Attacks on linking

This chapter describes, via clinical vignettes, the ways psychoanalytic professional training and practice theorize subjectivity as disembedded from cultural context – and then end up unconsciously reproducing that disembedded version of subjectivity in the clinic. A case study illustrates the discomfort felt by both white patient and white therapist when cultural and political material enters the clinic, and it highlights the professional pull to reduce such material to familial psychodynamics.