Routledge Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Sexuality (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)

Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Sexuality examines the links between race, gender, and sexuality through the dual perspectives of relational psychoanalysis and the theory of intersectionality. This anthology discusses the ways in which clinicians and patients inadvertently reproduce experiences of privilege and marginalization in the consulting room. Focusing particularly on the experiences of immigrants, women of color, sex workers, and LGBTQ individuals, the contributing authors explore how similarities and differences between the patient's and analyst's gender, race, and sexual orientation can be acknowledged, challenged, and negotiated. Combining intersectional theory with relational psychoanalytic thought, the authors introduce a number of thought-provoking clinical vignettes to suggest how adopting an intersectional approach can help us navigate the space between pathology and difference in psychotherapy. By bringing together these new psychoanalytically-informed perspectives on clinical work with minority and marginalized individuals, Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis makes an important contribution to psychoanalysis, psychology, and social work. Review "Placing psychoanalysis and the discourse of intersectionality in direct dialogue, this collection consolidates new and refreshing clinical approaches to the ways in which modern subjects construct their identities, consciously and unconsciously. Thinking race, gender, and sexual orientation together, the contributors update and expand the theoretical insights of an older discourse of "identity politics," situating processes of self-formation and interaction with difference firmly in the space of relational rather than individual dynamics." Michelle Stephens, Ph.D., practicing psychoanalyst and author of Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and the Black Male Performer (Duke UP, 2014). "Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis is an essential and invaluable contribution to our field at a moment when psychoanalysis has finally begun to embrace the challenge of analyzing the social and historical contexts that organize our psychic experience―particularly the effects of collective trauma and intergenerational transmission. Each of these illuminating essays provides a uniquely thoughtful and complex answer to the question of how we integrate a perspective that recognizes the interpenetrating effects on psychic life of the relationships between race, sexual orientation, gender, class, and ethnicity. This volume represents an impressive work of vision, originality and depth that invites us, the readers, to immerse ourselves in the vital reflection on how we are formed by and express the social in our psychic lives and our clinical work. Jessica Benjamin, Ph.D. author, Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (2017) Through a series of powerful essays, White and Belkin bring a collective voice to the marginalization of "the other" and locate the challenges and opportunities that are available within the therapeutic situation. These papers, through rich clinical material, compel us to step into the intersection of race, gender and sexuality with our patients, moving away from being a "perpetrating bystander" (Leavitt and Harris) in our clinical function. Regardless of one’s theoretical approach, these are valuable insights that promote seeing ourselves and our patients more complexly, mitigating the tribalism that is ascendant in modern society and impacts our therapeutic capacities. Many of the chapters are written in the current relational idiom involving a degree of self-disclosure and a flexibility of psychoanalytic framework that may be regarded with varying degrees of acceptance by schools of psychoanalytic thought and readership. This book offers fertile ground for consideration of issues of otherness in psychoanalysis, thus s