Disallowing Multiplicity: Internalized Hierarchies, Dissociation, and Unformulated Bits of Self in a Poor, Mixed-Race Kid

Abstract

In this paper, the author considers how binary and categorical models of identity function as a means of maintaining hegemonic normative ideals. These frameworks necessarily create tremendous psychic tension for people with multiple, interrelated, mixed subjectivities, leading to the dissociation of aspects of self. Race theory, intersectionality, and queer theory are identified as fields that consider nonnormative, nonbinary, and multitudinous subjectivities. The author shares autobiographical experiences related to growing up mixed race and in poverty to reckon with his own intersecting identities and explore how hidden subjectivities and normative multiplicities manifest inside and outside of the consulting room and how professional psychoanalytic spaces assume homogeneity. A perspective of mixed-race experience is elaborated, and a new consideration of mixed-class experience is offered in which identity categories are considered from nonbinary, fluid, and trans perspectives that embrace a both/neither mentality. The author challenges the field of psychoanalysis to critically examine its unconscious transferences of the homogeneous analyst, as well as the structures, pedagogies, and theories within its institutions that maintain normative, binary standards of subjectivity.

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