psychoanalytic theory, and clinical experience, the author offers a consideration of some psychological meanings and uses of race in the psychotherapeutic relationship, especially in relationships where whiteness is a shared experience of analyst and patient. Hegel's description of dialectical relation and Winnicott's paradoxical dictum “There is no such thing as an infant” are brought into connection with subjective experiences of race, and to the essential movement of differentiation and mutual translation in relationships between the self and its objects. Understanding the specific meanings of race in the developmental history of the individual psyche can be instrumental in navigating experiences of safety and danger, self and other, same and different in the therapeutic relationship and in the patient's psyche.
