ABSTRACT
This chapter calls for a necessary reckoning, for myself and for our field, with U.S. history, particularly the intersecting history of white supremacy and white class dominance. The chapter looks at this history’s continuing effects on clinicians, on those clinicians treat, and on psychoanalytic institutions. I argue that psychosocial unconscious processes simultaneously press toward truth and toward a disavowal of truth, disavowals that, in this context, serve to restore psychic equilibrium to unsettled white psyches. Turning to non-psychoanalytic as well as psychoanalytic ancestors and contemporaries, I elaborate an ethic of dis-illusionment that stands in tension with and in opposition to an ethic of adaptation.
