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In response to Dr. Tronick's article on the evolution of responses to trauma, I explore the advantages of extending his study by differentiating between three types of trauma. I suggest that as analysts recognize chronic trauma that derives from pervasive racial and cultural prejudice, critical domains of social relevance open up for psychoanalytic consideration on levels of theory and practice. On a clinical level we are enabled to address suffering associated with social marginalization and neglect otherwise thought to be outside the realm of psychoanalytic applicability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yvette Esprey’s claim that race has the capacity to disrupt thinking in the analytic situation accords with my own experience. In this discussion I take up the question as to why ruptures that occur around race may have a special capacity to disrupt and disable analytic thinking. I look in detail at Esprey’s instructive clinical experience as it gives us a template, something to fall back on, in those moments when anxiety overwhelms us around a racial disruption. Such a template can settle us until we can restore a sense of self that is bothracedand analytically focused on the rupture at hand with all its personal and social/historical resonances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this discussion of papers by Gillian Straker and Melanie Suchet, the author draws some links between the two papers in the interest of expanding analysts' understanding of the nature of whiteness as part of a racist discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]