Observations on Use of the N-Word in Psychoanalytic Conferences

Unseen Harm

My personal choice to avoid speaking or writing slurs in any context, including this paper, ³ stems in part from my witnessing the intense degree of psychic harm suffered in my patients as a result of these words. The clinical literature, spanning decades, is full of examples of adult and child patients from a wide range of marginalized identities who have sustained psychic lacerations resulting from epithets directed toward them (Friedman and Downey 1999; Gardner 1975; Gehrie 1976; Halper 1970; Holmes 1992, 2016; Lousada 2006; Moss 2009; Stein 2004; Stoute 2019). Oppressed groups suffer from being used as “dehumanized targets of the majority’s projections” (Akhtar 2014, p. 150). In addition to receiving projections, targets of prejudice are the recipients of more insidious projective identifications, which aim to alter the victim’s internal mental processes by transferring venomous psychic contents from one person or group to another (Dajani 2017; Hart 2019). These intensely negative projections and projective identifications, when condensed into slurs, amount to weapons deployed against the psyches of those targeted in prejudicial attacks. Keval (2001) writes that such an attack may result in “puncturing and even shattering the individual’s psychic skin and existing defensive organization,” potentially shaking the psyche to its foundations (p. 34). ⁴ Slurs, like guns or whips or grenades, are designed to cause damage. Even when apparently brandished for another purpose, their original function is always nearby.

Many clinicians occupying marginalized identities report hearing these words directed toward them in the course of their clinical work and personal life, sometimes accompanied by physical violence or threats thereof (Butler 2020; Corbett 2001; Hamer 2006; Jones 2020; Leary 1997; Moss 2009; Tan 1993; White 2002). One consequence of the overrepresentation of dominant social groups in the psychoanalytic community is a marked underestimation of the degree to which our colleagues endure socially originated trauma. Relative protection from such forms of wounding is a significant privilege of social dominance. This protection is invisible to its possessor, as are all protections conferred by social privilege; one tends not to notice the absence of hostile attacks in one’s life if such attacks have always been absent. Socially located trauma has potential to be revivified by the unexpected use of words typically aimed at individuals during expressions of atavistic hatred. Although analytic thinkers are generally savvy to even oblique expressions of hate, this fact may well be consciously overlooked by dominant group members in a form of nonrecognition that keeps certain experiences stubbornly unfamiliar. Thwarted mentalization aids this nonrecognition, facilitating a process of othering that is rationalized by the conscious mind, rendering it subjectively unremarkable (Stoute 2019).

Some may consider it a testament to our colleagues’ resilience that traumatic socially inflicted injuries are so often managed privately by those who suffer them. However, these forms of nonrecognition have potential for grave material consequences. As Grace Kyungwon Hong (2015) asserts in her seminal contribution Death beyond Disavowal, the premature demise of many feminist scholars who are women of color is a direct consequence of the strain imposed by the structural and systemic forces under which they performed exhausting, exploitative intellectual and emotional labor. Intentionally paralleling remembrances of Black victims of homicide, Hong lists some of their names, poignantly stating, “It is difficult to say and impossible to ‘prove’ that these women suffered early deaths because the battles around race, gender, and sexuality were being waged so directly through and on their bodies. . . . Yet the names bear witness to [the] unknowable truth” (p. 147). Like these scholars, marginalized psychoanalytic professionals perform labor under antagonistic conditions that are unshared and largely unwitnessed by their colleagues in dominant social placements.

Jones (2020) puts her long-standing lived experience of these battles in painful terms: “I am nearly 71 years old, but fear and terror have continued to be my constant companions when I move around . . . in psychoanalytic spaces” (p. 80). ⁵ What are the consequences of living in unremitting terror among one’s psychoanalytic colleagues over four decades, “speaking at [one’s] peril, especially if heard” (p. 80)? Hong (2015) argues that a likely outcome is a systemically perpetrated collapse of the psyche-soma (Winnicott 1949). Some readers, based on a perspective shaped by their social location, may initially find the attestation of this degree of detriment excessive or unfathomable. Attentiveness to the accounts of our marginalized colleagues, students, supervisees, and patients in the field, especially with regard to the psychic and somatic sequelae of their more harrowing professional encounters, will confirm well-founded cause for concern.

The Violent World of the N-Word

It is certain that alongside any lack of awareness or bias that has its roots in differences in social position and lived experience, recognizable unconscious mechanisms are powerfully at work. Howard (2019), a professor of education and director of UCLA’s Black Male Institute, advocates a zero-tolerance ban on the word’s full pronouncement in schools, writing that the slur’s history “is rooted in degradation, enslavement, dehumanization, hate, anti-Black racism, and a belief in [racial] inferiority. . . . countless African-Americans died hearing this racist slur as they took their last breath.” The n-word first entered the institutional language of the United States Supreme Court in the context of the Reconstruction-era case Blyew v. United States, which in 1871 addressed a racial hate crime in which two white men “hacked to death several members of a black family,” after making threats containing the slur; numerous legal cases followed in which the word’s use was documented in instances of racial violence, arson, threats to life and employment, and other forms of extreme persecution (Kennedy 1999, p. 89). The children and adolescents who integrated Southern schools were relentlessly harassed with the word by white schoolmates and adults, often in the context of vicious physical attacks including being beaten, kicked, burned, and spat on (Asim 2007). For anyone acculturated to life in the United States, to claim a failure to know—or to seek an exemption from the fact—that the n-word is saturated in violently racialized and potentially traumatogenic meaning whenever used by a white person merits the highest degree of psychoanalytic skepticism. Yet these are precisely the assertions made repeatedly in discussions after the slur has been uttered in psychoanalytic circles.

Among white analysts who have spelled out the n-word in their academic publications, some have acknowledged that their doing so is fraught with weighty unconscious meaning and motivation. Altman (2006) uses the word, notably in a paper on the meaning of whiteness, in the context of representing the writing of both Black and white authors, including Baldwin and Faulkner. He astutely reflects on his dawning feeling of “getting away with murder” in using the word while attributing it to others, wondering that he “could use such a highly charged word without knowing that [he] was expressing something about [himself]” (p. 70). Similarly, Moss (2009), in his elegant discussion on use of the slur by a patient over the course of a treatment, explores his own developing understanding of “the brute fact” that writing the term in his paper meant that it constituted a part of his own personal language, allowing him to partake of the “pleasures and reassurances” offered by the “projective” and “essentialist” functions he attributes to the word (p. 837).

Both Altman and Moss initially imagined that they could write the invective out in full while remaining somehow separate from it, immune to its charge; both found this impossible. Both became distressingly aware that in writing the word in its entirety—even when discussing its use by a literary figure or patient—they were necessarily implicated in its use, and that this use was far from benign. Moss writes that regardless of his conscious intention, he could feel coursing through him the “pleasures, the powers, and the shame that adhere” to the n-word, concluding that despite the intention to use the word with civility, the “malign power” of slurs is inescapably persistent (p. 837). He asserts that the impact remains whether the epithet is spoken or unspoken; a similar stance is taken by Smith (2006), discussing Altman. I disagree with this latter claim. Speaking or writing slurs from a position of relative social power repeats well-worn and overdetermined lines of injury. Choosing not to do so disrupts the fault lines of splitting that undergird the normative unconscious process (Layton 2006) informing and upholding received social patterns. Such disruption can be potently reparative, a point to which I will return.

Perhaps the most developed psychoanalytic discussion about use of the n-word in one’s professional capacity comes from Barrish (2002), a white professor of English who explores what he terms the “secret joys” of pronouncing the slur while ostensibly taking an antiracist position in teaching Huckleberry Finn. The description of his physical experience of leading his classes in “analytic discussions” of the n-word is rich with immediacy:

To me these sessions always feel stressful and frustrating, sometimes unbearably so. But I also experience them as uniquely intense. They twist my viscera and sensitize the surface of my skin. I leave with churning feelings, mostly of guilt, confusion, and shame, as well as a sort of depressive helplessness. It is a dictum of Freudian thought, however, that where there is guilt there is also unconscious desire. What does it mean that I feel as if I’ve been caught red-handed in some shameful act every time I embark on a pedagogical attempt to discuss the word. . . . What secret desire might underlie the guilt? It goes beyond, I think, the excitement at breaking a taboo, at the repeating out loud of a forbidden word (which, of course, I know quite well before class that I will do)

[p. 132].

Here we get closest to the bodily report of the conflict. Barrish finds himself feeling “caught red-handed,” while Altman feels he is “getting away with murder.” Both are aware that they are committing a transgressive, potentially harmful act that centers physicality, even as they proceed to commit it. Murder, bloodied hands, exposed viscera, and unpunished crimes are clear associations to chattel slavery and its horrors. These are made proximate by the demeaning term whose sole function was to be employed in the service of racist dehumanization.

Barrish’s sensitized skin and twisted viscera are also plainly sexual, inviting us to consider the hidden dimensions of sexual violence and erotized aggression that are inextricably tied to the n-word. The “uniquely intense” “secret desire” and “excitement” to which he refers, as well as the “pleasures” and “powers” noted by Moss (2009, p. 837), reveal a link between use of the n-word by white people and the evocation of a sadistic sexuality tied to subjugation. Moss demonstrates some awareness of this possibility, stating early in his piece that “racist pejoratives . . . gratify, sanction, and reward fantasies of codified, prepatterned sexualized violence” (p. 825). Gay (2016) notes that fantasies of sexual slavery are commonplace, and that erotica frequently features themes of omnipotent possession, conquest, control, and submission. These fantasies were pathologically concretized during slavery, resulting in untold violation: “American slave owners had no need for—and no use for—metaphors. . . . The realities of slavery, of owning other persons’ bodies, included using those bodies for sexual pleasure” (Gay 2016, p. 41). Told from the point of view of those whose bodies were so used, one would speak not of pleasure but of unthinkable, relentless depredation. ⁶ In foregrounding the pleasurable uses of another’s body afforded to white people in the context of slavery, it is facile to deemphasize the ravages of sexual terrorism inflicted on the bodies and psyches of people who were enslaved. Likewise, in writing about the exciting pleasures of their flirtation with racial slurs, white analysts and academics participate in a narrative in which they are not required to fully consider those violated by their words. They avoid awareness of their immediate adjacency to the most dire forms of racialized sexual violence in doing so. The nearness of such violence is unconsciously revealed in the inexorable honesty of associative testimony.

Nachträglichkeit

The dynamic meanings of the emergence of the n-word in psychoanalytic conferences are elucidated by two key concepts, Nachträglichkeit and the discriminatory gesture. The first of these, Freud’s Nachträglichkeit, is translated with different emphases as “deferred action” and après-coup. Our tree-lined psychoanalytic neighborhood is experimenting with racial integration, only to find that swift, unconscious shifts occur in the ground beneath our feet. These silent earthquakes reveal weaknesses in our foundations, making small cracks more pronounced, and rendering seemingly hospitable spaces potentially annihilating. Present-day rumblings recall to us past tremors, with renewed exposure to the terrifying fissures they caused. This occurs when discussions about race summon the representation of white supremacy, which arrives, perpetually unmetabolized, in the form of the n-word blurted out by a white person.

In his early writings on hysteria, Freud observes the noteworthy occurrence of a memory arousing “an affect which it did not give rise to as an experience”; such a memory “only become[s] a trauma by deferred action” (Freud 1895, p. 356). Confusing, overstimulating events are especially prone to being unassimilable in their original experiencing, and therefore are subject to deferred revision (Laplanche and Pontalis 1967, p. 112). Such revision occurs in light of present experiences that shed new light on a memory such that it is experienced in a shockingly bewildering manner. Nachträglichkeit is central to a two-stage model of trauma, in which an event is “deposited in an individual, which is only activated later on” (Birksted-Breen 2003, p. 1501). It returns to us “what is left out of a story even when the whole story is told” (Ogden 2016, p. 160).

Freud’s examples typifying Nachträglichkeit concern adult forms of sexuality encountered by a child, before the significance of these encounters may be registered. Rozmarin (2017) suggests parallels between potentially traumatogenic negotiations between childhood and adult sexuality and childhood and adult experiences in the social domain, indicating that early collective experiences “accrue social signification through repeated Nachträglichkeit” (p. 475). When adult experiences stir dormant memories of previously incomprehensible racialized aggression, these may be suddenly invested with overwhelming meanings and affect, generating trauma in the present.

Slavery involved repeated efforts to obliterate the subjectivity of the enslaved; an enslaved person’s feelings were rendered entirely without meaning, inflicting “wounds on self and soma” transmitted intergenerationally (Gump 2000, p. 627). When a racial slur is spoken and defended, two levels of experience may be engaged. Most members of the targeted group are likely to recall memories of racial aggression and obliterated subjectivity, yet each will have their own specific, highly personal meanings made of those experiences via Nachträglichkeit, underscoring the importance of psychoanalytic working through (M. Levin, personal communication, July 15, 2020). Group-level identifications intersect with uniquely individual experiences; past intersects with present; internal life intersects with external events.

The Discriminatory Gesture

Repeated experiences of deferred action are at the heart of the concept of the discriminatory gesture put forth by Hart (2019). A discriminatory gesture, distinct from a racial hate crime or similar attack, is a seemingly everyday interpersonal occurrence that is destructive because it indexes present-day racism and the ongoing historical trauma of slavery. “Each discriminatory gesture,” Hart writes, “carries the personally annihilating power embedded in the existence of the entire destruction-subjugation oriented enterprise of racism and white supremacy”; it is “always implicitly spoken with the grammar and vocabulary of the racist-supremacist cultural context within which it occurs” (p. 2). Seemingly mild references to racist oppression can contain the entire force of “foundational atrocities” (p. 12); slurs hold charge because of “the destructive forms of social organization and oppression” (p. 3) in which they originated and persist.

As a result, it is impossible for a white person to utter the n-word in any context without causing unconscious reverberations within the entire sociocultural matrix of white supremacy (historical and present-day) and slavery, replete with its violence and transgressions, its destructive sadism and dehumanization. In making use of people of color as repositories for unbearable anxieties and affects, discriminatory gestures pose “relentless attempts at enslavement,” which engender ongoing retraumatization, and may precipitate post-traumatic reactions of great intensity (Hart 2019, p. 16). By contrast, the party generating the gesture is often apparently unfazed, stabilized by having projectively off-loaded extremely disturbing affect. Hart contends that a second traumatization occurs if the recipient of the discriminatory gesture attempts to project back into the originator, thereby “enlarging the threat, increasing the terror . . . making it more likely that lasting trauma will result” (p. 15).

I should note, as Hart does, that different people experience discriminatory gestures differently as a result of their personal histories and psychic structure. This may explain why some psychoanalytic professionals of color may not experience the use of the n-word by white colleagues to be especially noxious in any given instance. Indeed, some people of color have perceived an opportunity for psychoanalytic exploration in the emergence of the taboo term, a sentiment that has occasionally emerged in conference settings. McWhorter (2019), an African American professor of linguistics, has proposed that some uses of the word by white people may be unobjectionable, and is critical of the idea that the slur’s use in discussion is necessarily problematic. Nonetheless, a study conducted at an historically Black university showed that more than three-quarters of participants felt it was never acceptable for non-Blacks to use the n-word “with anyone in any situation,” with 67 percent feeling it was never acceptable for anyone, Black or non-Black, to use the n-word, under any circumstances (King et al. 2018, p. 55); the possibility of serious psychological injury is always present. On a group level, such trauma is endemic but kept largely unconscious, and the unconscious climate favors recurrent minimization of its severity.

The Defensive Life of theDiscriminatory Gesture

Holmes (2006) posits “a culture-wide defensive barrier to recognizing the implicit representation” of racism (p. 221). The sine qua non of the n-word is the implicit and explicit representation of the most brutal racism; slurs exist to conjure persecution. Awareness of this purpose must be defensively warded off to allow the n-word to be used in professional settings under any circumstances, especially ones in which the conscious intention is frequently an examination of race and racism. The unconscious awareness that the n-word evokes violence, bigotry, and subjugation in their most extreme degrees is strongly evinced in the alacrity of the defensive maneuvers that appear in the wake of its appearance in psychoanalytic gatherings.

The intensity of these defensive operations may amount to not registering the use of the word at all. After the first incident I witnessed, a few attendees believed they had not even heard the initial speaker say the two slurs she had uttered unmistakably, clearly, audibly, and rather forcefully. This is a striking example of the “perceptual defense” identified by Basch (1974, p. 92), which he conceptualizes as a failure in repression, or leaking out of highly charged content which must be secondarily erased, rather than evidence of successful repression. It is also a version of the dissociative “forgetfulness” exhibited by Southern apologists for slavery (Gay 2016, p. 57).

More commonly, those present will acknowledge that the word was spoken and heard, but then rapidly disclaim the meanings and significance attached to the epithet. This conforms to Freud’s definition of disavowal, in which the conscious experience of the perception itself (i.e., hearing the slur spoken) remains intact, but the perception’s “true meaning” is kept unconscious; “the percept’s significance for the unconscious is not linked with conscious knowledge of perceived reality” (Basch 1974, p. 90). It is also similar to Steiner’s concept (1985) of “turning a blind eye” (or plugged ear), an ambiguous relationship with internal and external reality in which we “seem to have access to reality but choose to ignore it because it proves convenient to do so” (p. 161). We cannot readily separate our reflexive responses from our more considered ones in relationship to highly charged speech, and both responses serve defensive functions (Moss 2019). In the case of the n-word, the enormous anxieties generated by acknowledging the legacy of slavery in our midst require enormous defenses, which may be deployed at the expense of reality orientation. These defensive processes also may facilitate the emergence of perverse forms of relatedness, as I will elaborate.

Using ancestral routes of projective processes, rights to which have been deeded intergenerationally, allows white people to achieve distance from feelings of ignorance, uncertainty, shame, guilt, inferiority, and badness. ⁷ Those who are socially empowered to employ discriminatory gestures are motivated to protect their use of them, as the gestures facilitate projections and projective identifications that are felt to be essential to psychological equilibrium within a racialized social-cultural system that has potential to traumatize in all directions. Additional motivation comes from unconscious awareness that access to particular defensive processes, including discriminatory gestures, are inequitably distributed. The option to make use of specific forms of defense is in fact an unconscious social privilege. This fact is not lost on those who receive the discriminatory gesture, though it likely known only unconsciously to the user of the defense.

Oppressive projective processes are not fully bidirectional; certain psychic contents move overwhelmingly from oppressor to oppressed. Hierarchies split culturally desirable attributes from undesirable ones, assigning the former to those with social dominance and the latter to those who are marginalized (Layton 2009). Repeated societal refusal to attempt any form of meaningful repair of societal trauma exacerbates these tendencies. Failures of the environment-mother, or culture-mother writ large, to reliably facilitate reparation “leads to a loss of the capacity for concern, and to its replacement by crude anxieties and by crude defences, such as splitting, or disintegration” (Winnicott 1963, p. 78).

Disavowal

Primary among the defenses that recur in the wake of the use of the n-word is a disavowal which aims to omnipotently change the meaning of the slur, attempting to de-link the slur from its trauma-infused matrix; “surely, this time it didn’t mean any of that.” Unlike repression, which aims at managing affect, disavowal works on mitigating the troubles posed by ideas though “radical repudiation” of external reality (Hook 2005, p. 714). In the potent fantasy generated by such disavowal, the discriminatory gesture of the slur is imagined to lack destructive power because it has been psychically stripped of its actual, lived meanings and uses. Moss (2009) writes of a depressive fantasy surrounding epithets, a search for a lost state of innocence in which the hatred held within the slurs is depotentiated, its harm located in the past rather than in the affect-filled present. ⁸ Hong (2015) makes a related observation, stating that contemporary educational institutions are “epistemological structure[s] of disavowal, a means of claiming that racial and gendered violence are a thing of the past” (pp. 10–11), while continuing pernicious forms of such violence.

Using the n-word in psychoanalytic meetings seems to hold within it an insistence on the comforting fantasy of a postracial world in which the slur has been rendered inert, or indeed, an even more compelling fiction in which slavery and anti-Black oppression never occurred and do not have an ongoing presence in our lives, despite ample daily evidence to the contrary. Access to these fantasies is restricted, however, and fantasies are not without their real-life consequences. Certain life circumstances and social locations allow some to readily enter, even in adulthood, fictional worlds in which racial and other oppressions are absent, while others must more fully confront nonnegotiable social realities from childhood. In this manner, the privileged person’s comforting fantasy constitutes the marginalized person’s discriminatory gesture, with destructive possibilities invigorated by the erasures inherent in repudiated reality. Every effort I may make to protect my defensive fantasy increases the traumatogenic potential of the gesture your psyche receives, filled with painful realities I cannot tolerate, but I insist you must tolerate for both of us. Nachträglichkeit links past and present experiences of erasure.

Identity Trouble, or “Who, Me?” and “Who are we?”

Another repeating defense of the n-word spoken in its entirety in psychoanalytic settings is “My patients say that word all the time,” or a corollary, “Should we forbid our patients to say these words?” These statements reflect an intense wish to be, in that moment, a patient-child in the presence of a receptive, accommodating analyst-caregiver rather than a professional among other professionals, held fully accountable for the consequences of their speech. In altering the scene from conference to consulting room, the speaker imagines him- or herself not as the containing analyst faced with metabolizing difficult experiences, but rather as the patient whose right to speak freely is being curtailed. This identification with a vulnerable, entitled party is consistent with white supremacist narratives that paradoxically allow white people to consider themselves endangered and innocently aggrieved while simultaneously asserting powerful superiority and narcissistic entitlement.

A related response is something along the lines of “I, too, would like to see certain words disappear, but I must tolerate their existence.” This variation, typically made with reference to misogynistic insults, hints at the presence of chronic grievance. Grievance may be used to return to an omnipotently created ideal self, especially when reality has broken through and disrupted contact with such an object (Weintrobe 2004). ⁹ In this case, the ideal self quietly, gracefully, and patiently suffers insults and deprivations, and is ennobled in the process. Such an idealized self disavows its own social power and narcissistic rage, is damaged by the awareness of utilizing such power in racist enactments, and must keep such awareness unconscious. This narrative, too, evokes long-standing white supremacist tropes that pit white cisgender women’s interests against those of Black people, undermining the potential for solidarity against white supremacist patriarchy and its abuses.

Invocations of a psychoanalytic identity are another frequently heard defensive refrain—we are people who speak unflinchingly of difficult matters and therefore bravely speak slurs in their entirety at conferences. One analyst expressed this sentiment in her advocacy for the use of racial and homophobic slurs, writing, “I go deep and I go dark” (Maher 2018, p. 224). From this perspective, not using slurs, as in this paper, is defensively euphemistic, and counter to psychoanalytic values of confronting painful realities. Some may contend that not saying slurs in their entirety is an evasion, a sign of unwillingness or anxiety about directly acknowledging the intense negativity held within these words. In my estimation, this critique is based on a misunderstanding of the function of the slur.

To slur or not to slur is not the question; contending with the full meanings of an epithet’s use is. Psychoanalysis privileges the latent, the hidden, the obscured; the symptom is a provocation to discover, not the entirety of the communication. Speaking slurs may be considered a symptom that attempts to bind the anxieties generated by the return of the repressed. As a symptom, it is intensely protected in order to keep repressed, dissociated, and disavowed conflictual, trauma-filled material at bay. Those who slur must therefore consciously minimize the impact on others to themselves, justifying it as harmless speech, at least “just this once.” Speaking epithets as if they are ordinary speech is hence more accurately understood as the evasion. The traumatic legacies of white supremacy are deep and painful indeed, and deserving of the most thorough psychoanalytic inquiry. They are instead enacted but left entirely unaddressed when slurs are pried from their meanings and impacts, a profound betrayal of psychoanalytic ethics.

Denial of Difference and other Considerations

The notion that psychoanalysts, the vast majority of whom are white, should say racial slurs at conferences because it is psychoanalytic to do so also reveals a denial of racial and other social differences. Denial of difference is linked to the defense of disavowal, as such denial requires bending the reality that the self lacks qualities that the other possesses (Barrows 1995). Freud’s definition of disavowal places central importance on defending against a perception’s personal significance, its specific meaning to the individual (Basch 1983, p. 145). This extends to the personal meaning made of our perceptions of others’ perception of us, the ways in which others read meaning into what we say based on their understanding of our social locations. However much we may wish it otherwise, our unchosen social identities are constantly read by others—sometimes incorrectly, but read nonetheless—and have a role in shaping the meaning of our speech. Whiteness is rarely a salient identity to a white person; in fact it may be entirely overlooked as a part of one’s self-concept (Altman 2006; Miller and Josephs 2009). Yet it may be the most salient identity to one’s interlocutor. Acknowledging this to oneself as a white person may cause confusion and narcissistic injury.

Thus, one may attempt to defensively avoid the reality that it means something different for a white person, psychoanalyst or not, to speak a racial slur than it does for a person of color to do so. The former is a discriminatory gesture that evokes white supremacy. The latter is not, because racial trauma in the United States does not centrally feature Black people enslaving each other and perpetrating racial hate crimes against each other, but instead white people perpetrating ongoing racist harm against Black people. Similarly, a homophobic slur reclaimed for personal or in-group use by someone who is gay ¹⁰ means something entirely different from a heterosexual person’s attempt to single-handedly diffuse the power of an epithet by speaking it, as the latter attempts an erasure of traumatic history even while invoking it. Centuries of social meaning cannot be undone through wishing. Psychoanalytic practitioners indulge in treacherous omnipotent delusions to the extent that we believe we may successfully separate ourselves from our social realities, including the conscious and unconscious meanings attached to our speech by our time, place, history, bodies, and social identities, both real and perceived. We may not.

It is possible that some choose not to say slurs as a reaction formation, adopting a guise of overweening sensitivity that obscures simmering, disowned racism underneath. However, it is likely more often the case that the ability to exercise thoughtful restraint with offensive terms is instead a developmental achievement, one that has been temporarily hindered, or not yet been accomplished, in those who use slurs in their entirety. In a case vignette involving a white patient who repeatedly hurls the n-word at his analyst Hamer (2006), the patient eventually ceases to say the epithet and instead begins to state that he feels “that way” (p. 201). This change occurs after skilled interpretive work on the part of the analyst, undertaken under the intensely charged and uniquely challenging conditions of sustained racial attack. ¹¹ In evidence here is neither censorship nor evasion on the part of analyst or patient. Rather, we see a highly effective psychoanalytic treatment in which the patient exhibits developing concern for the other and an increased capacity for mentalization, resulting in the ability to better negotiate painful internal states without resorting to the violent projective processes indicated by the use of slurs. There is a corresponding shift from action, using the slur, toward thought and expression of affect, however vague: “I feel that way.” Choosing not to use a slur also shows relatively intact reality orientation, a capacity to negotiate the intensely traumatic evidence of our human hatred for one another, as well as the realities of one’s own social placement within those legacies. To choose not to use slurs, therefore, is akin to choosing not to wield a weapon; one has found other methods to manage anxieties.

Even among those who generally possess these capabilities in ample measure, all may be subject to impairment in the neighborhood of the discriminatory gesture. Such is the disorganizing force of racial trauma in the United States; “racism is ruthless in its violation of others” (Holmes 2016, p. 577). Epithets are perhaps best understood not as an opportunity to contend with the devastation incurred by human hatred, but rather as a miserable sound emitted by a canary in the coal mine, indicating toxic fumes released by subterranean antipathies rising to dangerous levels. When slurs are in evidence, whatever their conscious intention, it is a sign that our capacities for reconciliation with ourselves, each other, and our mutual implication in each other’s suffering (Layton 2009) are under threat.

“Because I want to”

The most thinly veiled defensive response, or secondary discriminatory gesture, arising in psychoanalytic spaces is the assertion of one’s desire and right to speak as one wishes, expressing a defiant resistance to altering one’s speech in any way. The reassertion of this right occurs in a range from quiet insistence to defiant outrage. Common related examples of this defense include balking at adopting a person’s preferred gender pronoun or refusing to attempt to learn a name in a non-English language. The speaker voicing this point of view seems not to be saying, “I can say whatever I want,” so much as “I can say the words that exert potentially dehumanizing power over you if I want to, and I want to.” Gay (2016) believes that while sexual sadism certainly played a role in slavery, as noted earlier, comprehending the human capacity for the “nonsexual pleasures of ownership,” including superiority, pride, status, wealth, display, and even a form of companionship, are most central to understanding the phenomenon of slavery in the Southern United States (p. 42). We may understand these pleasures as primarily narcissistic, extracted coercively from those who were enslaved.

Racamier’s conception of narcissistic perversion (1992) is typified in the need to assert oneself at the expense of another, and taking pleasure in doing so (Filippini 2005). Filippini (2005) suggests a distinction between sadomasochistic forms of relatedness and what she terms “relational perversions,” the latter of which feature the absence of the potential for role-reversal and mutual pleasure in relatedness. In such an arrangement, as with a slaveowner or a member of a dominant social group, only one party may enjoy the pleasure of exerting power over the other. Relational perversions centrally feature the infliction of psychological harm by one party upon another via narcissistically motivated dehumanization. Domination and coercion are means of extracting what mutual dependence would confer in other forms of relatedness (Gump 2010). Insisting on one’s right to use slurs simply because one wishes to, especially when harmful consequences have been brought to one’s awareness, seems to be an example of just such a psychologically abusive process, recapitulating the perverse processes that characterize white supremacy.

Those invoking this line of defense often engage in an unconscious reversal of social power, projecting a forceful tyrant onto the party made vulnerable by the discriminatory gesture of the slur. In doing so, they rewrite a bid for greater understanding, often made with the utmost trepidation, as a command from a powerful figure against whom one could be rendered helpless. They conjure a world of “thought police” and curtailed expression in which the powerful must suffer under the suppressive hegemony of fragile “snowflakes,” casting those who seek self-reflection about charged language as “violently aggressive, controlling, and manipulative, with a victim mentality” (Maher 2018, p. 225). Absent is the idea that one may freely choose to be authentically caring in one’s choice of language, that one may desire to be sensitive to the others’ feelings out of genuine, uncoerced regard. Depressive concern and the capacity for empathy are eviscerated in the neighborhood split asunder by patterns of subjugation; one is either controlled or the controller. Such primitive defenses damage “vital interpersonal connective tissue, replacing it with self-generated hostile or paranoid feelings, [with] serious consequences not only in relationship to others and the inner world, but in the capacity to test reality” (Aragno 2014, p. 271).

In its projectively identified form, this projected tyranny may result in apparent stridency on the part of marginalized people who feel they must repeatedly insist, sometimes frantically, that their personhood matters. It is often unclear to the observer that such a person is struggling against nothing less than a threat of annihilation (Hart 2019). Further projections lead to further intolerance, with both parties experiencing the other in undifferentiated fantasy as a violent, powerful, tyrannical oppressor. However, in reality, only one party actually possesses the power to oppress with the full force of institutional, social, and epistemic power. This is parallel to the relationally perverse arrangement delineated by Filippini (2005). In subjugation, persecutory fears are fully realized, leading to highly unstable, escalating fragmentation. The white speaker of the slur is filled with anxiety about loss of social esteem and entertains fantasies of being mercilessly shamed or “cancelled.” The person of color addressing the harm done, who may already be in a post-traumatic state brought about by the discriminatory gesture, recalls past injuries and fears unconsciously motivated professional reprisal, sugar-coated aggression, and hate mail. Both are unsure whether their concerns are justified or paranoid, because it is unclear which psychic world is most dominant at any moment, internally and externally. Perhaps the new neighbors aren’t as friendly as we thought.

The Gesture of the Open Hand

As noted above, oppressive projective mechanisms are asymmetrical, adhering to unequal distributions of social power and value. This is in part the reason why many forms of social reparation rest upon the willingness of those with social power to consciously resist conforming to expected, predetermined social scripts. When either oppressed or oppressor deviates from unconsciously prescribed roles and swims upstream against the projective current, generative potential results. The oppressed do this in various forms of protest and self-advocacy, as well as a willingness to engage in overtures toward repair. Oppressors do this by recognizing the ways in which they are pulled to inhabit oppressive internal stances and intentionally refusing to enact power in ways that are highly ego-syntonic, relinquishing the emotional spoils. Such a shift moves away from the potential of relational perversion (Filippini 2005) toward what Chétrit-Vatine (2014) terms “ethical asymmetry” (p. 33). This does not occur passively or unconsciously.

While a white person’s saying the n-word will inevitably be experienced by many people of color as a discriminatory gesture, a white person who demonstrates sensitivity to the destructive potential of the word signals to the hearer that something new and different is taking place. Similarly, someone with membership in a dominant social group ceding time to a colleague from a marginalized social group is a powerful gesture precisely because it does not conform to expected behaviors that perpetuate normative marginalization. Listening closely and taking seriously the words and experiences of someone of less social privilege than oneself in a clinical hour, a classroom, or a meeting leaves lasting, consolidating impressions. A trans patient tells me with glee of having been greeted with everyday friendliness at a washroom sink; a friend with a visible disability reports with radiant pleasure an encounter in a supermarket in which he was treated as the capable person he is; a white student basks in warm pride when her instructor of color praises her skillful offer of repair after having made a racially insensitive comment to a classmate of color; the classmate is astonished because it is the first time she has ever received a sincere apology from a white person. Seemingly small moments such as these are intensely noticeable to the people receiving such gestures because they differ markedly from the norm.

I term such social overtures “gestures of the open hand,” a reference to the abhayahasta, or “fearless hand” in South Asian iconography. The hand with open palm facing the viewer indicates beneficent concern for human welfare, a hand that is both fearlessly open and extending of reassurance that there is nothing to fear. In counterpoint to the discriminatory gesture, which derives its destructive power from the social terrors that have come before and rear their heads once again through Nachträglichkeit, gestures of the open hand derive profound restorative power by eliciting hope in a new and surprisingly benevolent future, reminding one of optimism instilled by past social nurturing. While discriminatory gestures trigger apparently disproportionately injurious reactions because of the ways in which they tap into traumatizing histories repeating themselves seemingly endlessly into the present and future, gestures of the open hand generate disproportionately reparative responses because they are unusual, unexpected, and generating of optimistic possibility, gifts from a new social object world that has not yet been realized. Discriminatory gestures index our deepest experiences of rejection and human hatred; gestures of the open hand index foundational, organizing experiences of acceptance and human love against all expectation. The act of fully witnessing the harm done by a discriminatory gesture may serve as a gesture of the open hand.

Gestures of the open hand may be considered a form of interpretation-in-action (Ogden 1994), symbolic actions that derive their meaning from the unconscious aspects of experiential context. Faimberg (2007) presents a broadened definition of Nachträglichkeit in which psychoanalytic interpretation may provide new, retroactive meaning to what may not be fully spoken as a result of trauma, suggesting that such meaning-making is key to psychic change and psychoanalytic efficacy (p. 1238). In this view, the meanings conferred retroactively through interpretation are not traumatizing, but rather have potential to integrate trauma; new meanings and capacities from the present are brought to bear on the past, rendering charged experiences in both past and present more assimilable. This facilitates a process by which “the patient acquires a history,” and traumatic events may be placed firmly in the past as opposed to the ongoing present and feared future (Faimberg 2007, p. 1230). In the social sphere, this process becomes possible when clear signs are available indicating that what is occurring in the present differs from past socially traumatizing experiences.

As with interpretive action, discriminatory gestures and gestures of the open hand do not draw their life from the action itself, but rather from the entire universe of meaning held within the gesture. Psychoanalysis departs from other forms of social justice work in its understanding of this: the specific forms of action one takes are much less important than the conscious and unconscious meanings made of actions and inactions. By no means should I be read as making recommendations to cede time to colleagues, smile at strangers, and never voice a slur. Instead, I propose that gestures of the open hand are a spontaneous outgrowth of generative, constructive, creatively integrative processes that are well understood, theorized, and practiced within psychoanalysis. Cultivating environments in which such innate processes may begin or resume is the work of psychoanalysis, and it is increasingly crucial work. While the emergence of slurs and defenses thereof are a symptom of the collapse of such processes, the emergence of gestures of the open hand is a welcome sign of psychoanalytic well-being.

A Concluding Note on Epistemic Justice

In the preceding pages, I have reviewed the harms and unconscious significance of the n-word and discussed the possible meanings of the emergence of the slur in psychoanalytic conferences, as well as some of the many defensive processes that follow. I have identified both the utterance of the slur and the vocal defense of the word’s use as discriminatory gestures, invoking the full force of centuries of subjugation in the present moment through intergenerational transmission of trauma, and generating traumatic experience through Nachträglichkeit. A third discriminatory gesture also takes place, that of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007), which occurs when the self-report of a marginalized colleague’s subjective experience is not believed, delegitimated, or unrecognized. Psychoanalysis has within it the capacity to deliver epistemic justice, a recognition of disowned personal and collective subjective truth. Epistemic justice, in turn, may bring about the full promise of psychoanalytic modes of thinking, which have potential to usher in new ways of being (Rao 2020). To realize this promise, however, psychoanalysis as a discipline must address the epistemic injustices it has inflicted and continues to perpetrate.

Fricker’s original concept of epistemic injustice includes two forms, “testimonial injustice” (2007), in which a hearer diminishes the credibility of a speaker because of the speaker’s social location, and “hermeneutical injustice,” which results in “having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding” (pp. 4–6, 155). In other words, we do not believe some people because of who they are, and we lack collective concepts to describe and make meaning of marginalized others’ experiences. Both of these forms of injustice constitute discriminatory gestures that occur with regularity in psychoanalytic conferences, with potential to evoke the intense post-traumatic reactions outlined by Hart (2019).

Particularly because these injustices have to do with forms of thinking and knowing, concerns central to psychoanalytic identity, they issue deep cuts to those who suffer from epistemic marginalization in psychoanalytic communities, causing deleterious injury when elaborated through Nachträglichkeit. Jones (2020) piercingly communicates the cumulative impact of such jolting: “I cannot help but speak the wrong way in psychoanalytic spaces because I am a black woman in the United States” (p. 80). Psychoanalytically informed epistemic justice aims at remedying these injustices by paying particular attention to the ways in which we may ameliorate our unconscious participation in defensively prejudicial processes that marginalize others’ ways of knowing, thinking, feeling, speaking, and being. Such offers of epistemic justice are true gestures of the open hand, ones that emerge out of generative conditions that allow seedlings of hope to take root in our neighborhood.