ABSTRACT

The blindness made by cultural stereotypes and connected to racism gives rise to a deep and painful intrasubjectivity developed around finding a way to deal with the racial cultural complexes through working with one’s internalized invisibility in the context of the culturally sanctioned damage done to one’s being. Can the cultural unconscious with its multiple group dynamics, seething differences of conflicts, polarizations, individual personalities and its cultural complexes constitute such a transitional space? How do we process and make sense of our many reactions, thoughts, emotions, and impulses triggered by being with each other’s intergenerational traumas, given the historization of their and our subjectivities? At the level of the unconscious, certain kinds of images (phantoms) and affects that appear in the aftermath of natural and social catastrophes are representations of unconscious narratives (phantom narratives) expressing the inner psychological dimensions of culture’s working interiority.