Transgenerational Transmission of Privilege and Trauma: Locating Jewish Experience in Racial Reckoning within Psychoanalysis

Abstract

In the context of psychoanalytic culture, the transgenerational transmission of trauma that marks Jewish experience is accompanied by a transgenerational transmission of privilege that inheres from the history and process of psychoanalysis itself. While all members of dialogues addressing racial reckoning are confronted simultaneously with multiple self-other configurations that may be consciously in conflict with each other and/or unconscious and dissociated, my sense that this seemingly discordant coupling of privilege and trauma with regard to Jewish experience generally remains unspoken, is sometimes disavowed, and often results in confusing interactions that stem from split off affect states. Analogous to the analytic situation, the aim of this article is to engage these dissociated, disavowed and/or conflicted parts, such that they become accessible not just to Jewish participants, but to all participants, thereby deepening mutual understanding and expanding self-awareness.

Keywords:

• privilege
• transgenerational trauma
• Jewish
• racial reckoning
• multiplicity
• dissociation

A psychoanalytic institute hosts a program that focuses on manifestations of cultural and racial bias. A Jewish participant states that, because she is Jewish, she has trepidation about raising her consultation fee. She references “stereotypes” about “Jews and money,” but she does not articulate what exactly these are. She is, I believe, referencing the historical denigration of Jewish people as “cheap,” “money-hungry,” or “greedy.” A Latino participant, in an attempt to be supportive, enacts the reason for her trepidation –he agrees that raising her consultation fee might be perceived by the patient as greedy, and he offers that this is because Jewish people are “wealthy.”

In a discussion focused on unconscious bias, a Jewish participant shares his experience of anti-Semitism. He is told by an Asian man that because he (the Jewish participant) is White, he can hide his marginalized status, whereas People of Color cannot; therefore, he can evade being perceived as “Other.” Several participants (Jewish and not) are uncomfortable with the Jewish man’s insertion of his experience of unconscious bias, as it was implicit in their understanding of the meeting that it was intended to address “racial” bias. They feel that he is taking up space that is not intended for him. The Jewish man is confused, a bit defensive. As he has been a victim of unconscious bias, he believes he is speaking from a place of solidarity with People of Color. He is not experienced as such. He does not understand why, even as he agrees with the assertion that he can hide his marginalization.

In a case conference, the presenter is asked about the racial, cultural identification of the patient. The presenter answers, “She’s Jewish.” The discussant replies, “So, she’s White.”

As I lived my way through each of these experiences, I found myself spinning. Sometimes awash in shame and confusion, other times bristling with anger, feeling too visible and unseen at the same time. I had considered my Jewish identity before, but I hadn’t looked into it in the way that these dialogues demanded, particularly with regard to the way that others engaged with Jewish identity. Over the last twenty years, as I waded into the waters of psychoanalytic thinking, I found that things often made sense to me. I felt lucky to have fallen into a discipline with a sensibility that came naturally to me. I had no conscious idea that my ease was related, at least in part, to being Jewish; and that it wasn’t luck, but more of a pull to the familiar, that landed me here. It wasn’t until Covid hit and George Floyd was murdered that I was forced to look, and try to see, where I was located in all of this—societally, culturally, and psychoanalytically. The process of exploring Jewishness, both my own and that of psychoanalysis, is an attempt to ground myself as I navigate these uncharted waters, and to make sense of my reactions (and those of my colleagues) to scenarios such as the ones I describe above. I realize that centering Jewish experience within psychoanalysis is perhaps a risky maneuver, as it—once again—places the Jewish perspective at the center of the conversation. I have chosen to take this risk because I believe that examining these dynamics can address, maybe even alleviate, some of the turmoil and confusion in both Jewish participants and the members of the community who are interacting with them. Another risk is to try to articulate what I see as the complexity of the matter and not reduce it to any absolutisms or orthodoxy that might be easier to comprehend. I attempt to maintain this complexity, even if it strains the mind and obfuscates clarity at times, because I think it most accurately reflects what occurs and, therefore, has the best chance of contributing to progress toward authentic racial reckoning.

We all arrive at these discussions with a unique subjective experience of our intrapsychic and interpersonal histories that are embedded in our sociocultural/historical milieu. As such, there is not one location for Jewish identity, or anyone’s identity, in these conversations that are grappling with racism, classism, and prejudice in our psychoanalytic midst. Dialogues that address diversities and biases are difficult. Making room for contradictions, convergences, and incongruent self-states and defenses requires enormous patience, courage, and nonjudgmental process, and a dedication to the hallmark of psychoanalytic discourse, which is (to my mind) a broadening of experience, and an openness to exploring all human experience, as glorious or shameful as that might be. It requires a commitment to elaboration and uncertainty. It is a complex, non-linear process. But the complexity bespeaks a richer experience of self, one that encompasses pride and shame, humility, deeper understanding, and – hopefully – openness to multiple aspects of oneself and others. My goal in this exploration is not to place anyone anywhere, but rather to argue for the messy and complicated nature of attempting to locate oneself in the context of these dialogues. In essence, to make room for all parts of each person, with all their subjective experience, as we address inequities, biases, and prejudices within ourselves and within our larger psychoanalytic theory, history, culture, and community.

This article originally had a particular goal, which was to locate Jewish experience in the context of racial reckoning within psychoanalysis within the United States.¹ It quickly became clear that that goal was elusive, as there is not one Jewish experience, nor one psychoanalysis, and racial reckoning is a complicated, fluid process—in continual motion, changing over time and place. And, to speak of a “Jewish experience” is inherently reductive, as Jewish people have all sorts of skin colors, degrees of religious or cultural affiliation, class identifications, nationalities, and other relationships to their Judaism and their surround. There is not one Jewish mind, or Jewish experience. To complicate matters even more, my personal experience as a culturally affiliated, visibly White, American, Reform Jewish woman of Ashkenazi descent provides the lens through which I address this challenging topic. I am exploring a phenomenon that I observe and experience, and in which I am implicated. As Emily Kuriloff (2014) wrote, with regard to her exploration of the impact of the legacy of the Third Reich on contemporary psychoanalysis, “the challenge of this inquiry is thus simultaneously historical, analytic, and self-analytic” (p. 17). For me, clarity arrived not in the process of identifying one particular location of Jewish experience, but rather in the ultimate acceptance of multiply configured, variable, highly contextualized, situatedness, coupled with a recognition of the complexity of the entire endeavor and the challenge of remaining open to potentials in myself and others.

The vignettes I described above are not unique, and I imagine that iterations of similar dynamics are playing out in psychoanalytic institutes and meetings across the United States. [They are also certainly influenced by gender as well as racial, ethnic, and cultural identifications and various other diversities (sexual, ability, class, among others).] At the present moment, as we continue to grapple with Covid-19 and our attempts at racial reckoning, we continue our interrogation of whiteness and White privilege within American society at large and, for our purposes, psychoanalysis in particular. Fundamental to this process is the acknowledgment of the racist, homophobic, and sexist history of psychoanalytic theory that has permeated our institutes since their inception, since psychoanalysis immigrated to the United States – originally transported, significantly but not exclusively, by European Jewish emigres in the context of an anti-Semitic Europe and eventually fleeing Nazi Germany and the Holocaust – what Kuriloff (2014) calls a “numerically very small but historically very important remnant that constituted the émigré quotient within institutional psychoanalysis” (p. 22). And, whereas some of the troubling threads in psychoanalytic discourse have been confronted (see Altman, 2006; Belkin & White, 2020; Goldner, 1991; Holmes, 2006; Mitchell, 1996; Sandmeyer, 2019; Sandmeyer, 2020; Stoute, 2017; Yonke & Barnett, 2001; among others), racism, sexism and homophobia remain, encoded systemically in our institutes, our associations, our journals, and our collegial relationships.

Even with wide variation in Jewish experience in psychoanalysis in the United States, I do believe that there are some commonalities to these experiences, and that the articulation of them can broaden the dialogue and thereby contribute to the racial reckoning that might be sought in our psychoanalytic communities. In my Jewish mind, a Jewish mind cannot be extricated from a transgenerational transmission of trauma, or perhaps more aptly described as ancestral narrative of existential threat (more on that later), that ineluctably impacts the way a Jewish person engages the world, even when that Jewish person holds a place of privilege in their present sociocultural milieu. Here are two examples from my personal experience. The first is the common refrain at Jewish holidays, particularly Passover, in which Jews might say, jokingly (but not), “they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat!” It speaks to the existential threat, and survival, that has marked Jewish history nearly since its inception. The other, more personal, involves a trip I took when I was studying abroad, in college, on an overnight train from Amsterdam to Heidelberg. I was with three friends, one who is also Jewish. In the middle of the night, when we crossed the border into Germany, the border guards opened the door to our sleeper-car and demanded, in German, to see our passports. I jumped from my cot, my heart beating out of my chest, in terror. A part of me was sure that we were headed to Auschwitz. I looked to my Jewish friend and saw the same terror in her eyes. To be clear, we were not in any physical danger. And yet, the existential threat was hot in our bodies and minds.

In the context of psychoanalytic culture, I believe that this transgenerational transmission of trauma is accompanied by a transgenerational transmission of privilege that inheres from the history and process of psychoanalysis itself. While all members of dialogues addressing racial reckoning are confronted simultaneously with multiple self-other configurations that may be consciously in conflict with each other and/or unconscious and dissociated, my sense is that this seemingly discordant coupling of privilege and trauma with regard to Jewish experience generally remains unspoken, is sometimes disavowed, and often results in confusing interactions that stem from split off affect states. For example, in a me-you configuration characterized by victimhood and anti-Semitism, a Jewish participant may desire recognition for their pain and suffering and disavow their privilege and perpetration of racism. The aspects of self that are privileged, racist, and biased, cannot coexist with aspects of self that have been persecuted and victimized. Conversely, when marginalized, a Jewish person may assert their privilege and belonging, distancing themselves from an identification with otherness. Simultaneously, in each of these configurations, a defensive “not-me” (Sullivan, 1953) dissociative process can occur, to keep those victim and persecutor aspects of self, unformulated and out of awareness, particularly in the face of others who may be articulating these intolerable aspects of self (Stern, 2010). Persecutor and persecuted, doer and done to Benjamin, (2004), are kept apart and away, to secure a Jewish person’s sense of self-continuity, thus resulting in failed intersubjective recognition – the exact ingredient that facilitates dialogue.

Analogous to the analytic situation, the aim of this article is to engage these dissociated, disavowed and/or conflicted parts, such that they become accessible not just to Jewish participants, but to all participants, thereby deepening mutual understanding and expanding self-awareness. As many of us have experienced, and as the above vignettes highlight, this is no easy task. To locate Jewish experience within the psychoanalytic community in the United States is to acknowledge layers of embeddedness within the origins and history of psychoanalysis, as well as Jewish experience in the United States. In each arena, we find that the Jewish experience is multiple, often encompassing – to widely varying degrees—privilege, bias, discrimination, comfort, and victimhood. This multiplicity is borne of a complicated history that spans millennia and locates Jewish people in such disparate positions as enslaved people in Ancient Egypt, Christians’ scapegoat as “Christ killers,” victims of genocide in Nazi Germany, victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre, hostages in a synagogue in Texas, citizens of the state of Israel, presidential candidates in the United States, and visionary leaders in the arts and sciences. Accordingly, a Jewish psyche typically hosts multiple, seemingly irreconcilable, self-other configurations in sociohistorical context that all come into view when discussions center around privilege, transgenerational trauma, and marginalization.

We all participate in dialogues on unconscious bias and prejudice with our complicated histories that we are continually creating and re-creating, and that live within us and are embedded in the continual, ongoing impact of historical and sociopolitical forces (Sandmeyer, 2019; Sucharov, 2019). This idea is critical, but not new. James Baldwin said, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history” (Grettey, Peck & Peck, 2016), and William Faulkner (1951) aligned, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (p. 73). It seems to me that Jewish culture and religion have survived as long as they have, due, in some part, to the call to Jewish people to live their history, in equal measure the trauma and the resilience. In the telling of the story of Passover, which is a story of traumatic, cultural existential threat, the Haggadah (the telling of the story) instructs, “You, too, were enslaved in Egypt and came forth out of Egypt.” The Jewish trauma and resilience narrative is present and demands that history be lived in the present. I think it might be this degree of conscious or unconscious trauma that, at times, fuels a Jewish person’s disavowal when privileged aspects of their life experience are identified by people of color and other participants. I believe that an exploration of Jewish experience, addressing the many layers of psychoanalytic and sociopolitical, historical contexts, will facilitate an understanding of the complexities that arise and cause impasses in these important dialogues. My hoped-for outcome of articulating the myriad dimensions of Jewish experience – in a deeply contextualized way -is an increased tolerance for multiplicity and an enhanced sense of self-continuity, such that engagement in dialogue becomes less threatening and allows for broadened self-awareness and open receptivity to the impact of oneself on others, for all involved.

Jewish Privilege in Psychoanalysis

The location of Jewish experience within psychoanalysis cannot be extricated from a consideration of the origin story of psychoanalysis. In my view, Jewish psychoanalysts hold the place of utmost privilege in psychoanalytic history and culture and, in many institutes, this living history continues to place Jewish members in positions of power. Undoubtedly, this highest caste position impacts the way Jewish participants engage in psychoanalytic institutes and meetings, as it affords them a level of security that is denied other participants, particularly members of other historically marginalized groups, – and denied to Jewish people in nearly all other settings. Even in institutes where Jewish members do not hold positions of power or are minimally represented, I would posit that we still enjoy a level of security that they rarely find in other settings. As is well known, Freud lived during a rampantly anti-Semitic time in modern history, in the most anti-Semitic city in Europe. Freud’s Jewish identity and his reactions to his anti-Semitic milieu shaped his theorizing and the history of psychoanalysis (Aron & Starr, 2015; Gilman, 1993). Thus, when I argue that Jewish members of the analytic community occupy a place of privilege within psychoanalysis, I am speaking of their historically privileged status within a discipline that, at the time of its inception, occupied a place of marginalization, suspicion, and otherness. In this origin story, we see how the layers of privilege and marginalization are entwined and perpetuated. In my experience, even in the place of utmost privilege, Jewish members of the psychoanalytic community remain in a precarious position when anti-Semitism in the larger cultural milieu infuses, and is enacted in, psychoanalytic spaces; even with privilege, safety is never guaranteed.

In my view, Jewish privilege within psychoanalysis stems from two interrelated factors. The first, rather manifest factor, is that Freud and his circle, the Founding Fathers of psychoanalysis, were almost exclusively Jewish. This foundational anchor, in theory, clinical experience, and supervision/consultation, germinated the legacy of ongoing Jewish influence that permeates psychoanalytic practice to this day, just as the Founding Fathers of the United States sealed their legacy in their framing documents and practices, and all that has entailed for the country henceforth. The second factor is that the psychoanalytic method they created was, while novel in many respects, already an integral way of thinking within Jewish tradition. Interpretation and narrative as a method for making meaning, continually co-creating and revisiting those meanings, and appreciating influence of the past on the present, are hallmarks of Jewish intellectual tradition (Aron & Henik, 2015).

Edgar Levenson (2006) identified the rabbinic interpretive approach in Freud’s praxis, even as Levenson himself only came to that conclusion after many, many, years of practicing psychoanalysis. He reveals, “I’d been practicing Midrash² without knowing it. Like Freud… I either never knew or unconsciously denied any familiarity with this tradition” (p. 378). Levenson continues, “It is taken as a given that by questioning, the therapist is inevitably participating—no matter how unstructured the inquiry might be. Transference and counter-transference emerge seamlessly from the inquiry. Mirabile dictu, the detailed inquiry becomes midrash” (p. 380). Aron and Henik (2015), and Levenson, make the point that contemporary psychoanalytic practice aligns with the rabbinic interpretive tradition that eschews definitive truths in favor of iterative questioning. My impression is that, regardless of religiosity, this way of thinking, filled with questioning, interpretation, memory and narrative, is familiar to people who identify as Jewish. Without any formal religious education, many Jewish people are at ease, even feel ‘at home,’ within an intellectual tradition with these particular methods.

The place of utmost privilege for Jewish members of the psychoanalytic community is upheld not just in the intellectual tradition and method of psychoanalysis, but also socially and institutionally. It is my perception and personal experience that Jewish members of the psychoanalytic community often move confidently through institutes and meetings, with the expectation that they will be welcomed and valued—implicitly, I believe, because of their Jewish affiliation. I wonder, at times, if Jewish people embrace their inclusion and status even more in the psychoanalytic arena because it is juxtaposed to their more familiar position of marginalization.

These dynamics do not go unnoticed by other members of the psychoanalytic community. Chanda Griffin, Rossanna Echegoyén, and Julie Hyman (2020) speak to this explicitly when they describe an incident from their training, in which Rossanna,³ a Latina identified woman, remarks to Julie, a culturally Jewish identified classmate, that she believes Julie benefits from a “secret society” of Jewish people who help each other with referrals, office space, finding their own analyst, and getting tips on financial advice. The third member of their group Chanda, who identifies as Black, dismisses Rossanna’s comment and is joined by Julie in doing so. In exploring her Jewishness and its impact on her training experience and that of her classmates, Julie candidly describes taking up space in class discussions, and racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic identifications with the senior members of her institute. With regard to analytic training, she offers, “I entered with a presumption of inclusion,” which she attributes to her socioeconomic status, Whiteness, and Jewishness. Julie acknowledges attributing Rossanna and Chanda’s concerns about their experiences, marked at times by exclusion and devaluation, to something they needed to change, not to the real social dynamics within the institute. Julie confirms the “element of truth lurking” behind Rossanna’s fantasy, and says that her defensive denial was a way to outwardly deny inclusion while holding onto feelings of pleasure and specialness that come with membership in a privileged group. I believe that Griffin, Echegoyén, and Hyman offer a powerful illustration of the impact of Jewish privilege within psychoanalytic spaces. And, while Julie attributes her feelings to Whiteness and socioeconomic status in addition to Jewishness, Rossanna identified the secret society as one of Jewish people – not explicitly White people or affluent people. Griffin, Echegoyén, and Hyman offer other examples of racialized dynamics that played out between them in many contexts throughout their training. They offer a multiple self-state model to understand the omitted and dissociated racial and ethnic identifications and self-states that were unformulated (Stern, 1983), uncontained, and resulted in racialized enactments. Only by recognizing and acknowledging the disavowed aspects of each of their experiences were the three classmates able to process the pain they experienced, both individually and as a group.

With regard to discussions of unconscious bias, racism, and privilege in psychoanalytic circles, my perception is that Jewish participants often are either unaware of, or disavow, this highly contextualized place of utmost privilege. They/we/I often speak of encounters with anti-Semitic prejudice and bias, without acknowledgment that they/we/I are doing so from a position of power, or comfort, within our community. My sense is that, without such acknowledgment, the attempt to align with marginalized others, particularly BIPOC⁴ colleagues, reads as insincere, falls flat, or diminishing of others’ experiences of racism. The conscious intention to align is obfuscated by the lack of awareness of this particular privilege, sometimes resulting in an ambient, unformulated discomfort in many participants, and impasse and defensiveness in others.

Privilege within Marginalization: Impact of Psychoanalytic Origins in an Anti-Semitic Milieu

The Jewish place of privilege that I am articulating can only be understood within the context of the marginalization and persecution of Jewish people in the culture in which psychoanalysis was founded. Psychoanalysis was born in a context of Otherness, distinctly defined by Freud’s Jewishness (Aron & Starr, 2015). Freud, racially othered and marginalized by society, created a discipline in which he attempted to eradicate all traces of Jewishness, yet simultaneously infused it with Jewish method thereby creating a place of privilege for the Jewish mind and culture.

At the turn of the century in Vienna, Jews were designated as an inferior race, marked – in contradistinction to the Aryan race – as sexually diseased, corrupt, and mentally limited (Gilman, 1993). Aryans needed Jews to serve as the lowest members of the caste hierarchy, thereby securing Aryans’ higher status in society (Wilkerson, 2020). Jewish people were marginalized in European society on the basis of their perceived innate biological and psychological differences. For Eastern European Jewish men, of which Freud was originally one (he moved to Vienna at the age of 4), this stereotype was even more pronounced and included linguistic incompetence, pathology, and visible disease – disease, it was said, that was written on Jews’ skin. As many authors have noted, Jewish people were considered the “Blacks” (Altman, 2006; Aron & Starr, 2015; Gilman, 1993) or “Negros” (Gilman, 1993; White, 2020) of fin de siècle Vienna. Within medical science at the time, in which Freud was trained, Jews’ skin color was considered an inherent quality and marker of disease and inferiority. Prominent members of the medical faculty at the University of Vienna considered Jews “a race apart,” and Freud came to see himself as “a member of a race different than that of the dominant scientific culture” (Gilman, 1993, p. 18).

The implications of Freud’s relationship with his Jewishness, and his anti-Semitic milieu, are too numerous to name and are beyond the scope of this paper. However, these threads are alive and present today, most notably in Freud’s attempt at universalizing psychoanalysis by decontextualizing the psyche. It is well documented that Freud was concerned that psychoanalysis would be discounted as a “Jewish science,” and hypothesized that this concern resulted in Freud’s failure to locate psychoanalysis culturally (Altman, 2006; Gaztambide, 2015; Kuriloff, 2014). Gilman (1993) states, “As virtually all of Freud’s early disciples were Jews, the lure of psychoanalysis for them may well have been its claims for a universalization of human experience and an active exclusion of the importance of race from its theoretical framework” (p. 6). The threads of this enticement have remained within psychoanalysis, perhaps denied, perhaps dissociated, wherein the impact of our political, social, economic and cultural surround has largely been omitted. Cleonie White (2020) addresses this lacuna when she questions,

What was lost in Freud’s inability to court his constructed status as ‘Negroid Other?’ ‘Black?’ We can take for granted that the unconscious shame and dread of being so categorized functioned as a powerful, shaping force in the theory he wrought. What paths might psychoanalytic thought have traveled, had Freud and his followers permitted themselves to encounter, and have conscious experience, with their own, dark Otherness—the ‘otherness of the[ir] unconscious?’⁵ (pp. 230–231)

Racially based anti-Semitism defined Freud’s surround and influenced his thinking, resulting in an attempted erasure of his Jewishness from the theory. This legacy, and how it arises in current racial discourse, is paramount. Gaztambide (2015) explicitly wonders how Freud’s experience of Jewish oppression and marginality affected the development of psychoanalysis, and how it impacts his interface with both theory and community. He offers, “to discover that immigration, racism, poverty, and discrimination all formed part of the genetic-traumatic foundations of psychoanalysis is to encounter an otherness that resonates with that of my community” (pp. 709–710). He also poignantly articulates his conflict within psychoanalysis, his own sort of double vision, wherein he resonates with the origins but finds himself repeatedly alone and unwelcome. I believe that Gaztambide’s depiction of resonance and Otherness, and his reference to a “genetic-traumatic” foundation, offers some answer to his question: His experience reflects the layered history of privilege within marginalization, central to the origin story of psychoanalysis, which allows for an inclusivity, but also perhaps turns its back on the

Otherness to which it was originally subjected. Conceivably, it is the legacy of the shame and dread stemming from Otherness, that Cleonie White (2020) identified that is, unconsciously, shaping psychoanalysis and its failures in this regard, and to which Gaztambide is responding.

Jewish Experience in Psychoanalysis, in the United States

For a Jewish person in the United States, situatedness is multiply-determined, ever-shifting, and embedded in a racist, classist, anti-Semitic, caste-based (Wilkerson, 2020) society. When we consider the particular history of psychoanalysis, as discussed above, locating oneself becomes even further complicated.

In the late 1930s, the vibrant European psychoanalytic world collided with the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, forcing the Jewish founders of psychoanalysis to flee to Britain, South America, and the United States. The émigré analysts who arrived in the United States found themselves in a country that, along racial lines, bore a striking resemblance to their homelands (Wilkerson, 2020; White, 2020). Analysts have written and speculated about how these emigrees dealt with the impact of their traumatic situation, and their theories range from denial, dissociation, and disavowal (Philipson, 2017), to creativity and generativity (Lachmann, 2017). Thomas Kohut (2023), son of Heinz Kohut, speculates that the shame and humiliation stemming from anti-Semitism, flight from Vienna, and the Holocaust were “just too painful” for his father to speak of. Kuriloff (2014), making the analogy to K.P. White’s (2002) reflections on racism, identifies a possible self-hatred that could result in either denying Jewish identification or the creation of a new identity, and an erasure of the topic altogether. When asked how he thought the trauma of persecution and war affected psychoanalysis, Otto Kernberg offered, “Because they were persecuted they also became identified with the aggressor I think…they were rigid and exclusive” (as quoted in Kuriloff, p. 65). In a related line of thinking, the authoritarian stance taken by many of these analysts, and the institutes with which they were involved, may have been a mimicry of the authoritarian states from which they fled—a consequence of trauma that Ferenczi (1933) identified early on as “the anxiety-ridden identification and introjection of the menacing person or aggressor” (p. 228) that underscores how traumatic survival can necessitate an erasure of traumatic vulnerability. These émigré analysts immersed themselves in the power and privilege of the ego psychology establishment, which focused on decontextualized intrapsychic conflict, autonomy, individualism, and “which, sadly, vilified other theoretical positions and deemed unanalyzable members of the less educated underclass whom they saw as needy, impulsive, and less gifted verbally. Here was projection and the transmission of Othering in action” (C. White, p. 230). This wave of immigrant analysts faced challenges of assimilating into American institutes, where they were perceived as threats and interlopers (Prince, 2009). There are numerous implications of this history, notably, a stifling of theory, a silencing around issues of real trauma, the pathologizing of marginalized people, and the exclusion from psychoanalysis of people of color (Stoute, 2017).

This story that took place within psychoanalysis is situated in the broader United States, Post World War II cultural shift with regard to racial identification of Jewish Americans. In the 1920s and 1930s, a time of heightened anti-Semitism in the U.S., and around the time that many émigré psychoanalysts arrived from Europe, Jews were not assigned to the White side of the American racial Black/White binary. It was not until the Post War era that Jewish Americans were culturally assigned a White designation, although it was a specifically Jewish Whiteness—Brodkin (1998) calls this “off-White”—as differentiated from a pure Protestant Whiteness. Varying ethnocultural and racial assignments, and their vicissitudes through time, impact the way Jewish people construct their identities. This has also changed over generations, as older generations are more likely to identify as Jewish and not White, while younger Jewish people are more likely to identify as White and have more diverse social communities than their grandparents. These changes in situatedness give Jewish Americans a kind of “double vision that comes from racial middleness: of an experience of marginality vis-à-vis Whiteness, and an experience of Whiteness and belonging vis-à-vis blackness” (Brodkin, 1998, p. 1–2).

This double vision is evident today. Millennia old consciousness of marginalization, coupled with present day anti-Semitism from both the political left and right, converge to complicate American Jews’ capacity to reflect on their relative privilege (Ladon, 2018). Anti-Semitic hate crimes have been on the rise since President Trump was elected, most notably the lethal shootings at synagogues in Pittsburgh and San Diego. Trump himself refused to condemn neo-Nazis, and repeatedly used anti-Semitic tropes in his campaign. Around this time, in my practice, Jewish patients whose parents and grandparents are Holocaust survivors wondered if they should leave the United States before “it’s too late.” They know that they are only alive today because their forebearers took the initiative to escape from Europe, and they have lived in the shadow of having lost family members to the Shoah.⁶ Three-quarters of Jewish Americans believe that there is more anti-Semitism in the United States than there was five years ago (American-Defamation League, 2023a; see also Graham & Stack, 2021). According to the Anti-Defamation League (2023b; see also Graham, 2023), tracking since 1979, the year 2022 was the highest on record for anti-Semitic incidents, up 36% from the year before, and the third time in the past five years that the year-end total was the highest number ever recorded.⁷ My son has come home countless times in the last handful of years with a report that swastikas are again spray painted on the bathroom walls of his public school, along with recent graffiti in our neighborhood that read “Jews not welcome here” and “No mercy for Jews” accompanied by images of hangmen. Many American Jews are scared, and with good reason.

At the same time, as a group, Jewish people are members of a privileged caste in the United States. Four in ten Jewish Americans live in households that earn over $100,000, almost one third of Jewish adults hold postgraduate degrees, and approximately 92 percent identify as non-Hispanic White (Pew Research Center). In the context of racial reckoning and Jewish identity, this particularity with regard to financial and educational success is most confounding: To identify as White, highly educated, and financially secure and, simultaneously, to resonate with persecution, fear, and otherness, is confusing, even unsettling. As a Jewish patient articulated to me recently, “I am not oppressed, but I’m are scared of being killed.” These parts feel disparate, complicated, for me personally, and, at times, it seems to me that they are discordant for other participants in these discussions as well. All of these components constitute Jewish ethnoracial assignment and identity. Consciously or not, these elements of the larger United States sociopolitical, class, and cultural dynamics infuse discussion within institutes and meetings in psychoanalysis.

Continuity, Multiple Self-States, Dissociation

Like a Russian Doll, the layers of privilege and marginalization of Jewish experience in psychoanalysis are embedded within each other. We see the privileged position of the Jewish analyst within psychoanalytic culture, but we can only consider that privilege in the context of the extreme anti-Semitic milieu in which psychoanalysis was born: privilege, ensconced in oppression. From this origin, we can trace the migration of psychoanalysis to the United States where, once again, the layers of privilege and prejudice are found: the trauma of the Holocaust and World War II, the demands and desires of assimilation, and the repositioning as White members of American society. This is one way to conceptualize Jewish experience in psychoanalysis, from its inception to the present day, from Europe to the United States, from its place of marginalization and its place of privilege—a conceptualization with a narrative and sense of continuity. A transgenerational transmission of both privilege and trauma.

Yet, unlike the image of the Russian Doll, there is also a discontinuous experience that lacks an innermost layer, a ‘true’ or ‘nuclear’ self, so to speak, that reveals a more ‘real’ or ‘true’ experience of being Jewish within psychoanalysis, within the United States, and at the present moment. The multiple contexts within which Jewish experience resides are alive and in motion, are continually shifting, being created and recreated, in an iterative process. And, Jewish members of the psychoanalytic community come to it with their own diverse histories with regard to familial relations, religiosity, cultural affiliations, situatedness within the larger American landscape, class differences, and degree of identification with privilege and marginalization. In this conceptualization, it seems more apt to describe the “me-you” patterns (Bromberg, 1980; Sullivan, 1953) that constitute Jewish subjectivity, particularly in dialogues aimed at racial reckoning, within psychoanalysis, as comprised of myriad relational configurations organized by encounters with various racial, cultural, sociopolitical and economic identifications, and psychoanalytic theories, over time and place. This is a story of multiplicity. As Davies (1999) describes:

It is a model of mind which replaces the more linear, topographically organized, repression-based structures of classical analysis with a dissociative-integrative continuum along which mind, indeed the individual’s experience of self at any given instance, reconfigures itself in accord with the present interpersonal moment. This model of mind involves viewing psychical processes as a kind of confederation of multiple, dynamically interacting, but otherwise autonomous sub-organizations of internalized self and object representations which move in and out of conscious prominence upon the evocative potential of the current interpersonal moment. (p. 185–186)

The problem arises when overwhelming affect states emerge in response to the present interpersonal moment. When that occurs, self and object representations get dissociated, disavowed, or denied, and capacity to maintain openness to one’s own multiplicity collapses. As a participant in programs within the psychoanalytic community that are attempting to confront and reckon with racial injustice, these various self-states come into contact—bumping and colliding, interfacing with each other and with those of other participants. This experience is not unique to Jewish people—everyone has their own version of this, complicated even more by the manifestations of intersectionalities of class, culture, sexuality, ability, gender, and more. But, it seems to me, because of the presence of both privilege and trauma, and their painful affect states, the Jewish experience in these dialogues is particularly challenging for everyone involved. My observation (and experience) is that the variety of interpersonal moments and me-you configurations can be head spinning and perhaps disorienting. A pivot in one direction locates a Jewish person as marginalized, with regard to larger American society (but, also standing in a place of privilege with regard to class, education and skin color); a history of anti-Semitism, enslavement and genocide leads a Jewish person to try to identify with People of Color, who often perceive them as too privileged to be able to relate and reject the identification. Pivot in another direction and the Jewish participant (consciously or not) embraces their psychoanalytic lineage and the comforts that entails. My hunch is that the degree of conflict between these versions of self, coupled with their attendant guilt and shame, can threaten the Jewish person’s sense of continuity, thereby engendering a defensive reaction that ranges from denial to dissociation. Am I a persecutor or victim? Privileged or marginalized? Safe or in danger? Insider or outsider? The answer, of course, is all of the above.

Dissociative phenomena in this setting does not occur solely as an intrapsychic, internalized conflictual process for the Jewish participant (or anyone), it is profoundly interpersonal. I am persecutor and victim and privileged and marginalized and insider and outsider all in the context of relatedness to the others with whom I am in conversation. As well, I would add that all participants are in dialogue with our broader sociocultural and political surround, at all times, and that me-you configuration between the individual and the surround is omnipresent.

Donnel Stern (2004) posited that dissociation is “the subjectivity we never create (p. 222) … Dissociated self-states, therefore, are potential experience, experience that could exist if one were able to allow it; but one cannot, and unconsciously will not” (p. 223). Later, he (2010) theorized that enactment is the “interpersonalization of dissociation,” (p. 16) and that “enactment is the last-ditch unconscious defensive effort to avoid being the person one must not be, accomplished by trying to force onto the other what defines the intolerable identity” (p. 14). Although Stern is writing about the analytic couple, it is no stretch to imagine how this framework captures the phenomena that undergird the fraught aspects of racial dialogue. The affect states that I believe to be most in play, and largely unformulated, are shame and terror. My thought is that these two self-states are most associated with “not-me” (Sullivan, 1953) configurations of persecutor and victim—potential intolerable identities, in Stern’s framework. Accompanying these “not-me” configurations are Jewish existential anxieties that infuse aspects of belonging, and being cast-out, that are rife with shame and terror.

To begin with the latter, existential matter, I would posit that when we talk in psychoanalysis about transgenerational transmission of trauma, the Holocaust is often cited as the trauma that subsequent generations contend with, that informs present day anti-Semitism, and with which psychoanalysis is most concerned. However, I believe a more apt descriptor of one aspect of Jewish psyche⁸ and identity that comes into play in racial dialogue is an ancestral narrative of existential threat that is part and parcel of Jewish culture and religious observance (see Passover Haggadah, referenced above). The existential threat comes into being for Jewish people in a way that is inextricable from their place of privilege in whatever culture allows them some degree of acceptance, and into which they assimilate. It is the success and privilege itself that is intricately woven into anti-Semitism—perhaps even fuels it, as Jewish members of society often become a part of a privileged caste but remain apart from it, thereby engendering fears from the dominant culture as well as from Jewish people themselves—fears that center around existential needs for belonging and separateness (see M. Slavin, 2017, for a more thorough explication). Historically, we see this phenomenon in Ancient Greece and Syria, in Spain in the 14th and 15th centuries, and in Germany and Austria in the 1930s and 1940s. In each case, Jewish members of society saw themselves as assimilated into the dominant culture, even though many maintained their Jewish identity and practice. And, in each case, the illusion of having transcended otherness collapsed—Jews learned that they were not truly considered members of the dominant culture, which ultimately excluded and either exterminated them by death, or cast them out. When I imagine myself into these moments in history, I can feel the shame, humiliation and terror of having thought I belonged and was accepted, and the realization that no, I am othered and unacceptable, to be killed or banished. This existential need to belong maps to all of our earliest developmental needs to belong, and the inevitable and ubiquitous struggles therein. At this moment of heightened anti-Semitism in the United States, my impression is that many American Jews are grappling with questions of belonging, exclusion, and existence. Deeply held existential anxieties have been ignited, as I live my history in the present with the knowledge that all that has been accomplished can always be undone.

With this swirl of ancestral existential threat in mind, let us return to enactments in racial dialogue in psychoanalytic circles, in which confrontation with intolerable identities, coupled with unformulated shame and terror, launches participants into varying degrees of dissociation and disavowal. One configuration that I find most challenging, and which I believe is essential, is the capacity for a (visibly White) Jewish person to embrace the implication of being a White participant in a White supremacist society. The task is to identify aspects of myself in White supremacy dynamics, while knowing that that belief system is one that is explicitly anti-Semitic and calls for my extermination; essentially, an identification with an internalized aggressor, and a brutal aggressor at that. Speaking for myself, I can say that this constitutes a nearly intolerable identity, riddled with shame, and terror, and one that is critical to engage: I cannot be open to understanding how that aspect of myself, aggressor/persecutor, is being enacted with others, particularly racially marginalized others, unless I can identify that aggressor within. For me, the sharp edge of shame cuts both ways, in being the aggressor as well as the hated Other. In these moments, dissociative processes arise both in internal conflict in holding disparate aspects of doer/done-to White supremacist dynamics, and also as defensive processes in relation to others; shame in the recognition of implication when confronted, face to face, by BIPOC colleagues and the impact of White supremacy on them; a shameful identification with the hated, excluded other; along with guilt stemming from enjoyment of benefits from identification and assignment with whiteness. Within the context of psychoanalytic discussions, we layer onto this dynamic the aspects of privilege and of existential need to belong which, in my view, Jewish people find in psychoanalysis to a degree they rarely find elsewhere. Threats of losing the sense of belonging that comes from privilege within psychoanalysis are profound and map to millennia old terrors of existential threat, shame and vulnerability. In such a context, the unconscious dissociative lure of “not-me” becomes a powerful elixir for unbearable affect states.

Lest this situation seem manageable, let me layer in another aspect that, in my personal experience, cannot be overstated: the coexistence of each participant’s individual relational configurations that arise in any interpersonal conversation, but particularly in charged ones that elicit conflict and vulnerability. How the participants talk to each other, whether overtly challenging, withdrawing, or whatever the dynamic may bring, will undoubtably map to transference configurations with which each participant enters the conversation, often configurations that remain unconscious but are freighted with personal meanings and are enacted throughout the dialogue. Concordantly, the meanings that the interpersonal field holds in each moment will impact freedom to construct possibilities for dialogic participation (Stern, 2004). While this notation may seem obvious, a discussion that centers solely on race dynamics without mentioning it is, in my mind, missing an essential aspect of what goes on in interpersonal racial reckoning. Just as we cannot discuss race without the context of history and the broader socio/cultural/political surround, we also cannot discuss race without acknowledging the very personal projections and relational configurations that we all carry, and that infuse how we relate to each other on a moment-to-moment basis—configurations that often become racialized in the context of these conversations.

With all of this in mind, it is no wonder that enactments on all levels and locations—personal, racial, sociopolitical, and all other intersectionalities that are coexistent—are occurring at all times. Dissociation stems from conflict around inhabiting disparate positions and defense against overwhelming affects states such as shame and terror. Complicated is one way to describe it; messy might be more apt.

If we revisit the vignettes that open this exploration, we would each have our personal reactions to the scenes. For purposes of illustration, I will delineate a just a few of my own. In the first vignette, I would need to take in, without defensiveness, others’ perceptions of my status and belonging, both psychoanalytic and financial, and consider how they and I are impacted by that, knowing that the sense of belonging is laden with my ancestral narrative of existential threat and exclusion. In the second, I would need to feel the rejection of an attempt at solidarity, to bear the shame I feel in the truth that I can hide my marginalization, coupled with the shame that my identity should be hidden because I am an unwanted other. In the third, I have to hear my identity being reduced to whiteness, understanding that my racial assignment and identity are White, and that comes with privilege as well as erasure of my vulnerability, identity, and the impact of transgenerational trauma and current day anti-Semitism. I could go on with numerous additional understandings and formulations, but the point is that the configurations are multiple, that we recognize that we only have access to what might be conscious in the moment, and that much remains outside of our awareness, unformulated and emergent. In each case, I would have to inhabit the intolerable identity, in the face of the Other with whom I am in dialogue, who may see in me parts that I might disavow in myself.

Bromberg (1993) stated that, “health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them—the capacity to feel like one self while being many” (p. 166). This, I believe is the challenge for the Jewish participant: to acknowledge, even embrace, the multiplicity of identifications and ways of experiencing and being experienced by others, as frightening as that may be. I believe that an openness to multiplicity and dissociation has the potential to diminish defensiveness and expand curiosity with regard to self and others. Hart’s (2017) notion of radical openness is helpful in this regard, as it involves noticing, questioning, and relinquishing presumptions about oneself and the other. He states that from a stance of radical openness,

you would need to approach foreign strangers with a kind of interest, a turning toward their faces, listening to what they say and what you say, and how you both seem to be hearing each other. And you would have to be prepared to listen for the responses, including the negative ones, and to reflect on how you seem to be taking in—or keeping out—the responses you are getting. (apsa.org)

Even further, you would have to consider that the other participants in the dialogue may be seeing or experiencing a part of you that is out of your awareness, and you would be charged with grappling with that perspective and the disruption it may bring to your sense of knowing yourself and your sociocultural situatedness; particularly, in this case, the way your racial or sociocultural identification or assignment may be understood and engaged with others, even if it is contrary to your own perspective. In this process, we are challenged to see ourselves how others see us, and convey to others the complexity of our own experiences, simultaneously remaining open to how we see others and hear their idiomatic complexities. In my view, multiplicity is critical to productive dialogue, and singularity—in the form of holding a position as either White and privileged, or a victim of persecution (or however one might construct a position of singularity)—will no longer suffice, as an either/or binary reduces people to one dimension of experience and undermines the task of recognizing each other’s complex humanity. The challenge here is to know that there is much we don’t know or have access to, and to remain open to emergent experience and the experience of our dialogic partners—easier said than done, to be sure. But the strength of psychoanalysis resides in its capacity to embrace complicated and contradictory matters, not because we are trying to avoid responsibility and action, but because we believe it to be the most effective way to address problems in living. Racism effects all of us and is a profound problem in living. Ultimately, this is an argument for a truly psychoanalytic approach to racial reckoning, which leads with curiosity, assumes multiplicity, dissociation, and shameful and terrifying self-states in each participant, and seeks tolerance and appreciation for all parts of each person’s subjective experience.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Drs. Anton Hart and Hazel Ipp for their astute editorial comments, and for their generosity and support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janna Horowitz Sandmeyer

Janna Horowitz Sandmeyer, Ph.D., is faculty and supervisor at the New Washington School of Psychiatry and The Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (ICP + P) in Washington, DC; Founding Chair of the Contemporary Approaches to Psychodynamic Psychotherapy program and the Sexual Diversity Task Force at ICP + P; on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Inquiry and Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, and formerly on the Council of the International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. Dr. Sandmeyer has presented nationally and internationally on issues of gender and sexuality. She was the winner of the 2018 Ralph Roughton Award from the Committee on Gender and Sexuality of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is in private practice in Washington, DC.

Notes

1 I am limiting this discussion to the United States because it is close to my experience, even as there is tremendous diversity within the U.S. with regard to this topic. The broad complexity of this topic as it pertains to other countries is so vast that I cannot speak to those dimensions in an informed, or personal, way.

2 Midrash denotes biblical exegetical method by ancient Judaic authorities, in which the oral tradition interprets and elaborates scriptural text, and contradictions are explained through (re)interpretation. The relevance for psychoanalytic method centers on the recursive process of revisiting, questioning, and (re)interpreting.

3 I will refer to the authors of this article by their first names and identifications, as that is how they refer to themselves throughout the article.

4 Black, Indigenous, and other People Of Color

5 As cited in Aron & Starr (2015, p. 714).

6 Shoah is a Hebrew word, found in the Bible, that means “utter destruction” and is used to reference the Holocaust.

7 The Anti-Defamation League (2023c) has recorded a 360% increase in antisemitic incidents in the US since October 7, 2023, related – of course – to the war between Israel and Hamas.

8 The notion that ancestral trauma impacts later generations is supported by epigenetic research. Kalas Reeves (2018) addresses this when she offers that “it is fascinating for psychoanalysts to discover that epigenetic research in biology is confirming what analysts have grasped for years—that our ancestors’ traumas or jubilations mark (are on top of) our genes, influencing expression (phenotype not genotype)” (p. 110).