ABSTRACT
As four women with different cultural backgrounds and different degrees of institutional power, we came together initially intending to discuss Rothberg’s “implicated subject” in the context of our experiences participating in the project Reflective Spaces/Material Places. Soon after meeting, however, we realized that the “implicated subject” that compelled us most was psychoanalysis itself. We all shared the experience of having been in psychoanalytic spaces animated by disavowals and marked by the damaging effects of a standard in psychoanalysis adhered to by most white- and upper-middle-class-dominated psychoanalytic spaces: the standard that radically separates the psychic from the social and pretends to speak in the name of “the human.” This chapter is an elaboration of our painful experiences in these spaces, as well as our attempt to imagine a psychoanalytic space that would not make us sick.
