Between Remembering and Forgetting: Reckoning with Racialized Transmissions

The backdrop for this paper has been the ongoing COVID pandemic and the author's personal response to the murder of George Floyd and the enduring destructiveness of racism and white supremacy that resides here in the US In writing this paper, the author argues that currently we are witnessing and living with the formidable trans-generationally transmitted return of inherited racial hatred that had been more repressed, denied, and refused. The challenge for the author, and for psychoanalysis in general, is to consider in what ways our theories and praxis keep in place whiteness as the unmarked category, a standard benefitting itself. As a result, the legacy of embedded racism continues to be reproduced. Transgenerational transmissions of racial trauma and the rupturing of attachments are examined within the author's background and in a clinical case with a white patient.