George Yancy in ☞ LARB speaks to the black relational psychoanalytic
"Philosophically, we have failed to think beyond false narratives of ourselves discrete, atomic, hermetically sealed and “safe.” We have failed, as Judith Butler might say, to face “the way in which we are constituted in relationality: implicated, beholden, derived, sustained by a social world that is beyond us and before us.” Similarly, James Baldwin reminds us that any real change implies the loss of safety. In short, Baldwin is critical of forms of “safety” that are really manifestations of self-preservation at the expense of the lives of others. He is critical of our failure to recognize and take responsibility for the fact that we are fundamentally relational beings, corporally intertwined bodies without edges and thereby fundamentally precarious or dependent, and sustained by others”.
James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Toni Morrison, George Yancy ............. have all offered relational psychoanalytix for us to draw from and yet they are rarely if ever on the curriculum of therapy institutions. So we refer to the relational psychoanalytix as a reference to a disruption to that which is usually regarded as the psychoanalytic canon. That to practice abolition when it comes to theory and practice is to banish borders between areas and practices of knowledge. It is to undo the privileging of white patriarchal knowledge about the human experience.
We draw from the ideas of sociologists, philosophers, somatic practitioners, poets, story tellers, critical theorists and so many more to fill out the detail of a relational psychoanalytic that is embedded in a recognition that we are never outside of the knot of ideas, histories and narratives that surround race and how it is embedded within the realms of the therapeutic.
Resources:
Derek Hook: Fanon and the psychoanalysis of racism